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Eagle PCB files for OpenScope MZ


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Hi Kristoff, have you considered releasing the Eagle files to the community as well? Possibly there are restrictions with Eagle IP that prevents you from doing that?

I am planning on doing some changes/improvements to OpenScope MZ in the near future, and in the true spirit of open source I am going to contribute these back to the community.

I am planning on using KiCad, however, if your Eagle files were open source I could consider extending on them instead.

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Hey Joor and Bob,

At the end of the day we want OpenScope MZ to be a great tool for teaching and learning.  We felt that posting the schematics, communication protocol, firmware source code and app software source code provided the vast majority of the benefit of being open to our customers.  Posting gerbers or design files seemed like it would not be very useful to most OpenScope MZ users and slightly increases the risk of straight up clones that add no value on top of the original design.

We have the 'what is open source' discussion regularly at Digilent and I welcome any feedback you all have on this topic. 

-Kristoff

 

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Hi Kristoff, I appreciate all the resources that you have already contributed to the community.

One disadvantage with not sharing the design files could be that you may loose creative control of OpenScope in the case that someone else made a hard fork of it (reimplemented the design files in e.g. KiCad) and made that fork more open source than yours.

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Hey Bob,

We (Digilent) have invested a lot of time and money into OpenScope MZ and WaveForms live.  A company that creates and sells a clone hurts our ability to recoup the cost we've invested.  Most companies and consumers understand that this is not the spirit of open source, but it's not always obvious when you're purchasing a clone and a lower price appeals to almost everyone.  We want to make sure we can recoup our investment and continue to develop open source hardware and software.

-Kristoff

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  • 4 months later...

Hey Kristoff,

I'm an electrical engineer and i enjoy engineering PCBs as a hobby on the weekend.  Does Digilent have a program where design files could be released to engineers (like me) who have interests in making changes without interests in manufacturing?  Maybe a "close source" as opposed to "closed source" approach?  Such a program might even have a rewards system.  Where the contributing engineers could get free Digilent stuff (i love toys) in exchange for accepted (not necessarily adopted) design changes.

Nolan

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  • 2 years later...

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