• Let me give you a quick overview of how you can make electrinics.
• You have a printed circuit board, typically made of fiber glass and copper tracks
• You could try and etch these yourself but they have become very affordable to order in the past decade.
• So you have this board, often shortened to PCB And you have components, with legs or pins, that you solder on by careful application of heat and solder wire

• You can have through hole components where the legs stick through a hole in the boord

• And you can have surface mount components, which are often shortened to SMT or SMD

• If you are making more than one board, or you have very tiny surface mount components you typically want to use a reflow process.
• You apply solder paste, site the component on top and heat it up.
• Often people hack toaster ovens to have more control over the temperature curve

• But of course, this get tedious so etching connections into copper-clad fiberglass can be much less tedious
• You can do this at home, you print onto a copper-clad board which will resist an acidic bath and leave you with just the connections that you want

• What you are looking for in an OSHW project are the gerber files
• These describe the printed circuit board design
• And what you'll find if you look at the gerber files of a typical OSHW electronics project
• You will see multiple layers
• Tiny drills
• A solder resit and a silkscreen layer

• So, for these you really need an industrial process
• On the whole they use a similar etching process to what you can do at home but they have a lot more accurary and they have further steps which are harder to do at home
• You get a nice silkscreen or ident layer which help you see where components are supposed to go, you get solder resist which helps you keep the solder where it needs to be
• You have much more accurate drillng and the drills themselves are internally plated through electro-plating, so they can make connections between layers
• And you can have many more layers laminated together

• And it's cheap
• There are so many places where you can order your PCBs these days and get them within a few weeks for under 20 euros, it's pretty insane compared to 10 years ago

• If you are interested in doing this, you should check out your local hackspace and learn how.
• Here in bristol we have a modified toaster oven and plenty of friendly people that are willing to show you how to use it.
• We also have a lot of other cool tools like a laser cutter and 3d printer, go check us out on the web!

• The way to design these boards is to use a schematic entry and a PCB layout software.
• You draw out a schematic, which is a sort of map where you want all your connections to go.
• And then place them onto a model of a board and route the connections your previously defined
• Once you make a design you can share this with people, and in theory someone should be able to replicate it.
• So that's what we call open hardware.

• And it's growing!
• I gave a presentation at FOSDEM in febuary and took a rough survey and did the same again last week
• And there are other places to put up projects as well
• So what's the problem?

• The problem
• The problem is that it's hard to document electronics in a way that allows others to replicate them
• Often it takes considerable effort to understand someone else's work
• Projects can be simultaneously brilliant but not reproducable
• There is no clear standard way to present the information that reduces the friction

• So what we would like, is something that incorporates all these different ways of doing things

• Allows you to make the PCB

• And allows you to purchase the parts

• And this is my approach to try and solve this
• The Kitspace.org web service
• and the 1-click BOM browser extension

• The browser extension tries to completely reduce the friction between a BOM and the retailer shopping cart
• It does this by replicating the web requests that your browser sends when using the site
• Currently works for these retailers

• So this kind of solves one aspect of our goal.
• We can replicate purcheses across the globe
• But it doesn't include the PCB and there is no standard way to package a complete project to be replicated

• So this is where kitspace.org comes in.
• We combine the BOM with gerber files and put the in a Git repository
• And kitspace.org makes a page out of this for people to access

The idea really is that, creators can put together a virtual kit, that others can buy themselves, and we can share open hardware designs that way. With the least amount of friction.

So I want to encourage you, to check out your local hackspace. If you are from around here that's the bristol hackspace, there