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Open Hardware/Modding: The Future, the Shortages, and Arduino

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of July 2022 06:42:56 AM Filed under
Hardware
  • The past and future of open hardware

    They say a sucker is born every day, and at least on the day of my birth, that certainly may have been true. I have a bad habit of spending money on open hardware projects that ultimately become vaporware or seriously under-deliver on their expectations. In my ledger are EOMA68, DragonBox Pyra, the Jolla Tablet — which always had significant non-free components — and the Mudita Pure, though I did successfully receive a refund for the latter two.1

    There are some success stories, though. My Pine64 devices work great — though they have non-free components — and I have a HiFive Unmatched that I’m reasonably pleased with. Raspberry Pi is going well, if you can find one — also with non-free components — and Arduino and products like it are serving their niche pretty well. I hear the MNT Reform went well, though by then I had learned to be a bit more hesitant to open my wallet for open hardware, so I don’t have one myself. Pebble worked, until it didn’t. Caveats abound in all of these projects.

    What does open hardware need to succeed, and why have many projects failed? And why do the successful products often have non-free components and poor stock? We can’t blame it all on the chip shortage and/or COVID: it’s been an issue for a long time.

  • The Ball and Supply Chain Part 2

    Nearly every person on earth has experienced some impact from the supply chain in the past two years. As we wrote in part 1 in April of 2021 “Prices will increase for consumer goods” and time has proven that accurate. We also declared the problem: “Parts, price, and lead-time” along with the solution: “Pay, price, and persevere.”

  • A DIY thermally actuated deformable mirror

    In typical applications, the optimal mirror is as flat as possible. The flatter the mirror, the less optical distortion it imparts onto the reflected “image.” Distortion isn’t often desirable, so precision mirror manufacturers take great pains to manufacture ultra-flat mirrors. But distortion is sometimes a good thing, such as when you want to focus reflected light. In some cases, one might even want to adjust mirror distortion. To experiment with that idea, YouTuber Breaking Taps built a thermally actuated deformable mirror controlled by an Arduino.

    Breaking Taps has something of an obsession with microscopes and, in turn, optics. That led him to the research that inspired this project. That research described a mirror that deforms based on thermal actuation, as opposed to some kind of MEMS (micro-electromechanical system) actuation. The use case for such a deformable mirror is in astronomy. A precisely controlled deformable mirror lets a telescope compensate for atmospheric optical distortions. Those distortions can change based on atmospheric conditions, which is why on-demand deformation has a use.

»

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