Innovation
Qi Hardware makes innovative projects. Here are a few highlights.
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Copyleft Hardware
- copyleft hw = hardware built only with freely available knowledge.
- the first computer built out of Wikipedia
What makes copyleft hardware superior?
Well you know the long laundry list, question is what sticks
1. no vendor lock-in 2. you can max out software upgradability, drive the actual physical bits to their maximum lifetime 3. dramatically lowers the amount of capital/people needed to improve upon the piece of hw, distributing the innovation burden on more shoulders 4. foundation for software continuity, i.e. you can make investments into or on top of software, and not be worried that your foundation is gone one day 5. will be cheaper than proprietary hardware once the amount of reusable copyleft hw reaches a critical point that makes investing to replace it prohibitively expensive at that point (#5), it should really take off btw. but I think it's quite a way out, especially because proprietary hw can be subsidized with proprietary content or ads, better than copyleft hw
Ben WPAN, akak SLoWPAN
First Open Processor
Milkymist1 is the first open source system-on-a-chip. The software that runs on our FPGA is completely GPL'd.
Hardware is Much Cheaper than Equal System
As pure hardware, one innovation is that it is cheaper than other systems that can do the same thing especially if you want to control DMX, MIDI as well
