Open source hardware is increasingly making the news, as Ford partners with Bug Labs to “advance in-car connectivity innovation”, thousands of US Radio Shack stores start stocking Arduino, and Facebook releases the plans for energy-efficient data centre technology via Open Compute. But could it change the world? Andrew Back takes a look at five projects which just might.
RepRap
Imagine a machine that could manufacture the components of your next gadget, and all you had to do is download 3D computer models and it would make them by joining materials together. This manufacturing process is known as rapid prototyping (RP) and has been around since the late 1980s, but up until recently machines that use it have been costly, with prices starting in the tens of thousands of pounds.
In 2004, Bath University’s Adrian Bowyer wrote an essay entitled Wealth without Money in which he proposed an RP machine that would “self-copy, but not self-assemble”, going on to state that the design must be provided with it so that it can be copied and improved upon. These details were a master stroke and meant that one machine would be able to print out parts to make another, or new parts based on an improved design and that would be used in its own upgrade.
Bowyer had intended simply to put an idea out there but fortunately colleagues persuaded him to run a project to develop the machine. By early 2007 the first replicating rapid prototyper, RepRap for short, was born. With parts printed using a commercial RP machine, it was only a matter of months before a second RepRap had been assembled from parts printed using the first. Only four years later the size of the RepRap population was estimated at around 4,000 machines, not including derivatives such as the 3,500 or so that had been produced by MakerBot Industries alone.
The total cost for the materials required to build a RepRap is quoted as being an incredible €350, but in practice this is dependant upon you being able to find someone to provide you with a set of the printed parts at cost. Even if you have no option but to pay a premium for these, the RepRap still meets its goal of being highly affordable, and as the number of machines in existence grows the market price for a set of printed parts should come down.
It must be pointed out that the current generation RepRap is only capable of printing plastics, but most of the non-printed components used in its build are commonly available items such as steel threaded rod, bearings and stepper motors. Control electronics are also required, but these are reasonably simple and various options are available. And although it’s very early days, work is under way to develop support for printing circuit boards and even electronic components.
RepRap’s open source design laid the foundations for a vibrant community developing modifications, enhancements and derivative machines. Such as a version that makes use of laser cut parts and that can be used as a “bootstrap system” in the absence of access to an existing 3D printer. Sites such as Thingiverse host a mind-boggling selection of user-contributed 3D designs for everything from anime figures and sculpture, to the body for a quadracopter and a case for an Arduino.
Arduino
Now that you’ve printed out the mechanical components of that gadget, you’ll need some electronics to bring it to life, and what better way than with an open source computer designed for prototyping and embedding in larger projects. Arduino takes the form of a compact circuit board providing easily programmed hardware that enables control of all manner of inputs and outputs, such as sensors and actuators and buttons and displays, and is low cost and extremely versatile.
On paper the Arduino hardware is nothing special and an entry-level board comprises little more than a reference design for an 8-bit processor. There is no shortage of “development boards” of a similar nature, so how did something AVR-based gain so much ground over boards built around long-established hobbyist favourites such as PIC and BASIC Stamp?
The key to Arduino’s success lies not in the choice of processor but in its price point, and the fact that it is very easy to use and highly-extensible. At around £20 for a basic board it’s not the end of the world if by accident you apply too high a voltage to an input or short circuit an output. Upon installing the IDE you can be up and running in no time, and receiving almost instant gratification as you compile example code and have the Arduino perform simple actions such as blink an LED or read an input. The modular nature of the system and its open source design has led to the creation of a rich marketplace for add-ons and compatible designs, with an incredibly enthusiastic community of developers contributing tutorials and video blogs, and example code and circuits for every imaginable application.
An Arduino can be connected directly, or with minimal support components, to a wide variety of devices. These include light sensors, buttons, dials, LEDs, LCD displays and buzzers. For applications with more complex requirements it can be extended via Arduino “shields” – add-on modules that are provided with power and access to the Arduino’s inputs, outputs and peripheral bus. These are based on a simple, stackable format that is easy to design for, and shields are available that add everything from Ethernet or a GPRS modem, to a Geiger counter.
You don’t have to use the Arduino IDE to develop applications – a combination such as Eclipse and avr-gcc can be used instead. However, the official IDE provides a turnkey solution and one that is far less daunting for those that are new to software development. The language used is Wiring-based and is essentially a simplified version of C++ with bundled libraries that provide a selection of easy to use functions for things such as maths, communications and I/O. Drop-in libraries accompany many shields to provide generic capabilities such as networking, and add new functions which bring ease of use to the additional hardware.
Opencores
Some engineers are not drawing the line at circuit boards and are extending open source all the way down to the level of chip design. Modelling digital integrated circuits using hardware description languages (HDL), members of the Opencores community are designing everything from RISC microprocessors and Gigabit Ethernet controllers, to multimedia and cryptographic hardware. The resulting intellectual property cores – so-called due to the copyright in the design’s source code – are then made available under a licence such as the LGPL or BSD, and are often modular in nature and so can be combined to create a system-on-a-chip.
Fragment of the OpenRISC 1200 Processor Verilog (HDL) Source Code
You may wonder why anyone would do this when the start-up costs associated with having your own chip manufactured are so high, but designs are mostly implemented using off-the-shelf reconfigurable devices called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These contain logic blocks that can be configured to provide something as simple as an AND gate, or as complex as the combinational logic used in an ALU, along with reconfigurable interconnects that are used to wire the blocks together. Configuration of the device takes place on power up when it loads a binary file that has been generated from the HDL design, and this is stored in a small amount of flash memory; this can be replaced with ease, thereby making it trivial to test and upgrade designs.
The price/performance of a general purpose computer built using FPGAs wouldn’t be great when compared with commodity gear, but the technology excels in many niche and specialist applications, such as in areas of computing that make use of dedicated hardware to bring high performance to tasks such as signal processing, encryption and networking. Since you can program many hardware paths in an FPGA they are well suited to jobs that can be broken down and processed in parallel, and some of the more powerful devices pack millions of logic blocks and have a transistor count well into the billions, with a blisteringly fast serial bandwidth that is measured in terabits/second. The fact they are easily reconfigured means that they’re also well suited to prototyping designs before a custom application-specific chip is manufactured, and they make an ideal platform for use in learning digital integrated circuit design.
OpenRISC is heralded as being the flagship project of the OpenCores community and is developing a “family of 32- and 64-bit processors with optional floating-point and vector processing support”. While much end use of these processors will be via FPGA, the project has seen them employed by Samsung in custom chips manufactured for digital televisions, and has raised over $20,000 towards the cost of having its own system-on-a-chip manufactured. It plans to make this device available to the community at low cost, with the aim of providing an alternative to “semiconductor giants who only provide cost efficient prices to large multinational companies”. The world’s first ever community designed ASIC, this could be used in anything from a prototyping platform similar to Arduino, to a TV set top box or a tablet computer.
Global Village Construction Set
What would it take to build a sustainable civilisation with modern comforts from the ground up? This is a question that a network of farmers, engineers and supporters going by the name of Open Source Ecology (OSE) hope to answer with the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a collection of open source designs for 50 industrial machines that are low cost, simple to construct, modular and user-serviceable.
The GVCS is organised into categories of Habitat, Agriculture, Industry, Energy, Materials and Transportation, with designs ranging in complexity from something as simple as a nickel-iron battery to an industrial robot. Likened to “life-size lego”, these are woven into “product ecologies” which illustrate how the 50 tools will work together. For example, the Power Cube can be used as the energy source for the Car or Tractor, and the CNC Circuit Mill can produce circuit boards for any machines which have electronics.
Development of the GVCS is informed by a list of core values that stipulate things such as how machines must be user friendly, have industrial efficiency, use proven techniques and be capable of being recycled. There are 49 values in all and these form part of even more comprehensive specifications covering everything from materials sourcing and systems design, to economics and business models. As you might expect, OSEs provide a position on patents (deemed unnecessary) and licensing as part of these specifications, along with guidance on how to go about documenting designs in a way that makes them easily reproducible.
OSE has set itself the ambitious target of releasing all 50 designs by the end of 2012 and within an extremely modest budget of $2.4 million. At the time of writing, advance orders were being accepted for four machines: the Soil Pulverizer, Compressed Earth Block Press, Power Cube and Tractor. The Bulldozer, CNC Torch Table and five others are currently in the prototyping stage, and the remainder are either in or awaiting the start of development. The web site suggests that additional subject matter expertise is currently required in areas such as mechanical engineering, power electronics, machine design, metallurgy and precision engineering.
OSE’s stated core message is “Creating tools for building modern off-grid resilient communities that can be reproduced by anyone at low cost”, and the GVCS could equally be put to use by developing nations or by those in the developed world who aspire to live “off-grid” and independent of large-scale manufacture.
Perhaps one of the most exciting GVCS concepts is the idea of product ecologies where there is a clear symbiotic relationship between tools. This is something that is also evident in projects such as RepRap, where one machine can print the parts for another, and an Arduino can be used for the RepRap control electronics which can in turn print an enclosure for an Arduino. But the GVCS takes this to the next level by encompassing a great many more technical disciplines and by putting an ecology of machines at the very heart of its design.
OpenPCR
Humankind has long sought to truly understand the building blocks of life and to be able to manipulate them for its own purposes, and genetics is an area of intense research and development with potentially huge rewards for those who make significant advances.
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a key technique employed in genetics whereby small pieces of DNA are amplified by several orders of magnitude. This is fundamental to processes such as DNA cloning and sequencing, the analysis of genes for hereditary and infectious diseases, and to identify genetic fingerprints. The reaction requires a piece of specialist laboratory apparatus which can accurately control and cycle the temperature of DNA samples, and these are typically expensive, costing thousands of pounds. But this changed with the arrival of OpenPCR, a personal PCR machine that is available as a kit for $599 and with a design that has been made available under the GPL v3 licence.
Assembling the kit is quoted as taking around five hours, small hex wrenches are included and the only additional tools required are screwdrivers and pliers. The machine’s enclosure is made from laser cut wood and snaps together, with brackets, nuts, bolts and various other simple fittings being provided. Temperature control is achieved via a ceramic Peltier device and large heatsink of the sort found in a desktop computer. A PC power supply provides the DC current for a fan, the Peltier and control electronics. Like all good open source projects OpenPCR stands on the shoulders of giants, and makes use of an Arduino for control and to provide a USB interface. This in turn plugs into a custom Arduino shield which provides connections for the power supply, Peltier, temperature sensors and an LCD display. The shield and a “PCR block” with sample wells being the only components which could be considered to be specialist.
The completed OpenPCR machine can hold up to 16 sample tubes and the temperature of these can be cycled from 10°C to100°C, with a ramp rate of 1°C/second and an accuracy of 0.5°C. Since control is via an attached PC complex, “thermocycler protocols” can be programmed, with a virtually unlimited memory for storing the configuration of temperature steps and their cycling.
The OpenPCR blog suggests that the machine could be used to expose fraud at a sushi restaurant, diagnose diseases such as HIV and H1N1, or to explore your own genome. But this is only the beginning as far as possible applications are concerned, and as they succinctly put it, “DNA is now DIY”. Now that such equipment is becoming affordable it should come as no surprise that intrepid amateurs are getting in on the action, and the motivations of these “bio-hackers” are varied, ranging from doing it for fun and as a hobby, to starting a business in the hope of making a highly profitable breakthrough.
Conclusion
Arduino is without a doubt the poster child of the open source hardware movement and its versatility, low cost and increasingly widespread availability will help to drive the movement mainstream in a manner similar to the way Linux did with open source software. Its ecosystem of derivative, compatible and extending technologies demonstrate how the open source principle of standing on the shoulders of giants can be mapped onto hardware development. This is further exemplified by projects such as RepRap and OpenPCR which in turn make use of Arduino for their control electronics.
As RepRap makes low cost desktop manufacturing a reality and inches towards being able to self-replicate, it hints at a future that would not be out of place in a science fiction novel – where designs are developed online, shared in an instant and produced locally at the push of a button, and with machines that are able to replicate and upgrade themselves.
The Global Village Construction Set offers promise to those who, for whatever reason, desire to live off-grid and be technologically self-sufficient, and has potential for use by developing nations and in disaster relief. With its novel industrial ecology for things such as materials production, manufacture and machine relationships, it opens up exciting possibilities for unprecedented scaling and efficiency in hardware: technology is optimised for reuse, and recycling is taken to the point where closed-loop manufacturing becomes a possibility and there is minimal waste and environmental impact.
OpenCores and OpenPCR have demonstrated that even areas of technology such as chip design and genetics, which many might consider to be the reserve of large organisations with deep pockets, are not off-limits to resourceful communities of interest and are within the grasp of those with very modest budgets.
Finally, it is important to note that these projects are real, they exist and most of them have been around for some years. This is not about the future – it’s about what’s happening right now, bubbling away just under the surface, and with the potential to change our relationship with technology, our lives or even the world.
Source:http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Five-open-source-hardware-projects-that-could-change-the-world-1428043.html
