Open source promotes the openness and accessibility of all useful information for studying, modifying, or replicating a piece of software or hardware. As for industry, the reuse of existing designs is, therefore, a fundamental requirement for open source. This project is motivated by the very diverse and contrasted documentation practices observed in web-based open-source hardware projects. Indeed, the lack of standardized open-source hardware documentation guidelines makes the reuse of the solutions very problematic. We are closely working with the promoters of the DIN SPEC 3105 standard to develop useful documentation guidelines and templates.
This work is the result of the OPENNEXT project funded by the European Union and you can find the last deliverable describing the documentation process HERE.
This guideline delivers a template standing as minimum viable documentation for open source hardware. By cloning this repository, you will be able to fill in the template provided in the folder entitled "Documentation". So, you can follow this guideline in the process of developing your project.
To better understand guidelines development for documentation of OSH design reuse, this video presents all of the structure of guidelines documentation.
The documentation structure corresponds to the classical development activities any project logically fulfills. This structure aims to fulfill the requirements for openness and enables the freedom of OSH as stated by the OSHWA association.
As defined by the Open Source Hardware Association, open source hardware is hardware whose design is made available in a way assuring anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the product. One major benefit of open source is to provide designers with the ability to freely reuse solutions in open collaboration across communities.
Product life cycle phases consist:
- Idea generation
- Need analysis
- Concept development
- Product development and prototyping
- Produce/replication
- Use
- Maintenance
- Dismantle/recycle
To get started with your documentation, you can use this template
Then, to reference this guideline, you can follow the guideline and then fill the template in each section in your own Project's readme.
Moreover, you can utilize the link of the App diagram in the template and fill the information of your product in the tables or create your representations as a graph or tree.
To use the link of the App diagram in the template, you can follow these steps to create your own project's table, graph or, tree.
- At first, use the link "Edit As New" or "Edit in diagrams.net" to go to App diagram.
- Then, you can modify the text, table, tree, or graph (image below).
- After modifying, you can save the changes. To save the changes on Appdiarams, you can follow this userguide
- Finally, it is possible to export the file in different forms ( PNG, JPEG, PDF, HTML, URL,...) and import it in the readme.
- Jean-François BOUJUT {[email protected]}
- Amer EZOJI {[email protected]}
- Romain PINQUIE {[email protected]}
Shield:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The European research and innovation project OPEN!NEXT is sponsorised by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program under the grant N°.869984
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