This guest blog was written by Chris Palmer, Co-Founder of Awesome Shield. 

At Awesome Shield, our mission is to teach kids about technology, and empower them to build it themselves. This is why we began teaching kids to code for Arduino. By learning through videos and writing simple lines of code, they personally experience hardware in a new way.

Our goal is to make it easy and fun for kids to get started with Arduino, but still help them become more fluent in the platform. We start them off with Awesome Shield's pre-assembled hardware so they can focus on writing code. Along the way, we explain the details of how the hardware works as they create projects.

This approach fits perfectly with making our hardware open source. As a result, our community can not only invent projects but also explore, critique, fork, and customize the hardware. Our designs are open to the community, but we wanted to do more than that because having open source designs is just one step towards open hardware. To learn more about our approach, feel free to check out our Kickstarter campaign.

Beyond Open Source

For hardware to be truly open, someone needs to be able to create a single board themselves, affordably, and using simple tools.

This means having a simple PCB that’s easy to manufacture and easy to understand. It means being able to buy all the components in very low quantities and assemble them with simple and inexpensive hand tools.

Awesome Shield’s Open Hardware Requirements:

1. Components must be easy for beginners to solder using a low-end soldering iron. This means the smallest acceptable SMT size is 1206.

2. Components must be available in very low quantities (1-5) at affordable prices.

3. Components must function in simple circuits.

We also need the hardware to be manufacturable at scale, so that awesome learning is accessible to people who don’t want to build the hardware themselves – at least not yet.

Better Components with Octopart

Sourcing components is tough when balancing requirements for community accessible hardware against manufacturing. Typically, production means prioritizing scale and affordability over accessibility.

Octopart streamlined the entire process for us and made us big fans. It saved us countless hours during our Bill of Materials selection. It let us easily identify available parts at affordable prices, that are available from many different manufacturers around the world in both large and small quantities. Plus, when we needed to find an alternative part to one that didn't meet our criteria, we could easily evaluate many options based on price, availability and specs until we found the right one.

We believe that with the right approach, community accessible hardware can have an amazing impact. Awesome Shield's learning kit could only happen with fantastic tools and resources like Octopart.