It’s Finally Here: Open-Source Hardware
The optimistic crowd that form the borderless and limitless open-source community world-wide have finally been rewarded a long sought-after dream: taking the beautiful concept of open-source beyond software, and into the hardware division.
A group of scientists from Standford University have succeeded in putting together a programmable digital camera that allows anyone to write the software to achieve any feature your imagination can come up with. This results in a digital camera made of extremely cheap components, offering features that no other proprietary manufacturer does. You’ll be paying for the dirt-cheap components, and just as they’ve always taught us, the best things in life are free (open-source software included).
This is a brief look at the Frankencamera by the scientists themselves:
It currently not the sexiest of cameras, but how charismatic was the first GUI for Linux? What matters is not the current product, but the potential results. And from what we can tell from this revolutionary innovation, the sky is the limit, and the users from every corner of the globe will inevitably be the ones who most benefit.
