In the Blackberry-keyboard-based project lineage story last week, I covered how a series of open-source projects turned into Beepy, a cool Linux PDA with a lively community. To me, it’s yet another demonstration of power that open-source holds, and more importantly, it shows how even a small pet project of yours could cause big moves in the hardware world, provided you publish it – just ask [JoeN], [WoodWorkeR] and [arturo182].
The journey didn’t end there. For all its benefits, Beepy had some flaws to take care of, some board-killing flaws, even. Its feature package also left things to be desired. The 5 V boost regulator was never intended for 4.7 V input it gets when charger is connected, and would occasionally cook itself. A charging current resistor was undersized, leading people to either bodge resistors onto their Beepy boards, or have their battery charge for 30 hours until full. A power path diode was undersized, too, and has burned out on more than a few devices.
Beepy never made it beyond v1. If I had to guess, partially because of BB Q20 keyboard sourcing troubles, but also definitely some sort of loss of interest. Which is a shame, as the plans v1.5 of the hardware were pretty exciting. In the meantime, other players decided to take up the mantle – here’s a tale of three projects.
Improved, Colorful, Closed
I like to talk about all sides of open-source hardware, good and bad. We’ll start with the bad here. Sometimes, you’ll publish a project under an open license that requires other people to share their work if it’s based on your project files. Then, someone takes your files, makes none to minimal changes, closes ..
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