Photo by Fumi
Making wearable computers? A booster for your iPhone made out of a mint box? It doesn’t get more DIY than this. Limor Fried is the founder an lead engineer at Adafruit Industries. She’s one of the leading forces behind the maker movement – people who like to alter technology to better it, or make electronics at home from scratch. And she’s particularly interested in making hardware that is open source.
You can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 19:30]
Play audio:
If you like hearing these extended interviews, why not subscribe to Spark Plus? It’s a podcast feed full of additional blog-only content like this. [Subscribe via RSS] or [Subscribe with iTunes]
"Open Hardware" should be renamed "Open Schematics", since most of the design of the main chip is not known.
In the past, hardware was open source. Manufacturers provided schematics and you could build your own, with modifications, if you wanted. Tubes and discrete transistor products were exceptional for this. Integrated circuits removed a lot of the options.
In the late 1980's I had an Apple II clone that came with schematics at the back of the manual. I worked as a repair person for Commodore computers, and most of their line of computers had full schematics easily available.
Nearly all the integrated circuits (ICs) in the Apple II clone, the Vic-20's and Commodore 64's were off-the-shelf components where the logical layouts were publicly available in easy to obtain books (I had shelves of these types of books). The 6502 processor internals wasn't detailed, but all the internal interfaces and the public instruction set was fully documented.
We now have FPGA and other technologies that allow us to custom create devices far more complex than the computers of those days. It is also much easier to have small runs of custom designed chips built — meaning if the design allows modification you can build nearly everything you want.
The physical ability to do these things is moving up the stack all the time. What is having a hard time keeping up is the legal regimes which grant excessive goverment granted monopolies on the simplest of things (patents on things which are inadequately novel or unobvious) — and where these monopolies are disabling citizens from engaging in their own design and building of their own technology. The presumption that you need large top-down organizations granted extensive monopolies by government in order to incentivise innovation is extremely outdated.
Nice, thanks for the interview. @JLB: we're finally getting to the point where creating open source ICs is possible at the hobbyist level (if not manufacture, at least design), so hopefully that will turn around this decade. To some extent it's also an issue that, due to economic realities, it's not possible to have a garage workshop of the kind my grandfather (an electronic engineer) had – and that's holding us back a lot. If it weren't for makerspaces my kid would never have the opportunity to go out and hack on little electronic gadgets the way I did when I was young (but of course, thanks to makerspaces, we're turning that around too).
Great interview.
When Limor was talking about how makers are the next generation from when people tinkered with their cars, I remembered when I gave a eulogy at my fathers funeral in 2009. He was an auto mechanic, and I never got a drivers license and never owned a car. At first glance people might think this made us different, but I treated computers as something to tinker with (hardware and software) from a young person up to present day.
In fact, I am part of a movement to try to keep tinkering legal, given there are companies and other interests who want to make it illegal for owners to tinker with their own computers. The most threatening policy at the moment is so-called "technical protection measures" TPMs which are applied to computing hardware, and where under "copyright" law it becomes illegal for the owner to remove TPMs applied by previous owners (primarily the manufacturer).
It may seem like "copyright" law is off-topic to an interview about makers, but that is because TPMs are off-topic when it comes to copyright law. It is sad that copyright law is being abused to justify infringing the property rights of technology owners. (See our petition for those who want to get involved http://c11.ca/petition/ict )
P.S. Semi-related, but I hope that CBC is making a lot of money for all those Apple advertisements that are added before every MP3 file for the feeds. It makes me cringe when I hear them given Apple is one of the lead companies (along with Sony) in seeking to legalize and legalize their infringement of technology property rights.
This would make the ideal companion for the 'Changer'
in Spark 162 where they admit in the northern hemisphere
charging is sometimes 'challenging'.
I might even be able to use my changer credits to buy the Minty boost.
There's nothing more embarrassing than having a converter and or
car charger and breaking down on the road with a dead phone.
It would make an ideal supplement to any survival or backwoods pack.
I could see the blinky lights giving a welcome boost to the roadside
high vis vest.
Your smartphone and other mobile devices are technically mobile computers; they do not fit the formal definition of a true wearable computer. It is perfect device.
I remember when I was a teenager when I started to repair electrical items, mainly CB radio sets, then computers and TV's.