Sparkfun's Entire Open Hardware Catalog Made Available On Upverter

An anonymous reader writes "Sparkfun has published their entire catalog of over 500 open hardware designs on Upverter. Anyone can now leverage Sparkfun's designs in their own projects by creating forks and customizing to their heart's desire."

Re:Huh?

[cpicon92]

From Wikipedia

SparkFun Electronics (sometimes known by its abbreviation, SFE) is an electronics retailer in Boulder, Colorado, United States. It manufactures and sells microcontroller development boards and breakout boards.

Re:

[Bigbutt]

Fricking dumbasses can't even read the article. Oh yea, I'm on Slashdot. Who RTFA nowadays?

[John]

Cool!

[Bigbutt]

I was just out there looking to replenish some supplies for a project I'm working on. Cool beans :)

[John]

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

a project I'm working on. Cool beans :)

Someone beat you to it. [youtube.com]

Upverter is a dead end for your project?

[Z-MaxX]

It looks to me like the Upverter web site stores your design in the cloud, using their own proprietary web based tool, and you can't save or edit it on your own machine. So it Upverter's site goes down, or if they decide to make you pay for it, or they go out of business, or whatever, your design is lost! I would much prefer to use a truly open solution like gEDA or KiCAD. At least with proprietary and limited Eagle, you can save stuff locally and use it forever.

Re:Upverter is a dead end for your project?

[Zero__Kelvin]

According to Bill Gates the Internet is just a fad.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Upverter lets you export in Open JSON. There's an open source converter on GitHub. Like whoever said, try using the Internet, you may discover stuff

Advert for Upverter?

[Anonymous Coward]

All these designs can be gotten in eagle format or something from sparkfun directly

Re:

[citizenr]

and now you can look at pcb/schematic without installing eagle, I say its a win.

Huh?

[DiamondGeezer]

What do I need open source forks for?

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

So you'll be able to comply when people tell you to go fork yourself.

Re:Huh?

[martinux]

You're not considering the modular nature of electronics.

With open hardware designs you can take a circuit schematic and integrate it with another circuit without having to go to all the trouble of generating it from scratch. Instead of dropping single components into a design you can drop a device like an accelerometer and all associated components as a complete circuit and then produce a PCB with everything on one board.

It's the reason there are so many custom arduino-based variants available - people were able to take the original design then change the form-factor or add something.

Re:Huh?

[ThosLives]

Unless you care about EMC or heat dissipation or something else that depends on the interactions between the components, yes, you can think of electronic circuits that way.

I suppose for logic-only devices this works, but as soon as you start wanting to do something that requires power, you can't just drop circuits together like that.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

all the those are implementation issues (mostly) when doing PCB layout, can save time at the schematic level by putting
together blocks you know works, tweak the values/package size etc. to your needs

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

Unless you care about EMC or heat dissipation or something else that depends on the interactions between the components, yes, you can think of electronic circuits that way.

Mostly that's not a problem. If you're designing something beefy enough for power and EMC to matter then you probably know what you're doing, EMC in particular.

I suppose for logic-only devices this works, but as soon as you start wanting to do something that requires power, you can't just drop circuits together like that.

There's a whole w

Re:

[Crudely_Indecent]

What do I need open source forks for?

Because commercial fork manufacturers assume that a one-size-fits-all eating utensil is what the world needs. They fail to realize that some people have small mouths, and at the same time others might want to take really big bites. An open source fork allows you to modify the fork to meet your needs.

Small mouth, compensate for that. Want more tines, adjust the design. Need to accommodate liquids.....crap...I guess you need a spoon for that.....or, maybe a SPORK!

Re:

[grouchomarxist]

What you're looking for is here: S.H.O.V.E.L. [sparkfun.com]

and it is open-source.

Interview with the Upverter Founders (theamphour)

[citizenr]

Im sure a lot of people boil just thinking about cloud and corporations stealing your ideas (Occupy Thingiverse).
Here is an interview with Upverter guys on theamphour. Dave doesnt take any shit and he hates the cloud so dont expect any PR fluff.

http://www.theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-163-ramiform-reciprocity-raconteurs [theamphour.com]

Sparkfun's designs

[Osgeld]

I think you mean examples lifted directly from the datasheet, lets not praise them for that

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

I think you mean examples lifted directly from the datasheet, lets not praise them for that

Yes, those. Because it takes zero time to read the datasheet, then the application note, then find the other obscure series app note with the land patterns and soldering guides, thenactually make the land pattern, tracks, caps etc, then test it to make sure it works.

Re:

[NoMaster]

Actually, I think the parent meant to say 'lifted directly from the CAD, netlist, & SPICE model files supplied along with the datasheet".

Which I personally suspect is why you see so many open-source 'designs' that are straight copies of LT / Maxim / DS / AD reference designs that appear to have been dropped straight onto an arduino shield or I2C breakout board, relatively few using TI parts, and almost none using parts from the likes of TI, NTE, NXP, etc.

Re:

[Applekid]

While Sparkfun does do some circuit design, looking at the comments on their site, it seems the more their "engineers" worked on it, the more complaints they get. Those that are closest to the sample application circuits are the most reliable.

Also, Sparkfun started a spam campaign a few months ago. Fuck them.