Open source hardware – feature story in Wired – In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits


Chris Anderson is on a mission… In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits @ Wired. This is it folks! Open source, custom-fabricated, DIY product design – it’s now the lead story in Wired!

A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires and local “hackerspaces.” Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world. In short, atoms are the new bits.

Let me tell you my own story. Three years ago, out on a run, I started thinking about how cheap gyroscope sensors were getting. What could you do with them? For starters, I realized, you could turn a radio-controlled model airplane into an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone. It turned out that there were plenty of commercial autopilot units you could buy, all based on this principle, but the more I looked into them, the worse they appeared. They were expensive ($800 to $5,000), hard to use, and proprietary. It was clear that this was a market desperate for competition and democratization — Moore’s law was at work, making all the components dirt cheap. The hardware for a good autopilot shouldn’t cost more than $300, even including a healthy profit. Everything else was intellectual property, and it seemed the time had come to open that up, trading high margins for open innovation.

To pursue this project, I started DIY Drones, a community site, and found and began working with some kindred spirits, led by Jordi Muñoz, then a 21-year-old high school graduate from Mexico living in Riverside, California. Muñoz was self-taught — with world-class skills in embedded electronics and aeronautics. Jordi turned me on to Arduino, and together we designed an autonomous blimp controller and then an aircraft autopilot board.

We designed the boards the way all electronics tinkerers do, with parts bought from online shops, wired together on prototyping breadboards. Once it worked on the breadboard, we laid out the schematic diagrams with CadSoft Eagle and started designing it as a custom printed circuit board (PCB). Each time we had a design that looked good onscreen, we’d upload it to a commercial PCB fab, and a couple of weeks later, samples would arrive at our door. We’d solder on the components, try them out, and then fix our errors and otherwise make improvements for the next version.

2 thoughts on “Open source hardware – feature story in Wired – In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits

  1. Open source hardware – feature story in Wired – In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits jktechwriter says:

    This issue of WIRED arrived the same day as issue 21 of Make: – I was in heaven. I did wonder if the two editors were talking because of the similarity of topics in each issue.

    Chris Anderson always writes thought-provoking articles (one of his best was on the topic of FREE – google it) and I couldn’t decide which magazine to read first – I went with WIRED because I can typically read the entire issue in one sitting… I did. And I want one of those Rally Fighter vehicles… only $50,000 but hey, it’s open source!!

    One thing is for certain – there’s no going back when it comes to DIY Fabrication. Both magazines provide evidence that the decade of home manufacturing has arrived.

    James Floyd Kelly

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