AI slop. Most of the things on this list are not open hardware, and some of the items are completely proprietary. For example, the SLAMTEC RPLiDAR A1 [1]. This part doesn't even have user-upgradeable firmware.
Well I fell down an RGB keyboard rabbit hole there. At first I thought I wouldn't find something compelling in this list but it only took me to the second scroll to get drawn in. The end result was a customizable keyboard from Canada.
Can I give it a link to my weird (but open) hardware?
The link was posted by project's author so probably should have been Show HN.
Feels more like AI slop list of "a bunch of hardware that you can buy from hobbyist electronic stores" which has no idea what it wants to be, shiny on surface but deeper you look less sense it makes. Not a surprised, the company who made it (likely single person) describes itself as "We're crafting interesting tools to speed up software development using Artificial Intelligence."
Good chunk of that stuff is not open hardware by any definition -> neither the hardware design being open nor the firmware not even community written firmware for proprietary hardware.
If you ignore the poor description of the site is the parametric search at least good? The values in parameter dropdowns seem to be filled based on currently displayed items, that might be fine for narrowing down once you already made a search but for initial search it means you get random subset of available values. The fact that whole thing is non-categorized, random mix of mismatched type of hardware doesn't make the parametric search better. Good parametric search needs well curated and structured database of descriptions made by people who understand corresponding product category, otherwise it's garbage in garbage out.
Having to wait half a minute while AI is reticulating splines even when you used quite specific keywords isn't a good search experience either.
So if it's not a good list of open hardware, not a good list of hardware you can flash open firmware, not a good search for electronic components what is it good for? Only value I see is as a fuzzy set of links for exploring a subset of related hardware.
This is "Open Hardware" which usually means open PCB or chip schematics, so people can modify or extend the board. OpenWRT is "Open Software that runs on closed hardware".
After checking a couple, Kind of seems like a lot of boards on this "open hardware" list might not actually be open hardware?
AI slop. Most of the things on this list are not open hardware, and some of the items are completely proprietary. For example, the SLAMTEC RPLiDAR A1 [1]. This part doesn't even have user-upgradeable firmware.
[1] https://openhardware.directory/devices/slamtec-rplidar-a1
Looks good, but it'll probably take a while until it's anywhere close to the coverage of existing repositories:
https://templates.blakadder.com/ has almost 3,000 devices flashable onto Tasmota firmware.
For older Tuya devices there's https://github.com/tuya-cloudcutter/tuya-cloudcutter
OpenBeken https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App covers 800 of the newer generation Tuya devices.
And there's a large community adapting ESP32 devices onto https://esphome.io/
Feels weird to advertise a microcontroller dev board this way. But the other stuff is cool
Yeah, it's worse, half of the devices on that list are peripherals that cannot be flashed with any firmware.
Well I fell down an RGB keyboard rabbit hole there. At first I thought I wouldn't find something compelling in this list but it only took me to the second scroll to get drawn in. The end result was a customizable keyboard from Canada.
Can I give it a link to my weird (but open) hardware?
The link was posted by project's author so probably should have been Show HN.
Feels more like AI slop list of "a bunch of hardware that you can buy from hobbyist electronic stores" which has no idea what it wants to be, shiny on surface but deeper you look less sense it makes. Not a surprised, the company who made it (likely single person) describes itself as "We're crafting interesting tools to speed up software development using Artificial Intelligence."
Good chunk of that stuff is not open hardware by any definition -> neither the hardware design being open nor the firmware not even community written firmware for proprietary hardware.
If you ignore the poor description of the site is the parametric search at least good? The values in parameter dropdowns seem to be filled based on currently displayed items, that might be fine for narrowing down once you already made a search but for initial search it means you get random subset of available values. The fact that whole thing is non-categorized, random mix of mismatched type of hardware doesn't make the parametric search better. Good parametric search needs well curated and structured database of descriptions made by people who understand corresponding product category, otherwise it's garbage in garbage out.
Having to wait half a minute while AI is reticulating splines even when you used quite specific keywords isn't a good search experience either.
So if it's not a good list of open hardware, not a good list of hardware you can flash open firmware, not a good search for electronic components what is it good for? Only value I see is as a fuzzy set of links for exploring a subset of related hardware.
more often than not, you could just buy the same new CPU on the open market and swap it in. It bypasses secure boot, etc.
There are another ~3k devices on the OpenWRT table of hardware that would fall into this category: https://toh.openwrt.org/
This is "Open Hardware" which usually means open PCB or chip schematics, so people can modify or extend the board. OpenWRT is "Open Software that runs on closed hardware".
After checking a couple, Kind of seems like a lot of boards on this "open hardware" list might not actually be open hardware?
Here's an example of what open hardware is supposed to be: https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/tree/master/h...
Also, prices for everything is 1.5 - 2.5X.
I wonder what (api?) creators are using to programmatically calculate this pricing.
I strongly feel that each board should display pricing in two ways 1. Market price. buy now price. 2. Get it used (used market price).