OSHGroup 025: Upverter – Great Electronic Design Collaboration Tool for Open Source Hardware

If you could easily see how others are designing their hardware, the parts they are using, and even the process they take to go about creating it – would that not open a plethora of useful knowledge to your finger tips?

Upverter achieves this by creating a collaborative electronic hardware design environment – built to be used and shared with a community of electrical engineers.

So lets say you are thinking about working on an Arduino spin-off that adds teleportation capabilities – why start from scratch?  You could upload the eagle files from the Arduino website to the Upverter cloud and start from there.

Or better yet, you could fork a project from someone who is already working on an Arduino spin-off in the Upverter cloud.  Yes, I mean fork as in GitHub like forking.  Someone has a design and you basically copy it for yourself and can allow any others to collaborate with you – like every one in the known universe for example.  Or you could limit it to a small team – what ever you want.

As long as you keep the file open for sharing then the cost to you is free.  That is, all the open source hardware on Upverter is freely hosted.

The collaboration is great, but only a quarter or the benefit.  Upverter also offer simulation, product life cycle management and manufacturing options that run the gambit of supporting one-off prototypes to 100,000+ boards.

Listen to this interesting interview with Zak Homuth, one of the founders and the CEO of Upverter to hear about the company and most importantly learn how you can start designing something awesome.

P.S.  Upverter is simple to use – far less learning curve than getting started with git.  Upverter is also completely web-based – no need to download any software.  I also forgot to mention all the files created can be exported to several supported formats.