Why hardware developers dont collaborate
 

Seems that I get asked a lot why i don't collaborate with other hardware designers. I'm sure others get asked the same thing.

1. Firstly. I have spent the last ten years working for large global companies and coordinating with people in different time zones / offices is not as easy as it sounds. And this is when I spend all day every day doing the job. Its work that i'd rather not bring into my hobby time.

2. Secondly hardware development is a pipeline. One is being designed in Eagle, another is being built at the boardhouse and one or two are on the bench being debugged and getting firmware developed for it. Its difficult enough to manage this pipeline for yourself without adding more elements to this.

3. I design board for parts i already have. e.g. i had 512K SRAM chips in my drawer when i designed the TF530... So i thought i'd use them. If i coordinated with others they'd probably have objected and my cost would have been higher.

4. My available time is sporadic. I disappear for months at a time doing professional flying courses. I'm sure others have other hobbies they escape to aswell. Its unfair to others in a project just to drop things.

5. I build things in a sequence thats taking me somewhere. Learning step by step and sharing as I go. If i had started with an A4000 060 accelerator i'd never have got anywhere. The steps are steps im comfortable with. I dont want to be pushed to a bigger step because someone else wants more features.

6. Its my fun time. I do this after a day of working on projects with other people and compromising. I dont want to compromise when its my creative space.

7. I am making knowledge not products.

In short i'm happy to give opinions and even help debug something by putting it on my rig. But i'm not going to be a day to day collaborator with a team. I wish anyone working in a team well.

I agree 100%.

Nuff said.

This. A thousand times this.

Projects like this, software or hardware, are incredible aids to learning - both for the developer, and anyone following the project. Ultimately i think this is one of the greatest values to opensource projects, both hardware and software.

Obviously everything else you mentioned is important too, but the accessibility to raw, working code/design and the videos documenting your progress provides in my opinion a resource something akin to engineering colleges providing jet engines to tear down and analyze. For free, i might add!

John

MY guess is that there is a big ego thing aswell. there are people that just NEEDS to be the person showing this and that. instead to be a team show a thing.

AND... then there are way too many doing this for some kind of money.

well I have this dream of a 060 card. thing is it is hard to find people that knows how atleast parts can be made that want to do it and also have the time..
(and want to do it with the general idea of all being some kind of open)



Anyway. . I guess that EGO is the biggest point.. actually.. even if noone will confess it.

There is a bit of that for sure. I feel that need less now that I have some things already done

I really don't understand why you don't want to synchronize with 6 people/teams around the world using skype and agreeing on a cut down degraded version of a common A500 clone after 27 4-hour tele-meetings? ... in your spare time ... ?

I'm confused. Come on, it'll be fun.

(oh that would require skype.. ughnnn that would mean me out. :) )

Yeah, only agreeing what method of communication to use could take too much time/energy. :)

This sounds exactly like my day job.

It looks like OP's points #4 and #6 are also valid for a coder...

@Locutus at least you get a salary for it :) I've done this for a while (well, not around the world, but france only), then switched jobs before I kill myself.

Last year I convinced some of my managers to develop/reuse/connect/whatever a 68040 emulator for some old software we don't have the source for (only our co-contractor has it). And it worked :). And the co-contractor is okay with that. That was a dream job for a while.

Anyways, more people on the same project isn't necessarily a good thing.

They don't collaborate because the Amiga scene has always been full of tight assed dickheads unwilling to open source their hardware/software.

Refusal to collaborate to team projects isn't the same thing as open sourcing, which is taking the risk of seeing the project being defaced by a$$holes not fully understanding it...

Also what I like about Steve's approach is that it doesn't put pressure on people.

People like me, 8-bit Dreams and supaduper have replicated hundreds of copies of Steve's hardware in our free time for those who can't or won't do it themselves...

When building TF530s stopped being fun for me due to rather long support requests, I stopped building them.

It also led other people like EzdineG to create the A1000 adapter for the Tf530... lots of good came out of this. Keep it fun and it'll keep coming...

After 18 months spent on mcu software for my own hardware design, then sending prototypes off to others to do the PCB CAD,
I can already see that it would have been easier to learn the PCB CAD myself.
Lesson learned is exactly not to involve anyone else.

just fyi you can say the same thing about the community
crowdfunding isnt new many could have got together over these years and sourced enough money to build or code or whatever everyone could agree on
even decap and synthesize 68060 etc etc
list goes on

I don't understand half on the posts on these hardware development threads but I do enjoy reading them nevertheless. Eventually I might even learn something :)

Collective Consciousness will be always above individual ideas.

+1

I was just looking into the Cyclone 20 project, sometimes things that start out open source "Released under Gnu Public License" magically turns "closed source" as well.