Bike Pixel with Open Hardware certification
09/28/2019Bike Pixel is now officially a project certified by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). The mission of this non-profit organization is to foster the creation of open source and free hardware. To this end, it annually organizes different events such as the Open Hardware Summit or the Open Hardware Month. Additionally, they issues its own Open Hardware certificate and maintains an archive with all certified projects.
The certification offered by OSHWA ensures that a given project publishes all its source files using open licenses. That guarantees that all the elements that compose a design can be used freely to recreate and modify the project.
Among the developments that have been certified so far are projects such as the Arduino Pro Mini (US000007) or the 3D printer together with other elements of the LulzBot project (US000153). And now also Bike Pixels (PL000002) which is the second project certified in Poland together with the Nettigo Air Monitor (PL000001).
Certification process
The whole certification process has taken about 2 weeks and the truth is that it hasn’t been complicated at all. In my case it was only necessary to pick and update used licenses. OSHWA requires a license for each part of the project. To receive the certification you have to select different licenses for the code, the hardware and documentation. In our case I chose GPLv3 for the code, CERN for the hardware and CC BY-SA for the documentation and the images.
Additionally, it is very important to have published all the elements that allow to build from zero the project. All the schemes, draws and necessary instructions must be online so that anyone can build their own Bike Pixel. The project was conceived as an open development from the beginning. Since then I have been uploading all the materials to our GitHub repository as well as the documentation needed to build the first prototype. Hence this requisite to get the certification was already fulfilled.
