I always believed that innovation exists at all levels, be it anything from product development to its marketing, documentation (yes, its true…), distribution and more. This belief was further reaffirmed by our management by quoting,

“Innovation creates success and being innovative in your business is one of the keys to being successful. Innovation is the introduction of new processes, new ways of doing things and revolutionizing how things have been accomplished previously within the resources available. Be more focused, inspired or challenged. Think and be wacky. Innovation applies to all forms of our business whether it’s product development or teaching methodology or a sales strategy.”

The above quote quickly summarised a lot of facets of innovation, including the revolutionary art of accomplishing things within the limited resources available, which I never associated with innovation earlier. This lead me to further introspection. Would you consider the launch of a satellite in space by an organisation which has been inundated with capital funds an innovation? Or would you consider the Indian telecom sector to be innovative enough to have ensured that the mobile technology touches the lives of everyone, including the slum dwellers. I would also applaud the Chinese for ensuring that an iPod doesnt simply remain a millionaire’s style statement. I mean what use is technology if it doesnt touch everyone’s lives?

One such step that, we earlier last year took, in this direction was making an affordable robotic arm (iARM) available to Educational institutes and universities in India such that a dozen of them could be bought at the price of a single (so-called industrial) robotic arm prevalant in these institutes till now. Our goal was to ensure that the iARM wont become another out-of-student’s-reach lab equipment, confined to the showcases of the labs which open up, only to welcome accreditation committees.

Pretty much in line with the above philosophy is the story behind beagleboard (http://beagleboard.org).

The Beagle Board is a low-power, low-cost Single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments designed with open source development in mind, to demonstrate the Texas Instrument’s OMAP3530 system-on-a-chip. The board was developed by a small team of TI engineers.

I was first introduced to this board while in a seminar at IISc, Bangalore by Khasim. To be frank, I considered this to be another “innovative” marketing strategy by a company to market their high end architecture in a potentially huge market segment. But then once I realised the capabilities of the board, it struck me that making this neat little sophisticated thing available for just 149$ was simply out of the world. Kudos to the team!!!

Within no time, the community had all popular operating systems including Linux, Android, Angstrom, Windows Embedded ported to the beagle. With the beagleboard, things which were earlier possible only after years of research became possible for even for under-grad engineering students, thanks to the free flow of information related to the beagleboard via the mailing list and live IRC discussion channel. Truly living by its name, beagle (which means a common breed of pet dogs) has become a must have for the techno-hacker fraternity.

So, what are the factors that really drive us while looking at commercial evaluation boards like the beagle? Lets analyse them one by one:

Open designs matter:

List any popular board which has been registering a very active user community, timely enhancements, hundreds of developers working on building up and porting applications to the board. One common feature that binds all these products, be it the Beagleboard or the CMUcam or the arty arduino, is that their designs are open and available. So, why is open-ness so attractive. More often than not, you would find that this open-ness is seldom used to replicate a board. In a countable number of cases you would find that users would customise the design and refabricate the board. I mean how many beagleboard users would want to customise and rebuild this cute little thing? When a large group of users do realise this need, its time for the board itself to undergo a revision. I believe open-ness in a design has got more to do with the mental satisfaction of the buyer. Whether you plan to build your own board post using an open source hardware is secondary, who would want to buy from an insecure source, insecure of designs being aped, insecure of facing critical peer reviews / comments on their designs, insecure of Chinese manufacturers coming up with dirt cheap alternatives. One such path breaking philosophy surrounds arduino’s business model.

The arduino team has created a company based on giving everything away. On its Web site, it posts all its trade secrets for anyone to take—all the schematics, design files, and software for the Arduino board. Download them and you can manufacture an Arduino yourself; there are no patents. You can send the plans off to a Chinese factory, mass-produce the circuit boards, and sell them yourself — pocketing the profit without paying the team a penny in royalties. They won’t sue you. Actually, they are sort of hoping you’ll do it. That’s because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and his team have spent precious billable hours making the thing, and they sell it themselves for a small profit — while allowing anyone else to do the same. They’re not alone in this experiment. In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens of hardware inventors around the world have begun to freely publish their specs. Banzi admits that the concept does sound insane. After all, Arduino assumes a lot of risk; the group spends thousands of dollars to make a batch of boards. “If you publish all your files, in one sense, you’re inviting the competition to come and kill you,” he says, shrugging. (Courtesy: http://www.wired.com).

An answer to this is, “It doesn’t matter anymore whether your product is open source. Someone in another country (did I say China??) is going to open it up and reverse-engineer it anyway.” So, how does one sustain in this volatility? How was the arduino team still able to sell over 50,000 units in two years?

“Basically, what we have is the brand,” says Tom Igoe, an associate professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, who joined Arduino in 2005. “And brand matters.” Last year, Arduino noticed that copycat versions of its board made in China and Taiwan were being sold online. Yet sales through the main Arduino store were still increasing dramatically. Why? Partly because many chinese knockoffs were poor quality, rife with soldering errors and flimsy pin connections. The competition created a larger market but also ensured that the original makers stayed a generation ahead of the cheap imitations. Merely having the specs for a product doesn’t mean a copycat will make a quality item. That takes skill, and the Arduino team understood its device better than just about anyone else. “So the copycats can actually turn out to be good for our business,” Igoe says. (Courtesy: http://www.wired.com).

Looks matter:

Steve Jobs once said, “I dont need engineers. I need artists.” Whats a product thats low on looks, usability and visual appeal? Art has often been an ignored entity while designing evaluation boards. The other day while I was working with the beagleboard at home, its aesthetics suddenly attracted my siblings (non-tech people), who started enquiring what this new gizmo was. Although its unspoken of, I strongly believe that sophisticated looks and smart finishing do contribute to mass appeal even for a product meant for a technical audience. After all, if the board is gonna be your companion, you would rather keep scary looking things away.

Clarity on user segment/intended applications matter:

Very often than not, I have also noticed people stuffing development boards with anything and everything since its not too clear what the hardware is meant to do and what sort of audience does it cater to. This is a direct contributor the fact that most companies are unable to come-up with cost effective hardware.

Support matters:

Come what may, a bunch of highly paid talented intellectuals hired by a firm to provide support for products can rarely compete an exponentially increasing highly passionate user community sharing information and ideas, day and night on forums, IRCs and mailing lists.

Post analysis of all these factors, we at ThinkLABS still firmly believe that inspite of the presence of hardware of the likes of arduino, an apt platform for hobbyists worldwide with an easy to use expressible programming language and aesthetic looks to find place in any art exhibition or the very powerful, ultra-compact beagleboard, which is an ideal platform to have for building Embedded Linux applications, there is still a gap to be filled in, that would permit beginners to graduate to complex architectures and operating systems and provide a lower entry barrier than the ever powerful platforms like the beagleboard or OpenMoko.

With these goals in mind, I would like to introduce you to our latest offering, an open source development platform called uNiBoard V1.1 (we call it you and I board) for Embedded and Real Time Systems Programming. Based on the very popular AVR architecture, powered by ATmega128 running uC/OS-II, the board features application notes on game development using the hyperterminal driver (VT102) on the Real time kernel. Other applications like the open Embedded File System Library (EFSL) and uIP (an open source TCP/IP stack by Adam Dunkels) have also been ported to the board.

The board along with its content-rich user manual is a perfect companion to have for hobbyists/aspirants seeking a kick-start in Embedded software design, since it can accommodate preliminary applications like port control, motor control or sensor data processing built on Embedded C to complex real time applications built on RTOS like DAS (Data Acquisition Systems), embedded web-server, FAT FS for embedded systems and more. RT Kernels with small footprint (uC/OS-II, FreeRTOS, nut OS) can be ported on the board to gain hands-on experience of Real time application design.

We hereby invite you all to utilize this initiative to enlighten yourself, and at the same time contribute and enhance the technical capabilities of the board. Feel free to use our forums (http://thinklabs.in/forums/) or send a mail to info@thinklabs.in for any enquiries or doubts related to the uNiBoard. To order a uNiBoard, send us an email on roboshop@thinklabs.in. Keep visiting this section (http://code.google.com/p/uniboard/ ) to get more updates on activities that people have done using the uNiBoard. In case you make any interesting projects on the uNiBoard or any extensions for uNiBoard, do mail us so that we can share it with the community.

License to share, remix and reuse matters:

We plan to adhere to the Creative Commons license (like the arduino), which has the philosophy of “Share, Remix, Reuse – Legally”. It means that anyone and everyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don’t need to pay a license fee to the ThinkLABS team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the board will be equally free and open.

Finally, amidst all this, once you become the owner of the uNiBoard, dont forget the crux of this article. As Mr. Narayan Murthy would put it, “Innovate or die”.