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Thang010146. Ninja Sphere | Ninja Blocks. Maker Culture. Linux. Creative Commons. The Truth About Open Source Hardware Business Models. After some time now, the Open Hardware Ecosystem and Business sector gained some significant traction.

An excellent presentation by Mathilde Berchon was recently release at the open hardware summit, trying to summarize the increasingly interesting diversity and numbers of the OSHW business. Here’s some interesting passage in the talk: The number of open hardware startups is increasing, mostly since 2007. Before this date, about only one company per year was launched […] Since 2007, the number of new open hardware startups is growing pretty fast.It takes an average of two years to go from a project to a product.

All the data is available in the Open Hardware Startups Database here: Within time we are seeing a substantial diversity of business models coming up for businesses growing around open hardware. The most obvious monetization strategy: Manufacturing The most obvious monetization strategy for open source hardware is that of manufacturing. Raspberry Pi. Arduino. FreakLabs Store, Open Source Wireless Sensor Networks. Home Shopping Cart now in your cart 0 items Home :: Contact Copyright © 2014 FreakLabs Store. How to Start Making Your Own Electronics with Arduino and Other People's Code. K Source ::. || .:: Bookshare.biz ::. || .:: Free Eboo.

Open source electronic projects. Supermechanical: Twine. Listen to your world. Talk to the web. How to Choose the Right Platform: Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black. This article was originally posted at Michael Leonard’s blog and has been re-posted here. There are already many articles out there comparing Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and BeagleBone Black; this is not one of those articles.

I believe it is clear that Arduino is in a different league than the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black, and serves an entirely different purpose. What I was looking for and couldn’t find was a comprehensive article that would summarize all of the pros and cons of the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black, and what each platform is best suited for.

When I couldn’t find that article, I decided to write it myself. I begin this comparison by giving a short introduction to each platform and then we will take an in-depth look at the two platforms side-by-side to determine which one is best for each category. The categories covered are: Let’s get started! About the Raspberry Pi Top of Raspberry Pi About the BeagleBone Black Top of BeagleBone Black So Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black? Spark | Wi-Fi for Everything. Parallella. iFixit: The free repair manual. Design Engineer Community | Online Electronic Resources and Support Homepage. 18 Lessons in Smart Prototyping From a Self-Made Billionaire - Make:

Dan Gelbart made a fortune in R&D for his company Creo. His prototyping was done at home, in his basement, using tools on par with what many of us have access to at our local hackerspaces and universities. In his spare time he has put together a short YouTube course on “how to build stuff” for students and researchers whose primary skill sets are unrelated to fabrication. The goal being to build good things quickly with simple equipment. The course is solid gold for anyone looking to improve their shop or hackerspace on the cheap. Dan didn’t always have his fortune, and he knows lots of ways to save money like using $20 diamond-glass plates from supermarket scanners as your cheapo sand blaster’s window so that it’s both safe and scratch resistant.

The 18-part video series begins by demonstrating how to use and modify his favorite shop tools, and reveals all kinds of enlightening shortcuts that make complicated assemblies trivial to produce. Matt Freund. About Adafruit - Press, Limor Fried / Ladyada & more... DIY Flexible Printed Circuits. Get some thin sheets of polyimide which have copper on one or both sides.

Polyimide is a yellow polymer with a high melting temperature and is sometimes called Kapton. A common type of copper-coated polyimide is DuPont "Pyralux" material. Pyralux sheets come in many different varieties of polyimide thickness, copper thickness and adhesive thickness (the "adhesive" is between the copper and polyimide holding everything together.) Copper thickness is given in oz per square foot, while adhesive and Kapton thickness is given in mil (1 mil =0.001 inch). Pyralux LF7062 (pictured) has 1/2 oz Cu, 1/2 mil adhesive and 1 mil Kapton. Other options are double sided copper ( a sandwich of Cu/Kapton/Cu held together with adhesive) and a roughened surface, denoted by R at the end of the part number. The roughened sheets and double sided sheet work OK. See if you can get a free sample from DuPont. Cut the Pyralux sheets to 8.5x11 or 8.5x14 inches with scissors or a knife. So long, breadboard: Draw circuits instantly with the Circuit Scribe pen.

The process of learning about electronic circuits today is pretty low-tech. You are sitting in a high school physics classroom. The teacher demonstrates a circuit at the front of the room while you draw a rough sketch and attempt to describe in words why connecting this thingy with that other thingy makes the light thingy light up. The Circuit Scribe wants to make learning about and creating circuits much, much easier. A gel pen filled with conductive ink, the Circuit Scribe lets you draw circuits that dry instantly, meaning you could create a working circuit among the notes in your notebook. A Circuit Scribe campaign went live today on Kickstarter, where its creators are asking for $85,000. The team behind Circuit Scribe wants to use the money to scale up production of the pen. If you tended to fall asleep in that physics class, a circuit is a loop through which an electric current can pass. List of free and open source software packages. Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial software | Open Source Alternative - osalt.com.

Apple Just Ended the Era of Paid Operating Systems | Wired Business. The desktop operating system is dead as a major profit center, and Apple just delivered the obituary. Amid a slew of incremental improvements to its iPad tablets and MacBook laptops, Apple today announced some landmark news about its oldest surviving operating system: It will not charge for the latest big upgrade, Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, breaking from a tradition that goes back 16 years and shining a light on a long-unfolding reversal in how tech profits are made.

Eighteen years ago, the tech industry's dominant company made nearly half its revenue selling OS licenses. Now, as Apple just confirmed, the prices of OS licenses are headed towards zilch. Prices of Apple's Mac OS X have long been on the wane. After four releases that cost $129, Apple dropped the operating system’s upgrade price to $29 with 2009’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and then to $19 with last year’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. In a way, operating systems are returning to their roots as a kind of loss leader.

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