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Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

It's because you would need open source ICs for that, and that'd a whole complex multinational tool chain.

The modules you speak of exist, they're ICs. Most electronics now are just ICs and traces on a board. The real challenge is the IC tool chain is very complex and very not open.

It would do no good to have open source modules that are just traces and then a bunch of closed source ICs. This is what Sparkfun, adafruit, etc. do. It's great for engineers and hobbiests but it doesn't get to the root of the value you propose.

The real value is in the ICs, those are the magic modules you speak of that need to be open source.

Getting that to happen is a whole thing. Like getting ExxonMobil to share their oil rig designs.

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I think that open-source modules are valuable even without open-source ICs. At least for may classes of genetic IC/modules there are many vendors of an IC, so one could have multi-source for the IC, to reduce reliance on a single vendor/source.

It is becoming more and more feasible to do things software-defined, with a generic microcontroller being the core IC. I would love to see some projects for DC/DC power converters for example around a microcontroller with open software. This is a bit tricky because it needs to be safe, but in theory doable. Also need to be EMC compatible, which will require a lot of testing. Generally going beyond hobbyist requires much better QA than what most current open source hardware projects are willing/capable to do. Environmental testing, EMC testing, regulatory compliance, etc. Some exceptions might be vendors like Olimex.

Closed source ICs are currently pretty cheap, reliable, and there's so many of them that if one became unavailable, a module could be redesigned to use another (Losing firmware compatibility if you had to switch to a new MCU, but keeping hardware compatibility).

For stuff like this maybe https://colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/ would suffice?

edit: Hrrm. Actually that seems a little bit overblown. Seems like they've upped their stuff. I just remembered them from a few years ago, when they had much smaller things on offer. Or misremember them for something else, were you could use them as something like 74xx replacement, with emerging support for open toolchains.

But still, interesting. So I won't erase this ;>

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