Arduino Duemilanove:Arduino, really Free ?

Arduino, really Free ?

  • vcaron

    By vcaron Fri 05 Feb 2010 in

    The Arduino had a bit of controversy, wether it is "really free" or not. The full board schematics are available, shareable and modifiable. Provided you can order all electronic components, it's Free as in freedom and for the design part Free as in beer. A major point is that the Atmel micro-controler is not free wrt to the same principles: you cannot get a VHDL source to study, modify and share its design. The idea could be brought further with resistors and so on, but in this case the design is mostly a non-issue, and the problem is about industrial process and hardware manufacturing, which is a whole new topic when talking about freedom in the hardware world. Hack labs and such are already investigating how to build basic silicon foundries for people by people, fantastic project... You can recurse the problem of free CPU/uC design with "free FPGAs" which are needed to "build" your CPU unless you can arrange atoms by hand in your garage. Etc. Worth mentioning is that there's not a lot of energy efficient processors or micro-controler free designs out there. The OpenSPARC is a nice general purpose core but does not really fit the "embedded bill". For those interested, look at Lattice Mico32 for instance.
    • dsamblas

      By dsamblas since 6 months, 2 weeks

      You can also take a look at http://www.milkymist.org/ project, it's based on Lattice Mico32 on a FPGA, a board called Milkymist ONE from http://www.qihardware.com project is on development.
    • lindi

      By lindi since 5 months, 3 weeks

      I think the largest problem is that there is no free software to modify the schematics. If you ask about it they recommend you to use non-free software (Eagle in this case).

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