There’s been an interesting trend toward “open-source hardware” over the last few years, as the growth of the quick-turn manufacturing industry, the increasing power of cheap microcontrollers, and the wide accessibility of CAM devices like laser cutters have run into a hobbyist culture long familiar with open-source software and creative commons licensing. You can’t clone hardware for nearly zero cost, like you can with software, but it is increasingly easy to see hardware as a physical representation of some digitally-encoded design. As the capital investment required to manufacture such a design continues to drop, and more people gain access to such processes, it makes increasing sense to start sharing around the knowledge necessary to design and build one’s own devices.

In this context, the newly proposed Open Source Hardware License is particularly interesting, as an attempt to do for hardware something like the OSI did when it first standardized the term “open source”. There are already a number of small shops selling both kits and assembled devices for which they also freely publish the schematics and firmware source; the Arduino has become the most popular microcontroller platform in the hobbyist community in no small part because of the vast array of completely legal clones which have jumped on the bandwagon.

I’ve been toying with the idea of commercializing the rhythm robot, possibly as a kit, or perhaps a fully assembled device like you might find in Guitar Center. Now I’m thinking: what if I added a USB port for a programming interface, published the schematics, and gave away the firmware? Most people would probably just play with it as-is, but people who were really interested could dig in and customize it, or even build their own variations. How cool would that be?