co-founder of paddi91 here. What your are saying is essentially what has driven us to start investigating into this.
We come from the Open source hardware and hobby electronics world, and have backgrounds in mechanical engineering and information technology. So we wondered how we can add a European flavor to it:
Lots of high quality manufacturers here in (central) Europe, but with a focus on High-End High-Scale series production, both for PCB and PCB assembly. We collaborate with them, automate most of the production process for them, and thus are able to offer competitive prices for low quantities.
We started investigating into this because we want every OSHW project to be reproducible by others. So that if you are an author and publish your designs with us (we synchronize with github if you want), other people (and the many others that are not able to design or assemble the project) can receive a copy of the current version. And since not everyone can assemble by themselves, we try to make it as simple as possible which is the reason for the PCB Assembly pilot. Here we use similar tools to automate everything. It should therefore be affordable to re-produce any project on-demand. Seriously, if you want to help make open source electronics more accessible come and join us with your project for the assembly beta, the more projects, the better, as it improves the test-suite ;-) feel free to either send an email to patrick via patrick@aisler.net (my co-founder) or contact me directly via felix@aisler.net
By the way: the cost parameters for assembly would be the following:
cost of the pcb x 2 + cost of parts. no minimum quantity required.
All boards come with green soldermask, white top and bottom legend, and will have ENIG surface plating. We only use high-class FR4, 1.6mm TG150 material.
So, I did a quick check, and you're currently over 4x more expensive than OSHpark for 2-layer PCBs, but the assembly proposition looks much more promising. I will definitely keep an eye on your project.
In my opinion, that is exactly what made Chrome popular. Focussing on Dev-Tools, but that's a very expensive undertaking (it took firefox an extension to make this possible -> Firebug ftw). However, market success from other companies e.g. Stripe have shown that optimizing for developers today is by far the most effective way to get into market.
MS did the same thing, although back then they used ActiveX extensions or certain proprietary IE implementations that simplified the transition from old fat-client development to web-development.
Now that this is gone, focussing on debugging and open-sourcing is a better choice for a web-browser to win dominance. Chrome did just that: Opensourcing the core - attacking one of Mozilla's core promises - and adding proprietary google eco-sytem add-ons on top of that.
So imho what made you change to Chrome is similar to what made everyone of us developers back then adopt IE (i.e. simplifying development). And when Chrome started gaining traction, the google-lead team started implementing proprietary APIs that we now struggle with when we consider an open non-proprietary web.
I use firefox everyday, for dev and regular, and I'm happy to be a user. But I also see a lot of sites that just start breaking because they have been implemented with Chrome in mind. For where I am standing, I try to encourage our team to develop for FF first, test in Chrome and then EDGE/IE, that way it's most likely that anyone can access the site without breakage. And yes, this also means that sometimes it takes some overhead, but I'm willing to take that for the sake of an open web ;-)
Indeed, I love Firebug and have been an avid user since it first came out.
For the rogue JS, that is indeed a problem. From a development perspective though, I even think this is a good thing: stuff that bricks your browser needs to be optimized first. the moment we'd allow a more easy grip in terms of development, a lot of slow stuff will find its way into the codebase.
Holy mackeral, that is cool. I really appreciate the "well, let's just try it" approach. I can't wait to see what happens when he launches his little satellite. If it shows positive results, lots of people will replicate it.
This is win-win: if it works awesome happens. If it fails then you're left with the experience of having built a little satellite!
thanks for taking the time to comment on the presentation of the projects. We try to index and rate all open source hardware projects by their development stage. Our goal is to provide an insight for users like you whether the project can be built. For that we evaluate the difficulty and the project's dependencies (like parts).
You are right that some of our copies are a bit quirky and maybe need better explanation/call-to-actions. We already work on that and will soon release a revised version. Our designer has tried to "humanize" our analysis to make it a bit more approachable, maybe we need to put some additional effort into that ;-)
Founder of AISLER here: we want to provide a search engine to improve finding examples for parts online without the need to look for a datasheet. We would be very interested in feedback.
I actually like the second part of the article a lot more intriguing where he talks about his and the company's personal background. It's these stories that inspire to start a company.
co-founder of paddi91 here. What your are saying is essentially what has driven us to start investigating into this.
We come from the Open source hardware and hobby electronics world, and have backgrounds in mechanical engineering and information technology. So we wondered how we can add a European flavor to it: Lots of high quality manufacturers here in (central) Europe, but with a focus on High-End High-Scale series production, both for PCB and PCB assembly. We collaborate with them, automate most of the production process for them, and thus are able to offer competitive prices for low quantities.
We started investigating into this because we want every OSHW project to be reproducible by others. So that if you are an author and publish your designs with us (we synchronize with github if you want), other people (and the many others that are not able to design or assemble the project) can receive a copy of the current version. And since not everyone can assemble by themselves, we try to make it as simple as possible which is the reason for the PCB Assembly pilot. Here we use similar tools to automate everything. It should therefore be affordable to re-produce any project on-demand. Seriously, if you want to help make open source electronics more accessible come and join us with your project for the assembly beta, the more projects, the better, as it improves the test-suite ;-) feel free to either send an email to patrick via patrick@aisler.net (my co-founder) or contact me directly via felix@aisler.net
By the way: the cost parameters for assembly would be the following: cost of the pcb x 2 + cost of parts. no minimum quantity required. All boards come with green soldermask, white top and bottom legend, and will have ENIG surface plating. We only use high-class FR4, 1.6mm TG150 material.