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[Reply #15 on:]

Pictures are up...


http://www.freeduino.org/

[Reply #16 on:]

Nice! the colors a nice break from dull/darks

[Reply #17 on:]

what about a bright red color (similar to the background on the freeduino site) and white silkscreen.  i think that would look gorgeous.

[Reply #18 on:]

Like this one?

[Reply #19 on:]

yeah, i like that red color alot.  i think it looks really nice.

[Reply #20 on:]

The red's nice too, I think I prefer the tan though, I'd love to see what color you'll use for the BT Daniel  

[Reply #21 on:]

Freeduino BT?

Go right ahead!

It is really not a lot of work if you consider the speed that OS collaboration makes possible. From drawing the schematic to the boards shown in the picture was about five weeks, maybe 150 hours and $750 spread among four people. And those four people hadn't, and still haven't, ever met!
Anyway, Most of that cost comes from the fact that we mis-ordered and ended up with 100 each of the prototypes. At ten pieces each of the four protos, cost would be more like $500. So time-wise and cost-wise, this was a pretty efficient operation.

This is all to say that, assuming a stable platform to draw from like the Arduino, making your own derivative like the Freeduino BT would not be so expensive or time consuming. I was shocked at the speed of things:  while the official team takes months and months to even consider releasing their files, we were able to make a derivative design that is almost production ready-- in  five weeks!
 
I can't speak for the other Freeduino guys, but I think that part of this speed and efficiency might have been because of the non-proprietary nature of Freeduino: no one owns it, so anyone involved was free to go their own way at any point, and take the IP with them. It seems that working this way, where people are aware that they always have the choice to do it "their way", actually works better than collective consensus for a proprietary design, as with nothing to lose, poeple always cooperated.

Daniel

[Reply #22 on:]

*applause*

It's quite an achievement, but I imagine you and your fellow collaborators have "that much more" experience in this field than many, so what was a couple of hundred hours, might be a couple of thousand to the less experienced.

I certainly won't be making a BT since I can buy them from whomever happens to be selling them, and only if I happen to have an application that needs a BT.

I like the idea of making one, but that's a bit "fantasy" at the moment, one day perhaps

[Reply #23 on:]

I tried to download the script, but the link was broken. The script is exactly what i am looking for on another project. I don't know how to export .brd / .sch files to gerber from eagle cad. I would rather not use eagle cad if possible. I'd rather use PCB , or the PDF2GERB script. Thanks.

[Reply #24 on:]

I suppose that would be a disadvantage of open source (and always has been, even for software.)  You're expected to have enough familiarity with the tools used to build the "product" (in this case EAGLE, but some compiler and development environment for "open source".)  It shouldn't be hard to learn enough about eagle to do gerber output; certainly no harder than for me to learn "PCB."

(OTOH, if all you're looking for is PDF or Gerber versions of top and bottom of the PCB, those are probably generally useful enough, and easy enough to produce, that they could be put in some standard place...)