Opening Hardware Talk

Oy! I’m Henry Ishitani! And this is my blog for Computers and the Open Society, the most kick-ass intro seminar Stanford has ever seen. This blog will be looking into the potentials of a sweet new idea that looks primed to see some serious action in the future: open source hardware. Open source hardware is basically the same thing as open source software, with people from all around the world putting their heads together through the Internet on a project. The main difference of course, is that the focus of each project is not some novel piece of program- cool though that can be- but the designs and how-to-do’s of an actual fully operating machine.

But we’re not just talking toy robots here people (though we are talking that too!). We’re talking tractors. And bulldozers. And dairy milkers. Except these aren’t just any average-joe dairy-milkers. These are dairy-milkers designed by brilliant minds to be super low-cost, super high-performing, and super able-to-be-built-by-practically-any-old-schmuck. Imagine the possibilities!

And so, over the next weeks, I will cover a range of topics beginning with the Arduino Project, the adaptable open-source microcontroller platforms that has every robot-making mad scientist raving. WOOHOO!!! MORE POWER TO THE ROBOTS!!! BRING ON THE SKYNET!!!

After that, we’ll crank the volume to 11 and hit up Open Source Ecology, a project of truly staggering ambitions. OSE’s big idea is the Global Village Construction Set, a system of 50 key industrial machines that you can very nearly build in your backyard and have all the qualities of that dairy milker I mentioned earlier. Now, what would a sensible lad or lady like you ever do with a souped up dairy milker? I really don’t want to know, but I can very easily imagine what a Ghanaian cow herder would do with it- and how it would change his life and kickstart a local economy!

So please, stick with me in the coming weeks and let’s see where this blog takes us. With your brilliant ideas and my killer personality we have a lot to look forward to!