Will open source hardware bring huge development to hardware related technologies? Just like the impact of open source software gives the software industry?
Open source hardware will make better combination of software and hardware and Internet industries, from open source hardware itself, there is also better profit model than open source software. I think that open source hardware will have a good development in a certain period of time, and finally form the basis of hardware products children's chemical, civilians, and popularization.
Hardware engineering is concerned with software engineering, there are the following differences, making the opening source of hardware far more complicated than software.
1. Modular, standardized, and modified convenience
Software products have a complete definition and can be adjusted at any time. Once a software module writes run test, then this module can be considered as a black box, and is running by another complete definition module. As long as the interface between the software does not change, the logic between the modules will not change, which makes the software developers can cooperate with each other through the defined interface, regardless of these developers Place.
In the hardware field, engineers are not so lucky. First, this world does not exist as long as you know the interface, you can join the designed hardware. Hardware selection is a very troublesome thing, even if the hardware designer working for many years, it is also very likely to match this "small matter" when selecting hardware devices that have never been used. "Planting the Head - A contact resistance and parasitic capacitance that comes out, it may make the entire circuit. Hardware designers have no powerful IDE, no beautiful compilers and interpreters, all hardware engineers are told in the first EDA design class: software simulation is unreliable and can only be used as a reference. The only hardware design can rely on solid theoretical basis and repeated experimental testing. As "a Chinese engineer and a US engineer are developing a signal collector" This seemingly normal working model in the open source software is impossible to happen in hardware. Hardware designers must sit together to run simulation, test chips, soldering board.
2. Production and release cost
During the software development process, once the interface of a module needs to change, the software engineer has to do is sitting in front of the computer to modify the code and use SMS, Phone, Email, or Git, SVN These tools notify all people who need this module. Everyone is completed after debugging. The communication cost and modification cost of this process are basically zero except for humanity. The cost of publishing the software is lower, and it is necessary to use a carrier such as a floppy disk, and now there is an internet, which is basically zero cost.
In contrast, when the hardware engineer has worked for a number of simulated circuits, the circuit sent to the factory, after spending a lot of banknotes, oscilloscope, logic analysis and spectrum analyzer (they all value do not fever) Tell you with a harsh fact: this thing is wrong. If you do a board-level circuit, congratulations, if you are lucky, some of the devices in Rework can save your design. If you do the chip-level design, then you will have a few hundred thousand to do a problem, X-light, FIB, etc. to find a problem, re-flowing to see if you can bless you. The cost of hardware design is really too high, which is why the universal board and the IP core market in Arduino is so hot. In addition, etc., the product is hot, then the construction of warehousing, freight, distribution, after-sales and other systems is absolutely the money. Among the hardware product companies, the cost of developers is often only a small part.
3. Entry threshold
Today, in today's extremely developed, anyone who has good logical thinking ability is only interested in interested, you can get enough education through the Internet to refer to a software developer. And all investments are just a computer that can be internetrated. This makes the current number of programmers continue to rise, you can always encounter a few interesting things together to cooperate together.
And the hardware is, but still need the professional staff of the class to design and develop, I have not seen the electronic hardware design engineer of self-study. Cultivate a qualified hardware design engineer, requires a lot of physical and electronic basic theory learning, and accompanied by a large number of internships of various instruments, the time and material costs are very high. The number of hardware engineers is not much, plus the difficulties of collaboration mentioned before, making it easy to find a batch of hardware to get a high risk of risk.
All in all, the opening source of hardware needs to overcome the design of non-standardized, high cost, high cost, high-end threshold. And in my opinion, these problems are difficult to resolve in a short period of time. Alternatively, the solution like Arduino and IP Core can break through some areas, but in terms of the overall electronic circuit design, I can't see a good open source model.
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