Open-source Hardware (OSH) Registry

Robert L. Read, Christina Cole, Victoria Jaqua

Andrew Lamb, Aditya Choksi

 

https://pubinv.github.io/osh-registry/

This project formed due to the rapid development of various designs during the pandemic that were at risk of being lost or with minimal/no access to the general public.

This team worked to develop a registry to tie together disparate open-source hardware libraries. They created the OSH Registry after observing the many rapidly developed designs meant to address the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, and the lack of public access or consolidation of these designs, intellectual property, general design info, and publicly available resources.

These inventors came together to develop a registry to collect and publicly record various open-source hardware designs and corresponding libraries.

“The Idea!”

This repo is modeled after the Arduino Library Registry and the way it works. The idea is to allow new open-source hardware projects to register here by making a pull request against a simple flat file that adds a new project. In this way, the public is encouraged to add new projects.

However, the Arduino community is mature and has a standardized and accepted libary.json file format. No consensus has yet formed in the open source hardware community, although we advocate the Open Know-How (OKH) standard.

We are seeking a registry that can take advantage of the OKH, but does not rely on it, or even depend on git as a hosting mechanism.

Q4: As of October 10, 2024, we added a face shield project from Open Source Medical Supplies to the registry.

Published in IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference: https://ieeeghtc.org/