Open Hardware and Shareable Design News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-02-28 08:22:07 UTC
- Modified: 2014-02-28 08:22:48 UTC
Summary: Recent news about hardware that can be modified and it permissive in that regard
SkyNet
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At the former Wired editor’s start-up, 3D Robotics, open-source robots take to the skies
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In the meantime, he’s hard at work on a new project called SkyNet Firmware, which will run on the open source Arduino circuit boards, devices you can use to build all sorts of computerized gadgets. “The idea is that you can load SkyNet Firmware on any Arduino compatible device or board,” he says. “The Arduino connects to SkyNet and just waits for commands.” This would let you attach almost anything to SkyNet.
3D Printers
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At the forefront of the 3D printing boom for consumers is MakerBot, whose Linux-based Replicator printers sell for between $1,300 and $3,000 and are small enough to sit on your desktop. Their MakerWare design software runs on any platform and the Thingiverse online community allows more than 13,000 users to download or upload designs in an open source, collaborative model for do-it-yourself manufacturing, according to a sponsored post in The Atlantic.
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So far, in short, I can describe 3D printing as: Building an object, by depositing layers, and creating every layer by drawing it with melted plastic. The key to understanding 3D printing, and thus learning how to do it better, is to think about the objects as a stack of layers. Then, consider how the layers will look like as they are being stacked.
Charles Babcock's Series of Articles
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References to Linux come up naturally because it is one of the most successful, sustained, and adopted open-source software projects. New releases of the Linux kernel now appear every 70 days. Each contains up to 10,000 updates and patches, a rate of change that equals 7.14 an hour. Linux's fame rests not on the fact that it's frequently modified. Rather, it's frequently modified and also respected as having a long-term future in the enterprise datacenter. The way things are shaping up, it also very likely has a permanent place in cloud architectures.
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Facebook, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and other leading IT users think the open-source movement is ready to shake up the hardware industry the way Linux did in software.
Misc.
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Intel announced a Developer Program for IoT, which will offer 5,000 Arduino-compatible Galileo SBC-based IoT development kits, plus hackathons with prizes.
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AS you may know, just few weeks ago OSHWA published the results from 2013 Open Hardware Community survey. You can find original datasheets and everything here. Despite raw data is good, I thought it was good to spend some time looking at the data trying to gather more insights, when possible, still keeping in mind that the survey samples a very limited and polarized (OSHWA centric) chunk of the community. But we need to start from something in a way.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- The Problem is Not Technology, the Problem is Really Bad Things Sold or Imposed as "Tech" (Like a Religion Built Around Technology)
- Don't hate technology, hate the corporations that abuse it to promote coercion, exploitation etc.
- Resisting IBM and EPO Corruption
- Rise up against EPO dictatorship next week
- Where Slop Meets Ghostwriting: It's a False Analogy
- It's a false analogy
- Slop Technica: Ars Technica Seems Like Repeat Offender, a Part-Time Slopfarm
- The culprits are repeat offenders, but the publisher will never admit this in public
- Where Microsoft's Bing Cannot Even Reach 1% "Market Share"
- Looking at "I" countries
- Links 16/02/2026: Barack Obama Responds to Racist Cheeto and Benjamin Mako Hill Studies Online Communities
- Links for the day
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- EPO "Productivity" Will Fall Off a Cliff If Examiners Stick to the European Patent Convention (EPC) and Follow the Real Rules
- The EPO's "Cocaine Communication Manager" would hate to see the next "productivity" metrics
- Links 17/02/2026: Why OpenClaw is Very Sleazy and Ars Technica Exposed as Hub of LLM Slop (Credibility Destroyed Overnight)
- Links for the day
- Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) Used Fake Articles to Promote Ponzi Scheme for Conde Nast and Its Client (Marketing)
- What Ars Technica and Conde Nast do here helps defraud the general public
- Only One in 50 Saudis Would Use Microsoft for Search, Almost Same as Would Use Russia's Yandex
- If statCounter is to be trusted
- Microsoft's "AI" Concerns Are All Indian (or Low-Paid Workers Who Work Extra Hours Unpaid)
- portraying charlatans and frauds like they're some kind of visionaries and luminaries
- Microsoft Turned Bing Into Censorship Machine of China, But Bing Is Pegged at a Mere 2% in Asia, Yandex is Bigger
- Expect many Bing layoffs some time soon (like in past years)
- Just Like The Register MS, Conde Nast's Ars Technica Has Just Publicly Admitted That It Published Fake Articles (Slop) Made by LLMs About Serious Subjects
- Conde Nast might shut Ars Technica down to escape the bad publicity/association
- Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Way Too Slow to Respond to Financial Fraud at Law Firms, in Effect Helping Those Law Firms Defraud Many More People (Fleecing Clients)
- Who will hold the SRA accountable for this?
- Techrights Became a Hub for News That IBM/Red Hat Doesn't Want You to See (and Pays Mainstream Media to Distract From)
- the more viciously the notorious organisation attacks the reporter, the greater the interest in what the reporter has to say
- EPO's Central Staff Committee on Fourth Technical Meeting, Two Days Before First of (At Least) 4 Winter Strikes at the Second-Largest European Institution
- “future orientations on the salary adjustment procedure”
- IBM's Collapse Continues, Half of EU Countries to Have Mass Layoffs, "IBM Clearly Disinvests From Europe" Says IBM European Works Council
- Recent publication
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, February 16, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, February 16, 2026
- Gemini Links 17/02/2026: Alpenglow Industries' Closure and Gemini Server Issues
- Links for the day
- The Southern California Linux Expo (“SCALE”) or SCALE 23x Becomes Microsoft
- It's not supporting the event, it is buying it.
- Microsoft to Focus on Name-Dropping Buzzwords to Distract From Declining Business, IBM RAs (Layoffs) With Staff Stack-Ranked
- Calling everything cloud or reclassifying as "AI"
- Another EPO Strike One Week From Now, Local Staff Committee Munich to Discuss It This Week
- Campinos MIA while Office staff goes on strike at least 4 times
- Gemini Links 16/02/2026: Task Completed by Avoidance and "Playing Again With Akkoma"
- Links for the day
- Happy Birthday (or Anniversary) to SoylentNews
- "Happy Birthday SoylentNews"
- Techrights' Architecture
- Stability is the main goal
- IBM Reduces the Thresholds for Acceptance (and the Salaries)
- Are chatbots good enough as IBM staff?
- When It Comes to Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
- It's not about security or politics
- Linux Foundation Continues Falling Off a Cliff in Geminispace
- Gemini Protocol will turn 7 this summer
- Links 16/02/2026: cURL’s Daniel Stenberg Asserts That Slop is DDoSing Free Software, But Still Uses a Plagiarism and GPL-Violating Blender (Microsoft GitHub)
- Links for the day
- The Techrights Community Never Needed Money, Only Goodwill
- We accomplish things by a track record of suppressed facts
- "AboutCode" is a Microsoft Proxy and Microsoft's Acquisition of the OSI Advances Via OSI Moles
- presenting direct evidence anybody can verify
- Social Control Media is Just a Digital Weapon
- Social control media is not social and not media
- They Will Call Smart People "Luddites"
- Is society "seeing the light"?
- Microsoft Amutable Already Reveals That Its Focus Is Not Linux, It'll Promote "Remote Attestation"
- This is basically an attack on Software Freedom, even if they toss around the brand "Linux"
- More People in Chad Move to GNU/Linux
- Last year we began to see GNU/Linux rising there - a trend which continues this year
- Dr. Andy Farnell on How Universities and Culture of Education Got Crushed by "Technofascist Nightmare"
- Farnell says he "already soft-quit in [his] mind"
- Debt of Broadcom Grew by More Than 50%, Broadcom is Deeper in Debt Than Google
- Expect many more cuts
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 15, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, February 15, 2026
- Links 15/02/2026: Slop, Politics, and Gemini
- Links for the day
- Small is Beautiful (in Cascading Style Sheets/Inheritance Rules)
- If done correctly, pages can take a tenth of a second to fully load
- Microsoft Has Fallen to New Lows in Hong Kong This Year
- That Windows "market share" falls there is perhaps expected
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised About 1.5 Million Dollars This Winter, Almost 50% More Than in All of 2024 Combined
- Verbal advocacy goes a long way
- Spread the Word About EPO Strikes and Patent Injustices in Europe
- Corruption in Europe is a real thing
- The Register MS is Promoting Slop, Promotion Connected to Microsoft (Trying to Replace Judges With Microsoft)
- marketing spun as "science"
- He Did Not Have Enough Souls
- A lot of the subjects we cover here no other site dares touch
- "Mix Vale" is a Slopfarm
- 3 "articles" about "ubuntu"
- Links 15/02/2026: Roy Medvedev Dead at 100, Rise of "YouTube Politicians"
- Links for the day
- Links 15/02/2026: How Alexey Navalny Was Executed by Putin, Erdogan Helping Iran
- Links for the day
- IBM Fedora Keeps Promoting Slop, Red Hat Has Been Turned Into Chaff and Trash to Help IBM's Stock (With "AI" Storytelling)
- Red Hat's Fedora is an old brand (20+ years). It no longer stands for what it meant to people in the Fedora Core days (I was a Fedora user back then).
- What IBM Said About 2026 Layoffs and What's Happening in Practice
- t'll leave IBM at the very bottom, in due course (customers will notice something profound has changed)
- Gemini Links 15/02/2026: "Already Midway February" and Loadbars Remembered
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 14, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, February 14, 2026