News @ Suspect Devices

Author: Cameron

  • Open Hardware Summit 2013 review

    The Open Hardware Summit is becoming my favorite event of the year. It’s a great cross-section of what people are doing with hardware. I had submitted a talk about ethics and labor in computing, but the talk was rejected. I didn’t feel bad about it because I was confident that the organizers would pick a good mix of speakers this year. I was completely right! The keynote this year was given by Eben Moglen who stressed to us the importance of open hardware and software as a means to help our communities and as a potential tactic in unfolding capitalism. This spirit seemed to continue through the conference, although not completely since the OSHWA membership is largely pro-capitalist.

    Around the conference I got to meet Don’s friends from ITP Summer Camp. Everyone from that group is doing interesting things. I got to talk about Nintendo stuff, as I did a Nintendo-themed art piece earlier this year. Jonathan Dehan showed me his work in helping people make their own ROM hacks of Super Mario Bros.
    Super Mario Bros Clouds

    The big lesson this year was learning how to be tactful. I ran into my ex-employer a lot, which was awkward, so I had to pull up a lot of courage to even address it and apologize for being rowdy previously. I had hoped for an apology from him, but I realize that it will never happen and I had to be the better person. I think I grew a bit personally.

    I was most excited about the women’s dinner that followed the summit. I am not usually one to go to all-women’s events but considering that most of the organizers and key players of the open hardware movement are women, I thought I’d go. I’m glad I did! I had so many wonderful conversations with everyone. It was actually very comfortable to finally talk shop without the weird overhead and baggage that can come from being in a mixed space. I met a friend’s roommate by accident who told me about PCBmodE. I also met Erin aka RobotGrrl who suggested I try out gEDA. I got to talk to people who were going to China to see how the work conditions are, and I talked to other artist-hackers. Overall I had a really positive experience this year.

    See all my snapshots on Flickr!

  • Cameron’s Open Hardware Summit review

    The Suspect Devices “team” attended the Open Hardware Summit in New York City this past week. It was really thrilling to be around so many creative and intellectually curious people. Many of the talks in the afternoon made me realize that we in open hardware have the potential to do a lot of great work in the world by collaborating inside and outside of our field. The Public Laboratory team brought up issues about gathering data and data ownership for the general public, which we have the technology to do but perhaps this has not filtered into many communities yet. I also thought that they were correct in turning to traditional publishing in order to inform residents of their findings in low-bandwidth communities, which is a fantastic opportunity for current and former journalists to get involved in the information distribution process. In fact, this would be a great opportunity for local and regional newspapers (or anyone with a printing press and lots of stamps) to facilitate conversations in neighborhoods facing environmental damage.

    One of the more disturbing aspects of the summit was the keynote by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine. His talk was focused on becoming a billionaire with open source by utilizing unpaid work, outsourcing as needed, and keeping your business model hierarchical. Individual contributions and code commits in open source are usually unpaid, but Mr Anderson suggested that by using branded gifts and other tokens as motivation, there would be no need to have people around to be paid. This is a horrible model. I don’t think that all situations necessarily need to be compensated but without provisions to make sure that people’s living is supported, you will only have contributors who are making money at programming already. Not only that, but the idea that businesses should strive to make billions of dollars is unsustainable both economically (as investment is not necessarily being reintroduced into the local economy) and environmentally (as businesses grow, they will continue to offshore production, which leads to a disconnect of downstream environmental impact). It continues to feed into a plutocratic economic model, instead of a distributed economic model that is so badly needed to reawaken blighted communities.

    While Leah Buechley is correct that openness for its own sake is counterproductive, so is an open source movement without ethics and sympathy. I hope that we as a community are able to nurture our own ethics that will help to support us as well as our neighborhoods and cities.

  • Resources for the Newly Inducted

    Now that you’ve taken the plunge into microcontrollers, here are some good resources to help you with your first project.

    Books
    • Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims
      A good resource if you have zero experience with electronics.
    • Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers by Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe
      Covers all the common use cases for kinetic sculpture and other art applications. The example code is being updated for Arduino-compatible microcontroller boards by Don as Errata for Physical Computing.
    • Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz
      If you have some basic understanding of electronic principles, this is the book for you.

    I would also recommend Forrest Mims’ Engineers Mini Notebooks, as they have lots of common circuits that you can use for a variety of projects.

    Sites

    If you have other sites or books or other resources that have been helpful, post them to the comments and (eventually) I’ll add them to this list.

  • Slicing up Maple Bacon

    I had been itching to do more Eagle projects since I took Laen’s class, so Don tasked me with a variation of the Maple Mini to use with a Gainspan module. It is rather large, but the surface mount parts are large enough to do at home on a hotplate. In fact, the board is designed just for at-home assembly. The project is called Maple Bacon, since the finished product should be as thick as a slice of Sweet Briar Farms maple bacon.

    This was my second attempt at a large-scale Eagle project, so any comments or critiques would be appreciated. You can watch or fork my repo at github.com/soycamo/maplebacon.

    Happy holidays!