PROTOTYPING

Prototyping: Prototypes and

Production - Open Source versus
Closed Source
 Prototyping
• Prototyping is inherently a matter of balancing trade-offs between building
something that allows to learn more about the project looking to build and
keeping an eye on how things scale up should your experiments prove you right.
• Problems in design that need to change and iterate is known in advance
• Think of Building three things in parallel
1. The Physical Thing
2. The Electronics that make the Thing smart
3. The Internet service that will connect to.

Benefits:
• Relatively cheap and easy to use
• Optimized for ease and speed of development
• Ability to change and Modify
 Prototypes and Production

• Ease of prototyping is a major factor, perhaps

the biggest obstacle to getting a project started
• Scaling up to building more than one device,
brings a whole new set of challenges and
questions.
• Key things to be made:
1. Changing Embedded platform
CHANGING EMBEDDED PLATFORM
 Moving to a different platform, for cost or size reasons.
 Porting the code to a more restricted, cheaper, and smaller device will
bring many challenges
 If a constrained platform is used in prototyping, then choices and
limitations in the code has to be made
Eg: Dynamic memory allocation on the 2K that the Arduino provides may
not be especially efficient, so think about using strings or complex data
structures?
 If port to a more powerful platform, able to rewrite the code in a more
modern, high-level way or take advantage of faster processor speed
and more RAM.
 Replacing an Arduino prototyping microcontroller with an AVR chip and
just those components that actually need, connected on a custom PCB.
 PHYSICAL PROTOTYPES AND MASS
PERSONALISATION

• Chances are that the production techniques used for

the physical side of device won’t translate directly to
mass production.
Eg: injection moulding in place of 3D printing
• Digital fabrication tools can allow each item to be
slightly different, letting to personalise each device in
some way.
• Mass personalisation, means can offer something
unique with the accompanying potential to charge a
premium
 CLIMBING INTO THE CLOUD

• The server software is the easiest component

to take from prototype into production.
• scaling up in the early days will involve buying
a more powerful server.
• If running on a cloud computing platform,
such as Amazon Web Services, can even have
the service dynamically expand and contract,
as demand dictates.
 OPEN SOURCE VERSUS CLOSED SOURCE

Broadly, looking at two issues:

• Assertion, as the creator, of Intellectual Property rights.
• Users’ rights to freely tinker with their creation.

• if other people were to use that right on your own design

/invention /software, you might not get the recognition and
earnings that you expect from it.
 OPEN SOURCE

• This hands-on approach to playing around with technology encourages

passionate amateurs and professionals alike to break out the soldering
iron and their toolkit and create everything from robots and 3D printers
to interactive artworks and games .
• The democratic and open approach from hackspaces, along with that of
the open source software community, has carried over into the Maker
culture, resulting in a default stance of sharing designs and code.
• Accompanied by an Open Source Hardware logo, which designers can
use on their products to indicate that the source files are available for
learning, re-using, and extending into new products.
• The Open Hardware Summit also established aregular annual event,
bringing together a huge number of hackers, makers, developers, and
designers to discuss and celebrate open hardware each September.
• In June 2012, the Open Source Hardware Association
(http://www.oshwa.org) was formally incorporated.
 CLOSED
• Asserting Intellectual Property rights is often the default approach, especially for
larger companies.
• If declared copyright on some source code or a design, someone who wants to
market the same project cannot do so by simply reading the instructions and
following them.
• That person would have to instead reverse-engineer the functionality of the
hardware and software.
• Simply copying the design slavishly would also infringe copyright.
• Be able to protect distinctive elements of the visual design with trademarks and of
the software and hardware with patents.
• Getting good legal information on what to protect and how best to enforce those
rights is hard and time-consuming, larger companies may well be geared up to take
this route.
• If you’re working on your own or in a small company, you might simply trademark
your distinctive brand and rely on copyright to protect everything else.
• Starting a project as closed source doesn’t prevent you from later releasing it as
open source.
 Why Open?

• In the open source model, you release the sources that you use to create the
project to the whole world.
There are several reasons to give away your work:
1. You may gain positive comments from people who liked it.
2. It acts as a public showcase of your work, which may affect your reputation
and lead to new opportunities.
3. People who used your work may suggest or implement features or fix bugs.
4. By generating early interest in your project, you may get support and
mindshare of a quality that it would be hard to pay for.
• GIFT ECONOMY: - Can use other people’s free and open source contributions
within your own project.
• Forums and chat channels exist all over the Internet, with people more or
less freely discussing their projects because doing so helps with one or more
of the benefits mentioned.
 Disadvantages of Open Source

• Deciding to release as open source may take more resources.

• After you release something as open source, you may still have a
perceived duty to maintain and support it, or at least to answer
questions about it via email, forums, and chatrooms.
Being a Good Citizen:
In some ways, being a good citizen is a consideration to
counterbalance the advantages of the gift economy idea. But, of
course, it is natural that any economy has its rules of citizenship!
Open Source as a Strategic Weapon.
• The idea of open source used aggressively is the idea of businesses
using open source strategically to further their interests.
• If you manufacture microcontrollers, for example, then improving the
open source software frameworks that run on the microcontrollers
can help you sell more chips.
Open Source as a Competitive Advantage
• First, using open source work is often a no-risk way of getting
software that has been tested, improved, and debugged by many
eyes.
• As long as it isn’t licensed with an extreme viral license (such as the
AGPL), you really have no reason not to use such work, even in a
closed source project.
• Second, using open source aggressively gives your product the
chance to gain mindshare.
• If an open source project is good enough and gets word out quickly
and appealingly, it can much more easily gain the goodwill and
enthusiasm to become a platform.
• The “geek” community often choose a product because, rather than
being a commercial “black box”, it
 MIXING OPEN AND CLOSED SOURCE

• Open sourcing many of your libraries and keeping your core

business closed.
• Adrian’s project Bubblino has a mix of licences:
1. Arduino code is open source.
2. Schematics are available but not especially well advertised.
3. Server code is closed source.
• The server code was partly kept closed source because some
details on the configuration of the Internet of Things device
were possibly part of the commercial advantage.
 CLOSED SOURCE FOR MASS MARKET PROJECTS
• One edge case for preferring closed source when choosing a license may
be when you can realistically expect that a project might be not just
successful but huge, that is, a mass market commodity.
• Let’s consider Nest, an intelligent thermostat: the area of smart energy
metering and control is one in which many people are experimenting.
• The moment that an international power company chooses to roll out
power monitors to all its customers, such a project would become
instantaneously mass market.
• This would make it a very tempting proposition to copy, if you are a highly
skilled, highly geared-up manufacturer in China, for example.
• If you also have the schematics and full source code, you can even skip the
investment required to reverse-engineer the product.
• The costs and effort required in moving to mass scale show how, for a
physical device, the importance of
• The key factor wasn’t so much about development platform as time to
market versus your competitor’s time to market supply chain can affect
other considerations.