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Freedom for amateurs and hobbyists

Electronics enthusiasts can find an excellently stocked playground for all kinds of ideas and how-tos at a blog maintained by O'Reilly's Make Magazine. In the last two years, O'Reilly has developed two printed magazines (one might maliciously add: "one for boys, one for girls"): Makezine and Craftzine. Make is pure hobby electronics and offers events, markets and all kinds of organised sharing for electronics enthusiasts. Thanks to clever marketing and recognition of the signs of the times, this is by no means a congregation of electronics engineers and technicians talking shop, but rather a wild but very successful mix of science fiction enthusiasts, creative tinkerers, geeks and digerati in true O'Reilly style.

Craftzine is the equivalent to Make, it deals with crafts instead of electronics and also has a blog. A hip handicraft scene is currently developing in the US. With a daily update rate between five and 25 postings, both of the O'Reilly blogs offer an exceedingly good access point for free craft ideas and regularly make explicit reference to free licenses. Make magazine's definition of Open Source hardware, for example, is interesting to read - it is a list of various approaches for combining hardware and free licenses.

Arduino: open source hardware for tinkerers

Open Source hardware? It does exist, for example the Italian Arduino Open Source mini developer board, which was designed explicitly for media artists and non-technical users. Arduino is an Atmel processor including the board, all readily assembled and furnished with a BIOS. In addition, there is a simple IDE which serves for writing simplified pseudo C code and loading it into the Arduino. The complete tool chain from Arduino's specs to its BIOS and IDE is Open Source and available for Mac, Windows and Linux. The Arduino makes achieving first successes so simple that electronics DIY is bound to attract a new and different clientele in years to come.

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