A ton of great open hardware is always on Crowd Supply, we’ve covered it here on the Adafruit blog, and for open hardware month, we reached out to ask what open hardware means to Crowd Supply.

First up – what is Crowd Supply? From the about page –

Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.

We help creators launch with the funding and support they need to deliver thoughtfully crafted products to delighted backers.

Not all hardware is created equal.

We love projects that are:

Original
A Crowd Supply project should add something new and exciting to the world. Improvements on existing projects are fine, knock-offs are not.

Useful
A Crowd Supply project should address a real need. Just because it’s possible, doesn’t mean it should be done – no one needs more landfill.

Respectful
A Crowd Supply project should honor user rights: curiosity, independence, association, longevity, transfer, discourse, privacy, and security.

What does success look like?
Success at Crowd Supply means delivering products to backers. In practice, this means taking a hands-on approach to helping creators, like shipping packages out of our own warehouse. The results speak for themselves:

100% of funded projects have delivered to backers (or are on track to do so).

Delivery is paramount, but we also care a lot about what gets delivered, which is why we have a Proclamation of User Rights to guide us.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the first instances that the Wayback machine saved from April 2013.

What does open hardware mean to Crowd Supply? Josh, Co-founder & President writes –

While Crowd Supply isn’t the only company to realize that open source hardware makes good business sense, we are uniquely positioned to leverage the natural affinity between open source hardware and crowdfunding.

Open source hardware is central to Crowd Supply’s mission, which is basically about bringing to life products that don’t annoy, abuse, or trick their users. Whereas a lot of products on the market today have an adversarial relationship with users, open source hardware empowers users to learn and do new things. It fights for the user. This is very motivating for everyone who works at Crowd Supply!

From the perspective of Crowd Supply’s business model, open source hardware helps our bottom line by building confidence among technically savvy early adopters that the product in question can be molded to their actual needs, regardless of the original intentions of the product creator or whether the product creator continues as a business. In nearly all cases, the value of a product is not the intellectual property, which is expensive to protect, but in the supply chain and community that
has grown around the product.

Related:

• Crowd Supply Blog.
• Crowd Supply on Twitter @crowd_supply.
• Crowd Supply on Facebook.
• Crowd Supply on Instagram @crowdsupply.
• Crowd Supply on YouTube.
• Crowd Supply on Adafruit blog and video.

Lastly, how did we miss this? Mouser acquired Crowd Supply LAST YEAR.

Open source hardware month @ Adafruit:

• What does Open Source Hardware mean to Tindie? – Day 29, 10/29/2019.
• Talking with Andrew “bunnie” Huang – Day 28, 10/28/2019.
• DIY Drones, which launched the largest open UAV communities – Day 27, 10/27/2019.
• OLIMEX open-source hardware made in Bulgaria – Day 26, 10/26/2019.
• Electronic Cats – Open hardware made in México – Day 25, 10/25/2019.
• 10 years ago we tried to make an open source flash light to make us puke … – Day 24, 10/24/2019.
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Day 23, 10/23/2019.
• MicroPython, bringing Python to hardware for everyone – Day 22, 10/22/2019.
• Open Hardware Month Hack Chat at Hackaday.io – Day 21, 10/21/2019.
• Parallax Open-source hardware – Day 20, 10/20/2019.
• Growing Your Open Business – A Digital Meetup for Open Hardware Month – Day 19, 10/19/2019.
• Open-source hardware at the Museum of Modern Art, posted on 10/19/2019 – Day 18, 10/18/2019.
• Open Hardware Licenses CC BY-SA, CERN, TAPR … – Day 17, 10/17/2019.
• Open Source Hardware Month at SparkFun – Day 16, 10/16/2019.
• How many Open-Source Prusa 3D printers are there? Posted on 10/19/2019 – Day 15, 10/15/2019.
• The RepRap Project Self-Replicating Open-Source 3D Printing – Day 14, 10/13/2019.
• The first 2 orders at Adafruit… now up to 2,161,166 orders – Day 13, 10/13/2019.
• Photos of the first Arduino (2005) – Day 12, 10/12 2019.
• In 2010 there were 13 Open Source Hardware companies that were making $1 million or more… – Day 11, 10/11/2019
• Opening Hardware 2010 at Eyebeam in NYC – Day 10, 10/10/2019.
• The Open Source Gift Guide, the early years – Day 9, 10/9/2019 (posted it on 10/10/2019, whoops)
• Before the iPhone, before the Raspberry Pi, before Amazon Echo Show, there was Chumby – Day 8, 10/8/2019.
• Mitch Altman Open-source hardware pioneer – Day 7, 10/7/2019.
• The Open Source logo(s) – Day 6, 10/6/2019.
• Open Source Hardware events all month long, EVENTS! – Day 5, 10/5/2019.
• Open Source Hardware Certifications and more! – Day 4, 10/4/2019.
• Teuthis Open Source MP3 Player 2001 – Daisy by Raphael Abrams – Day 3, 10/3/2019.
• What is the Open-Source Hardware Definition? – Day 2, 10/2/2019.
• Open hardware summit – Limor “Ladyada” Fried keynote 2010 – Day 1, 10/1/2019.

October is open-source hardware month! Every single day in October we’ll be posting up some open-source stories from the last decade (and more!) about open-source hardware, open-source software, and beyond!

Have an open-source hardware (or software) success story? A person, company, or project to celebrate? An open-source challenge? Post up here in the comments or email [email protected], we’ll be looking for, and using the tag #OHM2019 online as well! Check out all the events going on here!