Matthias J Mair

There are a bunch of projects that try to list all the tools out there to create open hardware, PCBs with open source tools, open electronics, open FPGAs etc. but I always found the format of just a link a bit limiting.

Opulo's Stephen Hawes made a website in the past that listed tools, but that project shifted focus to be more business focused "shipping hardware" and is still pretty empty. Which is fair enough, the original project does not seem to have gotten much traction and marketing to Open Hardware enthusiasts is not going to keep a larger company afloat.

So I am throwing my hat in the ring and creating a new project to list all the open source tools for open source hardware. Shocking, I know. I am calling it Open Source Tools for Open Source Hardware.¹
If it fails, at least there will be data in a repo.

Screengrabs

Goals

I want to have a (somewhat) rich dataset that happens to fill a website and the same dataset could be used for other projects as well. It should be presented in an accessible, friendly and easy to navigate way.

What I am missing in past projects like the various awesome lists or Open Toolchain Foundations List is the relation between tools, file formats and to processes. This might be because of my occupation², that has me spending a bunch of time in Software / Application Repositories, so a 1d list of names does not cut it anymore for me.

I would like to make this graph of knowledge available for others to use so it is CC-BY-SA licensed and gets published on GitHub. The code is messy; I still aim to publish that in April too.

Tech stack

The website is build with vite + react + mantine (my default stack) and the data is served to it as a static json file. There is a json-schema that validates the data.
For visualisations, I am playing around with d3 and nivo.

Future plans

I want to add a bunch more visualisations / search tools and figure out a way to have a better mechanism for repeat visitors to get notified about updates in a privacy-friendly way.

Currently, I am also in search for a designer / webdev that wants to help make this more accessible and fully static / SSG. I have reached out to a few people on my end but if you are interested, feel free to reach out.