ApacheCon: Core Europe 2015

CPUs that cost thousands a decade ago are now cost a few dollars. The Arduino platform has lowered barriers to entry so that people with minimal tech knowledge can create special purpose computers capable of changing the world. Open Source Hardware is in autonomous drones, 3D printers, DNA replicators, satellites, city-wide sensor networks, smart houses and wearable computers. In this talk I'll take you through what Open Source Hardware is and isn't, OSW licensing, recent advances in OSW, show a range of projects and demonstrate what's possible now, and warn about some the threats (lack of protocol standards and vendor lock in to name two) that may hinder the growth of Open Source Hardware.

We experience a growing number of mobile and similar devices flooding the market almost every day. Capturing the specification of each device is a tough job. If you want to create a great UX you need dynamic content matching hardware and browser specs of your device. That’s why Device Description Repositories (DDR) exist. Apache DeviceMap is a collaborative effort to create a comprehensive open-source and open-data repository of device information and other relevant data for various devices. The project began in January 2012 after which OpenDDR contributed data and APIs for Java and. NET. DeviceMap left Apache Incubator Nov 2014. After modularization, DeviceMap 2.0 aims to make classification generic, so people can introduce their own detection domains. Support further languages like JavaScript/Node.js, common web UI frameworks, etc. and a JSON representation of device data.