The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#10 – Open Hardware and Self Publishing

Most of this week’s discussion revolved around open hardware. The summit definitely provided some interesting conversation points, explained below. If we missed any links, please leave them in the comments!

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  2. I just wanted to say, that Dave got the Nokia rather right. It is really funny to hear English speaking people to try to say words in Estonian or Finnish. Usually people try really hard and fail, so they say something like “No Kia”.
    My favorite word is Õun (apple) or any other word with letters that do not exist in English or in any other language, so I can see peoples faces when they try to pronounce that. 😛

  3. Dave, what conference are you attending in October?

    How many lectures did Adafruit give? I need to watch the one with the Arduino history!!

    Is the bunnie Huang video available? He is a genius!!

  4. Freebies vs Boobies: Freebies win beause you know you will go home with the freebies, but you know you have NO chance with the babes, and they will have killer put-downs. I would guess most aren’t the best at conversation either.

    • You know, I gotta agree with Chris on booth babes. I immediately discredit booths which employ these tactics. Like Chris says, I really think this is “underhand and low”. The worst part is, if you need to talk to them about technical things, they are usually clueless. Its really disappointing and I think reflects badly on the organization.

  6. I liked the topic about self publishing. What do you think? Is there any benefit in blogging personal projects if you don’t have anything spectacular to show?
    Great show with all interesting topics.

    • Yes, definitely. Even getting ideas that seem mundane or simple to you may strike up conversation with others and inspire them or lead them to suggest future things for you.

    • Absolutely! People generally like to read about what other people are up to. And if you make something and publish it, you have helped someone else who might want to do the same thing but is having a problem. And vice-versa. Furthermore, after a few months or so, you might find that tens of thousands of people read what you’re up to every month. You can make lots of new friends and associates as well – the Internet makes the world a lot smaller place – as demonstrated by this radio show!

  7. I have often wondered about the prior art. I am not sure publishing it on a low traffic website would be enough since I could easily change something that was published 5 years ago. Or even make an article today and date it to be 5 years ago.

    Great content guys, much better than having tunes playing in the background. 🙂

    • To get defensive publishing right you should ask a lawyer specialized in that area. The idea is to make a publication in a way a court would later accept it as prior art. Sou you need to fulfill legal criteria, a lawyer should be able to tell you which.

      There are publishers specialized in publishing articles in specific magazines or databases, so they can later count as prior art (and there are, of course swindlers on the market, claiming they do such publishing, but just take your money).

      Many large companies have own magazines and other publications, where the corporate lawyers make sure they are set up in a way they can later count as prior art. The companies use this to publish marketing but also sneak in their defensive publishing.

      • It’d be a cool idea to start a magazine called “prior art” and just have it filled with open hardware ideas. It’d be like reading an inventor’s dream notebook!

  8. Dave, your understanding of what Open (Source|Hardware) means seems to mirror what people were saying around 10 years ago.
    Nothing in the Open Hardware framework demands that the product has to be designed by incompetent rabble, in fact I’m willing to bet that most OH is designed in exactly the same way as non-open designs, by a small handful of people, the interesting bit happens when other, unrelated, folks pick up the design and build on it.

  9. With regards to hosting, it’s worth mentioning ZoneEdit.com which allows (limited) free DNS services for your domain. So, if you bought a domain and the registrar didn’t provide DNS, you can use ZoneEdit to point your domain to wherever you like. For instance, pointing example.com to your webspace provided by your ISP. ZoneEdit will also provide “cloaking” so that you don’t see the underlying domain is different. For instance example.com can point to myisp.com/~myusername but the end user will be none the wiser.

    If you are looking at registrars for registering a domain, and you want to point your domain to a free host, look for “cloaking” services.

    Cloaking at ZoneEdit
    http://www.zoneedit.com/doc/faq.html#faq36

    Also, the benefit of services such as zoneedit, and some registrars allow you to forward emails as well. So, if your domain is example.com you can forward any emails directed to xyz@example.com to any other email address. This means you can have any email address you want without setting up a specific mail box and have them forwarded to your own current email!

    … hope that makes sense…. but plenty of options for hosting for free, next-to-nothing or slightly-more-than-next-to-nothing!

    /SockThief

  10. Perhaps the battery life is better in MP3 mode because of the reduced IO required to write to non volatile RAM. Would it be possible that a dedicated MP3 encoder takes less power than writing all those extra bytes to flash?

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