‘We can help out researchers in the process of making open hardware’

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“I came to TU Delft to do a master’s degree in Integrated Product Design in 2018. When I started, I had to sign a form that my projects would belong to TU Delft, and if they were really good you would get a patent and your name would be on it. But in the past, I have worked on many open-source projects and I really enjoyed that way of working and sharing knowledge.

Open hardware is relatively new. It’s quite similar to open software which has been around a lot longer and is easier to replicate because there’s no physical hardware, just code. In that sense, open hardware is very new, but in another sense it’s very old because it used to be that all of the research that was done at universities was documented and should be replicable.

Delft Open Hardware started with me and a few other students and employees who wanted to be able to work on open-source hardware projects, but there wasn’t really any knowledge at that time. In the beginning we started having lunch together on Friday afternoons just talking about open-source projects and the things that we were working on, trying to help each other. Later this group grew bit by bit and we started to do some workshops, some small things, basically all voluntary work.  

All of this changed in 2020 when the TU Delft Open Science programme came to us and said they saw that we were doing quite well and wanted to support us. That made it a lot easier to organise workshops, to reserve rooms at TU Delft, and to have a bit of budget for projects. The year after that we took it to the next level. We proposed hiring someone for this open hardware group so that we could help out researchers in the process of making something open hardware. TU Delft said let’s make it possible and for almost a year now I have been working on this project.

We came up with the idea of the Open Hardware Academy, a 10 week programme where basically the only requirement is having a project you want to work on and that you’re interested in making open source. We wanted to make a programme that helps people understand what open hardware is, what things apply to them, what they need to document and how they go from a closed source project to something that is publicly available for others to read about, help out with, and even work on new versions of the project.

‘We also had people from outside of TU Delft participating’

We started our first academy mid-August of this year and just finished in October. In the end we had nine people complete projects and we were very happy with the participation. We had a lot of different people participating, with different skills or sizes of projects. The academy was open to anyone so we also had people from outside of TU Delft participating. It was mostly an online programme where we would send out material on Monday and have an online session on Friday to discuss it. It was interesting to see that most of the projects had some sort of connection with a more sustainable world so that’s really nice to see.

At the moment, we’re discussing the details of the next academy. We’re currently looking into having it organised at TU Delft twice a year and also making it a bit more focussed on TU Delft students, where they can actually come in every week. For now, in the coming months we want to write a guide on how to do this as a self-paced programme.

People can have an intake session with us, talk about their project, see if there’s a match and which lessons of the academy apply to them. Then they can follow these lessons, do the exercises and based on that be able to make their project open source.

The field of open hardware is growing by the year and now you see more and more developments. There are a few universities who also work on this. For example, you see this at MIT and Stanford, but I think we are one of the early adopters being able to implement a programme like this. Although we’re working on some new things, we still host a weekly lunch meeting on Fridays, mostly online, where we talk about projects. If people are interested or want to learn more, the easiest thing is to join the Telegram channel. That’s where we announce our weekly meetings.”

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Heather Montague / Freelance writer