3 Review(s)

New product development using open source hardware (OSH) is becoming very popular and is expected to increase exponentially due to many reasons. However, developers are mostly adapting the traditional product development and then adjusting it based on their practical experience on the job. Traditional product development process does not fit well for OSH approach and hence an appropriate process needs to be established, that makes product development with OSH approach easy, effective and fun experience. The author has done extensive research on the nature of OSH, informal practices followed by current OSH developers, experiences shared in forums and blogs, and then used his own experience in process improvements, innovation, new idea generation, project management etc. to come up with a structured process for product development using open source hardware approach. One of the reasons for recent increase in usage of OSH approach is due to OSH component developers’ extra effort in making OSH simple, easy and fun experience. In line with this trend the author has tried to keep the process simple, easy to follow and brief. The author also wants to encourage more and more people to take up product development using OSH approach, and hence has included interesting topics like basic concepts of OSH and why it is required, comparison to traditional product development process, interesting case study etc.