Comment by wanderingjew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wanderingjew | Hacker News Reader

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If you're shocked by this, you would be appalled at the state of Open Source Hardware.

I've gone over the OSHWA Certified Project list [1], go into the repos, and actually take a look at what these projects offer. The _majority_ of projects only include a schematic PDF, which by OP's own assertion is not Open Source. If you find some mechanical bits of projects, you'll find some Solidworks files, too -- good luck opening that without calling a Dassault sales rep. And of course there are the projects where the links to project files are just dead. Only about 50% of OSHWA-certified are editable in any software.

Unsurprisingly, one of the best contributors to OSHWA-certified projects is Adafruit, with Sparkfun close behind. Everything is just there (needs a bit more organization, imho), sitting in a Github. Almost everything is in Eagle, though, which is non-free and sure to annoy some Open Source advocates.

There are a few theories on why this is, most notably that 'Open Source' is a replacement for the cost sink of producing real documentation. The fact that companies (Adafruit and Sparkfun) are the largest contributors of OSHWA certified hardware supports this.

[1] https://certification.oshwa.org/list.html

IMO: schematics are fine. You're unlikely to use the same CAD software they did anyway.

This feels a bit like complaining about some company publishing the source for their MSVC++ win32 app.

Schematics only contain a fraction of the information required to reproduce a design. It's like releasing a UML diagram of an app and calling it "open source."

It doesn't matter if you use the same CAD tool or not, there are a variety of utilities for converting the design files. What matters is if you can reproduce and modify the design. That's simply not possible without the complete design files.

You don't release the artifacts of your compiled code and call it open source. You release all the source required to generate those artifacts. Anything short of that is not open and fundamentally mistakes what it means for something to be "open source."

> Schematics only contain a fraction of the information required to reproduce a design. It's like releasing a UML diagram of an app and calling it "open source."

A good schematics is all you need. (it must have components values). The rest (layout, analysis) you can do it yourself.

> It doesn't matter if you use the same CAD tool or not, there are a variety of utilities for converting the design files. What matters is if you can reproduce and modify the design. That's simply not possible without the complete design files.

Well, it's a bit different from SW. Schematics is some kind of source code and the layout is a kind of compiled code. Different layouters will produce different layouts.

And when you modify the design you have to redo the circuit analysis and , maybe, the layout .

> You don't release the artifacts of your compiled code and call it open source. You release all the source required to generate those artifacts. Anything short of that is not open and fundamentally mistakes what it means for something to be "open source."

You release only your program, not the whole OS. Somedy who wants to "reproduce your design" still needs a compiler and an OS to run it.( and depending on the conpiler it may obtain different results :) )

I disagree, schematics are a form of documentation. They are not a design and they are incredibly leaky.

As an example, it's common to group all the bypass caps together in a schematic. This doesn't reflect the reality that those bypass caps need to be physically close to the power pins on specific components. The value is not sufficient to reflect their use.

It's no different from software engineering, the schematic is not the source code. It's a block diagram describing how the source works.

The "layout you can just do yourself" IMHO very much depends. For simple circuits, yes, for anything involving antennas, high-frequency signals, ... not. And as far as there are standards defining what Open Hardware is, they all consider design to be part of it.

> You're unlikely to use the same CAD software they did anyway.

Why?

But either way, it is much easier to convert from one CAD format to another then to convert PDF to CAD.

Meh. Tracing over drawings isn't that bad.

I guess the art of PCB pens, chemical baths and board baking is a forgotten science.

Not at all:

Open Source is when you can compile the provided project given the right tools.

From a Schematic alone you can't send the board to production. You'll need the BOM and the Layout for that.

Also OS encourage patch and contribution, without the layout you can just re-design the entire board from scratch, not doing incremental improvements on the OS version.

> There are a few theories on why this is, most notably that 'Open Source' is a replacement for the cost sink of producing real documentation.

This applies to Open Source software just as well. Why rely on documentation when you have the actual code?

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