List of open-source hardware projects explained

This is a list of open-source hardware projects, including computer systems and components, cameras, radio, telephony, science education, machines and tools, robotics, renewable energy, home automation, medical and biotech, automotive, prototyping, test equipment, and musical instruments.

Communications

Amateur radio

Homebrew D-STAR Radio
HackRF One

Audio electronics

Monome 40h – reconfigurable grid of 64 backlit buttons, used via USB; a limited batch of 500 was produced; all design process, specifications, firmware, and PCB schematics are available online
Neuros Digital Audio Computer – portable digital audio player
Arduinome
MIDIbox – modular DIY hardware–software platform for MIDI devices including controllers, synthesizers, sequencers

Telephony

Openmoko – phone framework (first use case: First International Computer (FIC) Neo FreeRunner, released as of mid-2008
OpenBTS and OsmoBTS – software-based GSM base stations
Project Ara – modular design, hot swapping pluggable mobile phone; due to enter trial production in 2015, but was suspended in 2016^[1]
PiPhone and ZeroPhone
Telecom Infra Project – collaborative Open Compute Project focusing on optical broadband networks and open cellular networks to create global access
PinePhone – developed by computer manufacturer Pine64, intended for allowing the user to have full hardware and software control over the device, released as of end-2019

Video electronics

Milkymist One – video synthesizer for interactive and dance-directed VJing
Neuros OSD – digital video recorder

Networking

NetFPGA – hardware platform, software, community, and education material to enable research and education effort in a line-rate network environment

Wireless networking

OpenPicus – platform for smart sensors and Internet of things
Sun SPOT – hardware–software platform for sensor networks and battery powered, wireless, embedded development
USRP – universal software radio peripheral is a mainboard with snap in modules providing software defined radio at different frequencies, has USB 2.0 link to a host computer
PowWow Power Optimized Hardware and Software FrameWork for Wireless Motes – hardware–software platform for wireless sensor networks
Twibright RONJA – free-space optic system, DIY in a garage and maker culture, 10 Mbit/s full duplex/1.4 km
SatNOGS – software-hardware project of a global low Earth orbit satellite ground station, including for data and Internet

Electronics

Cameras

AXIOM – digital cinema camera built by apertus° community
Elphel, Inc. – cameras based on free hardware–software designs

Computer systems

Arduino – open-source microcontroller board
Chumby – information ambient device
CUBIT – multitouch surface-interaction system
Netduino – microcontroller board, .NET Micro Framework based
NodeMCU – Wi-Fi microcontroller board
Novena - an ARM based computer built by Andrew Huang and associates
OpenPOWER – Power ISA, an open-source hardware instruction set architecture (ISA) initiated by IBM
OpenSPARC – Sun's, later Oracle's high-performance processor
Parallax Propeller – a multi-core microcontroller with eight 32-bit RISC cores
Parallella – single-board computer with a manycore coprocessor and field-programmable gate array (FPGA)
Pinebook – Notebook from Pine64
SparkFun Electronics – microcontroller development boards, breakout boards
The Bus Pirate – universal bus interface and programmer
Turris Omnia – open-source SOHO network router
RISC-V – an open-source hardware instruction set architecture (ISA)
MIPS – a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture
Color Maximite – open-source single-board computer running the BASIC language as its operating system and compatible with Arduino Uno micro-controller peripherals
Humane Reader and Humane PC

Peripherals

Nitrokey – USB key for data and email encryption and strong authentication

Robotics

ArduCopter – Arduino-based drone
e-puck mobile robot – mobile robot designed for education
ICub – 1 metre high humanoid robot
OpenRAVE
RobotCub – predecessor of ICub
Spykee
- multiplo OpenROV – telerobotic submarine
Thymio – robot for education

Microcontrollers

Freeduino – an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple I/O board and a development environment that implements the open source Processing / Wiring language. Also clones of this platform including Freeduino.
Tinkerforge – a platform comprising stackable microcontrollers for interfacing with sensors and other I/O devices

Components

Ethernut, embedded Ethernet adapters
IOIO, a board that allows Android applications to interface with external electronics
PLAICE, a device that combines a flash memory programmer, in-circuit emulation, and a multichannel logic analyzer. It runs uClinux.
Twibrigh RONJA, a 10 Mbit/s full duplex FSO wireless optical network adapter from 2001^[2]

CPUs

Amber is an ARM-compatible 32-bit RISC processor. Amber implements the ARMv2 instruction set.
LEON, a 32-bit, SPARC-like CPU created by the European Space Agency
OpenPOWER, based on IBM's POWER8 and newer multicore processor designs
OpenSPARC, a series of open-source microprocessors based on the UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 multicore processor designs
Parallax P8X32A Propeller is a multicore microcontroller with an emphasis on general-purpose use
ZPU, a small, portable CPU core with a GCC toolchain. It is designed to be compiled targeting FPGA^[3]
OpenRISC 1200, an implementation of the open source OpenRISC 1000 RISC architecture

Environmental

Open Source Ecology

Renewable energy

Wind turbines

Lighting and LED

LED Throwies – nondestructive graffiti and light displays

Neither electronic nor mechanical

Architecture and design

WikiHouse – project to design and build houses
OpenStructures – design from furniture to house

Domotics

Machines and production tools

Automotive

Complete vehicles

Land

See main article: article and Open-source car.

Airplanes

MakerPlane

Engine control units

SECU-3 – gasoline engine control unit

Electric vehicle chargers

OpenEVSE – charger for electric cars^[5]

3D printers and scanners

RepRap project – 3D printer-fabber; recyclebots, like the Lyman filament extruder, provide the filament for RepRaps
LulzBot – 3D printer design by Aleph Objects; is Respects Your Freedom certified by the Free Software Foundation

CNC milling machines

Maslow CNC - an open source CNC router project notable for low cost and unique vertical design

Other hardware

Multimachine – machine tool project
Open Source Ecology's Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – 50 industrial machines needed to build a small civilization with modern comforts
Precious Plastic's – plastic recycling tools – Shredder, Extruder, Injector, Compressor, and supplemental resources
Defense Distributed/Liberator (gun)

Charon (gun)

FGC-9 (gun)

Science

Medical devices

Open Prosthetics Project – design of open-source prosthetics
Open-source ventilator

Scientific hardware

Open-Source Lab – documents dozens of scientific tools, but is closed-source itself
OpenBCI – EEG amplifier

Satellite

UPSat

Partially open-source hardware

Hardware that uses closed source components

Computers

Single-board computers

Tinkerforge RED Brick, executes user programs and controls other Bricks/Bricklets standalone

ARM

Banana Pi, uses low-power processors with an ARM core; runs Linux, Android, and OpenWRT
BeagleBoard, uses low-power Texas Instruments processors with an ARM Cortex-A8 core; runs Ångström distribution (Linux)
IGEPv2, an ARM OMAP 3-based board designed and manufactured by ISEE in Spain. Its expansion boards are also open-source.
OLinuXino, designed with KiCad by OLIMEX Ltd in Bulgaria^[6]
PandaBoard, a variation of the BeagleBoard
Rascal, an ARM based Linux board that works with Arduino shields, with a web server that includes an editor for users to program it in Python. Hardware design files released under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.
96Boards (includes but not limited to, DragonBoard 410c, HiKey, HiKey960, Bubblegum-96 and more...)
Parallella single-board computer with a manycore coprocessor and field-programmable gate array (FPGA)

ATMega

Arduino – open-source microcontroller board

Motorola 68000 series

Minimig – a re-implementation of an Amiga 500 using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

National Semiconductor NS320xx series

PC532, a personal computer design released in 1990, based on the NS32532 microprocessor

RISC-V

HiFive1 is an Arduino-compatible development kit featuring the Freedom E310, the industry's first commercially available RISC-V SoC^[7]
HiFive Unleashed is a Linux development platform for SiFive’s Freedom U540 SoC, the world’s first 4+1 64-bit multi-core Linux-capable RISC-V SoC."^[8]

Notebook computers

Novena, a notebook computer that uses a 1.2 GHz quad-core Freescale processor closely coupled with a Xilinx FPGA^[9] ^[10] ^[11] ^[12]
VIA OpenBook, a netbook case design released by VIA Technologies

Handhelds, palmtops, and smartphones

Ben NanoNote, a palmtop PC based on the MIPS architecture
Openmoko, a smartphone containing a single-board computer equipped with a GSM/UMTS modem
Simputer, a handheld computer released in 2002

Instruction sets

J-Core, an implementation of the SuperH with some extensions^[13] ^[14]
- MIPS Power, which originated from IBM's POWER ISA
RISC-V, a RISC ISA that originated in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley
SPARC

Organisations

Bug Labs, a US technology company that began by developing and selling open-source hardware peripherals for rapid prototyping of electronics
LowRISC, a not-for-profit organization that aims to develop open hardware
M-Labs, developers of the Milkymist system on a chip
Open Compute Project, an organization for sharing designs of data center products among companies
Open Graphics Project, a project that aims to design a standard open architecture for graphics cards
OpenCores, a loose community of designers that supports open-source cores (logic designs) for CPUs, peripherals and other devices. OpenCores maintains an open-source on-chip interconnection bus specification called Wishbone
OpenRISC is a group of developers working to produce a very-high-performance open-source RISC CPU.

Notes and References

Web site: 2017-01-10. The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of the world's most revolutionary phone. 2021-02-19. VentureBeat. en-US.
Web site: Twibright Labs - Ronja.
Web site: ZPU - the worlds [sic] smallest 32 bit CPU with GCC toolchain :: Overview ]. OpenCores.
Web site: 10 of the Most Incredible Open Source Hardware Projects Born in 2013 . Cicero . Simone . 27 December 2013 . Open Electronics . Futura Group . 2017-03-12.
https://www.openevse.com/ OpenEV
Katherine Noyes. "Tiny $57 PC is like the Raspberry Pi, but faster and fully open". PCWorld. 2012.
Web site: HiFive1: Open Source, Arduino-Compatible RISC-V Dev Kit. Crowd Supply. 2017-05-31.
Web site: SiFive HiFive Unleashed Getting Started Guide. SiFive. SiFive, Inc.. 13 April 2018.
Web site: Novena. Crowd Supply.
Web site: The Almost Completely Open Source Laptop Goes on Sale. 2 April 2014. Wired.
Web site: Novena Helps Hackers Build Their Own Laptop. 2 April 2014 .
Web site: The World's First Open Source Laptop Makes Its Debut . Holbrook . Stett . April 2, 2014 . . 2017-03-12.
Web site: J-Core Open Processor . Jun 19, 2016.
j-core Design Walkthrough . 6 April 2016 . Embedded Linux Conference . San Diego . Jun 19, 2016.