Open Electronic
Active since 2010, more than 825’000 people today on our Facebook page, Open Electronics became a reference for the open source hardware hackers and makers. Open Electronics was born as a spinoff by Futura Group SrL, world leader in hobby electronics, pushing stronger on the open source products, software and policies.
In those years, we launched many projects collaborating with the worldwide community of hardware designers and makers interacting in a very open way. We manage to build a strong core of experts orbiting around our website and our Facebook community.
We’ve developed many products, like the 3Drag printer and its latest evolution, the 3Drag Choco: an amazing 3D printer using chocolate as “ink” to design and make your own engineered cakes! The Choco-3DRag won the “maker of merit” prize in 2014 at the second edition of EU Maker Faire in Rome.
Being based on the RepRap open source projects, on our website you can find all the parts and guides to make (or buy) all what you need to turn your “standard” 3d printer to the Choco-printing machine: syringe to replace the printing head, the syringe heather to keep chocolate at the right temperature during the printing, the cooler to improve the chocolate printed objects toughness and, last but not least, the dual extruder to print in two choco-colors!
You can also turn the 3Drag to a CNC milling machine and everything else your fantasy will drive the development to! We had also a drink mixing machine and an open whiskey distillery machine. Awesome!
On the blog website we have hosted many open source hardware products that you can see here. We focused for a long time on Arduino and Raspberry, being among the firsts to understand that the two boards can show their maximum potential when “put together”: that’s why we developed the RandA board. RandA stands for “Raspberry and Arduino” and it’s the most efficient solution to set an interaction between the powerful computing board with the world most famous microcontroller.
By developing the RandA board and, thanks to the strong help from community that adopted and pushed the solution to many real cases of application, we soon understood that the IoT trend was so important for the hardware open source world and at that time there wasn’t any affordable and comprehensive board on the market dedicated to the IoT needs. You could find expensive boards from Intel, maybe oversized respect to the specific needs coming from IoT real projects.
So we started developing Fishino, the “swiss army knife” of IoT: WiFI, RTC, Sd Card as a storage, Arduino compatible and now 32-bit capable. The boards has been really warmly welcomed by our community, that soon asked for many improvements and further developments. We delivered a Nano version, a Mega and other two versions you can find here.
We took in really high consideration our active community of contributors, it’s thanks to them that we found the energy and motivation to do so many things so far. To thank them and to show how much we care, this year we have made the decision to deliver a contests platform dedicated to open source hardware projects!
We’ve already launched a Wireless Power contest, by providing wireless power kits to finalists and the top three won amazing prizes, like the 200MHz oscilloscope with waveform generator: a must have for serious hw developers! Most of the projects we have received were very nice, and you can also launch your own contest leveraging on our website and community!
Open-Electronics.org is the brainchild of a world leader in hobby electronics Futura Group srl.
Open-Electronics.org is devoted to support development, hacking and playing with electronics: we share exciting open projects and create amazing products!
Open-Electronics.org is not just a container of ideas: it is also a web site lead by a team of engineers and geeks who will take part in the discussions and give support.
Our mission is to become a reference Open Source hacking site with ideas and feedback aimed to enrich the community.