OHR Meta Project

ohwr.org started with projects designed in Europe and soon it was followed by the RHINO project run in South Africa. Now also projects from Brazil and China are hosted on the site.

The article Is open hardware creating a more open world? in iSGTW describes extensively OHWR, White Rabbit, RHINO, a commercial partner active on OHWR and many other aspects of Open Hardware projects. iSGTW is an international weekly online publication that covers distributed computing and the research it enables.

The Polish company Creotech, that was already involved in the design of the SPEC PCIexpress FMC carrier, has decided to commercialise three Open Hardware designs that were initiated by CERN: SPEC, FMC ADC 100M 14b 4cha, the FMC DEL 1ns 4cha and the FMC DIO 5ch TTL a.
The same company has also created modified versions of the CERN's SPEC board for dedicated applications of its clients. These designs will soon be published on the ohr site as Open Hardware designs.

The article Open Hardware for CERN’s Accelerator Control Systems, by E. van der Bij et al, has been published in the Journal of Instrumentation JINST Vol.7, January 2012. It presents concisely the different aspects of CERN's Open Hardware developments.

The article is related to the poster Open Hardware for CERN’s Accelerator Control Systems presented at the TWEPP 2011 conference in Vienna, Austria.

The FMC ADC 100M 14b 4cha FMC card designed at CERN is available as a product in the catalog of the Dutch company INCAA Computers. It is the first CERN Open Hardware product that is available this way. The SPEC PCI Express carrier is also commercially available, but is not yet shown in the catalog of the two companies that produce it.

At the TWEPP conference in Vienna, Austria, the poster Open Hardware for CERN’s Accelerator Control Systems has been presented.

In an interview with Le Figaro, when the final question is asked: "From where do you see the next big technological turning point?", Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn answers: "I keep a close eye on the domain of open source hardware".

See the interview (in French) at Le Figaro

Q: "D'où voyez-vous venir la prochaine grande rupture technologique?".
A: "Je surveille de près le domaine du hardware open source."

Registration instructions can be found in the workshop page.

"Four months after launching the alpha version, CERN has today issued version 1.1 of the Open Hardware Licence (OHL), a legal framework to facilitate knowledge exchange across the electronic design community." More info here.

We are preparing an Open Hardware workshop to discuss legal aspects, commercial models, tools and designs. More info here.