There’s a lot happening, so I want to take some time to update you on the OSHdata project and what we see happening next in the broader Open Source Hardware community as we look ahead to Open Hardware Month in October.

OSHdata was started earlier this year by myself (Harris Kenny) and my friend and co-creator Steven Abadie. We worked together to create and publish the 2020 Report on the State of Open Source Hardware, which we released under an open CC BY-SA 4.0 International license.

Our report took a deep dive into how to price open source products, which licenses are being used by open source hardware projects, the growth of open hardware, and potential ways that we would modify OSHWA’s certification application. In parallel, OSHWA has been working on developing an API to increase accessibility of their data—which means more and easier reporting in the future!

After publication, we co-authored articles on new open hardware for Make: magazine and received media coverage in a number of different places like Hackster.io from Gareth Halfacree, Fabbaloo from Sarah Goehrke, and the Makers on Tap podcast co-hosted by Aaron Peterson and Joe Spanier. In many ways, this project has already exceeded our expectations. But there’s still more work to be done.

Our research has been read in over 40 countries around the world, on every continent—except Antarctica. Our report helped increase awareness of the certification program and created a sense of friendly competition between some of the leading Open Source Hardware companies in the world. Since our report was first published, the program went from slightly over 400 certifications to now boasting over 1,000 certifications!

Hardwaer hacker kliment created a workshop for the recent HOPE conference:

From the Artistic PCB Design for Terrified Beginners workshop

From the Hackaday blog:

Rapid Charging Supercapacitors

Battery technology is the talk of the town right now, as it’s the main bottleneck holding up progress on many facets of renewable energy. There are other technologies available for energy storage, though, and while they might seem like drop-in replacements for batteries they can have some peculiar behaviors. Supercapacitors, for example, have a completely different set of requirements for charging compared to batteries, and behave in peculiar ways compared to batteries.

This project from [sciencedude1990] shows off some of the quirks of supercapacitors by showing one method of rapidly charging one. One of the most critical differences between batteries and supercapacitors is that supercapacitors’ charge state can be easily related to voltage, and they will discharge effectively all the way to zero volts without damage. This behavior has to be accounted for in the charging circuit. The charging circuit here uses an ATtiny13A and a MP18021 half-bridge gate driver to charge the capacitor, and also is programmed in a way that allows for three steps for charging the capacitor. This helps mitigate the its peculiar behavior compared to a battery, and also allows the 450 farad capacitor to charge from 0.7V to 2.8V in about three minutes.

If you haven’t used a supercapacitor like this in place of a lithium battery, it’s definitely worth trying out in some situations. Capacitors tolerate temperature extremes better than batteries, and provided you have good DC regulation can often provide power more reliably than batteries in some situations. You can also combine supercapacitors with batteries to get the benefits of both types of energy storage devices.

From Glen Akins’ bikerglen blog:

Spotify and Pandora Wireless Remote Track / Artist / Album Display

I use Pandora and Spotify a lot–typically from 7 in the morning until 11 at night. I got frustrated with the Spotify and Pandora apps on my Pixel 2 and their inability to find and control my Chromecast Audio players reliably. I also wanted a quick way to identify new songs or artists I heard without having to find my phone and open an app.

To solve these problems, I moved my music playing ecosystem to Linux and installed a wired Dante digital audio network for audio distribution. Finally I built a retro 14-segment, scrolling, always-on LED display that I could quickly glance at to discover what song was playing without having to find my phone and open an app.

Good news about another company embracing open source hardware:

Lattice Semiconductor Embraces Open Hardware, Launches “Community Sourced” Portal

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) expert Lattice Semiconductor has embraced the ethos of the open hardware community, creating a portal which lists what the company describes as “community sourced” open hardware development boards and reference designs.

“In addition to proprietary boards developed by Lattice and other partners there is a broad array of boards developed by the open source community,” Lattice notes on its freshly-launched portal. “In some cases just the designs are available and in other cases there are sources available for purchasing assembled boards.

“For your convenience we list some of the more popular and interesting Community Sourced boards on the Lattice website. Lattice does not evaluate or certify community sourced boards so you will want to make your own assessment as to fitness for your application.”