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More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

openhardware.directory

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#11
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?

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#12
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 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 and ~~tags~~ for exploring a subset of related hardware topics.

Edit: not tags those are broken. #tags return error, other tags(uses cases) and other other tags(compatible firmware) in many cases returns only 1-2 results which doesn't even include the item where you clicked on tag even though there are a lot more items using it.

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#13
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

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#14
Please add the Sensor Watch to the list. It's an amazing project which created an open source replacement PCB and and even a custom LCD for the legendary Casio F-91W. Fully customizable open source firmware. It's got a temperature sensor which makes it a world class temperature compensated quartz watch.

I've contributed some work to it. Improved the pulsometer so it could also be used as an asthmometer which I really needed. Also improved the TOTP auth apps a bit. I was even one of the maintainers for a while.

It's an awesome project to hack on. Lots of nice people in the community. Highly recommended.

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#17
How many of these are something that a normal consumer would buy, e.g. not a dev board that you can obviously flash your own code onto? I was sort of hoping for a list of things like "spotify car thing", "facebook portal" (I know neither of those are flashable yet, they've just been on my mind) and them maybe a list of projects for them or a link to a wiki page or something

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#18

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 com…

Oh, esphome is more than only esp32 these days. For one it always worked on the pre-esp32 ESPs. But yeah, RPI2040, nrf52 and a couple of other platforms work too.

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#19
post #10
post #9

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...

Yeah, that OnePlus phone is defo the very opposite of open hardware...

Re: More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

#20
post #12

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 surprised, the company who made it (likely single person) describes itself as "We're crafting interesting tools to speed up software devel…

Agreed, alarm bells started ringing with the OnePlus phone that is the very opposite of open hardware...
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