Basic Lessons¶

How to make the best of these lessons?¶

Try to do the exercises in the lessons. If you get stuck, you can always ask for help in our community channels. These basic lessons are designed to help you get started with the open hardware academy. They are designed to be done in your own time. You can do them in any order, but we recommend you to start with the first one. You can also use them to organize a local workshop. If you do so, please let us know.

If you don’t have a formal engineering design background, you are a scientist, or a student looking to learn more about open hardware, these lessons are for you. They will help you to understand the basics of open hardware and how to develop your own open hardware project.

If you are a professional engineer, you might want to focus on the specific considerations for open hardware, as well as project management and agile methodologies that we cover as advanced topics within some of our lessons.

Lessons¶

Introduction to open hardware¶

In this lesson we aim to introduce people that are not familiarized with open hardware to the subject. We will cover what is specific and unique about open hardware as a practice, where does it come from and practical considerations about getting started with developing open hardware projects. We aim also to cover briefly the specifics of open hardware design, development, distribution and usage. What is unique about it, why it is relevant and powerful.

Read the lesson Introduction to open hardware

Documentation of open hardware¶

In this lesson, we want to get you familiarized with good open hardware documentation. This includes considerations about what to put in the documentation, different types of documentation, formats, as well as tools, and platforms to publish documentation. We will cover basic and introductory aspects of documentation and more advanced considerations, practices, and setups.

Read the lesson Documentation of Open Hardware

Framing open hardware projects¶

In this lesson we introduce the importance of framing as an essential activity to design and develop open hardware. We touch upon general aspects, practices and tools to frame projects as well as specific considerations that apply to open hardware.

Read the lesson Framing Open Hardware Projects

Hardware design and prototyping¶

In this lesson we introduce concepts, tools and techniques to design and develop open hardware projects.

Read the lesson Hardware design and prototyping

Hardware testing¶

In this lesson we introduce concepts, tools and techniques to focused on verification and testing of hardware. We emphasize the importance of hardware testing in different phases and project activities.

Read the lesson Hardware testing

Versioning and Releasing Open Hardware content¶

This lesson is focused on best practices and recommendations to distribute open hardware content. A good distribution approach for open hardware approach should address versioning and releasing planning.

Read the lesson Versioning and Releasing Open Hardware content