hckrnws

Looks good, but it'll probably take a while until it's anywhere close to the coverage of existing repositories:

https://templates.blakadder.com/ has almost 3,000 devices flashable onto Tasmota firmware.

For older Tuya devices there's https://github.com/tuya-cloudcutter/tuya-cloudcutter

OpenBeken https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App covers 800 of the newer generation Tuya devices.

And there's a large community adapting ESP32 devices onto https://esphome.io/

Oh, esphome is more than only esp32 these days. For one it always worked on the pre-esp32 ESPs. But yeah, RPI2040, nrf52 and a couple of other platforms work too.

Yup, it will take a bit of time until we index as many devices as possible. Also, we need to invest a bit more to make the AI search faster and much better. (If anyone has any ideas, we're open to feedback.)

Also, I'm curious — how do you think we can make the device pages even better? My personal problem is that I want to find devices for a specific use case, and the issue is that it's pretty hard to extract real-life use cases for all the scraped devices. We will need a way to extract these insights from the internet.

Wow, the UX kind of sucks. I just wanted to browse the devices - no way to do that, only option is an 'ai' search. Ok, I type in "Show All Devices" and it canoodles for about 30 seconds (great use of compute resources) only to apparently come up with the phrase "Browse all devices available in the directory without specific project-based filters." that it then seems to feed into the actual search tool... which then shows no results.

Two thoughts - (1) is your device list some state secret that you have to hide behind a search functionality? Because it would be nice to be able to browse through it without needing to engage in some sort of 'search'. (2) can you provide another option besides an ai search that is so intelligent that it has superseded the ability to do wildcard searches?

Edit: same feedback, but for the projects section as well.

- by default, we are displaying all the devices so you can just scroll through the list - if you want to get all the devices for a specific use-case, you can setup filters

- no, the search list is not secret.. you can even convert any page to markdown https://openhardware.directory/devices/md - you just have to add /md to any page

- also, you can browse it with llms.txt (https://openhardware.directory/llms.txt)

I'm open to new ideas on how to improve the search experience

There's a paginated list on the front page for me. Maybe already fixed?

yup :) thx for the feedback

Sorry not sorry - ai;dr;

Based on the title, I like the idea. It would be cool if manufacturers are more deliverable with their releases of firmware and developer tools. Like... if you're selling refurbished versions of a product, it makes sense that it's internals and firmware are open source.

Not commenting on the content itself (others have done it better) but anybody getting tired of seeing the same vibe coded websites over and over again?

It really is boring and lifeless. Most of those vibe coded sites have senseless boilerplate UI like the "send feedback" link that opens "beautiful" UIs that are completely without function.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between the flashiness of a website and the quality of it's content.

I actually didn't notice since there weren't gradients.

On one side what you are saying it's true but on the other side it rings like "it was better when it was worse" which I always despised in the past. It's hard to accept when it's your own craft that is being automated but we must move on. Otherwise we'll be like the mechnical clockmakers complaining about Casio watches.

No, this is absolutely just worse. The past wasn't all glory. There always were countless bad design patterns. But this is just bad. It's just the continuation of degenerative design principles that oppose information, functionality and control.

yup, i totally agree. i was focusing on the functionalities first, later we can do a redesign to not feel like ai slop

Feels weird to advertise a microcontroller dev board this way. But the other stuff is cool

Yeah, it's worse, half of the devices on that list are peripherals that cannot be flashed with any firmware.

yeah, it's true, but the idea was to also have some useful peripherals indexed, so when users are searching for a use case, they'd also have these plug-and-play peripherals in the search results.

but i'm open to feedback so we can make a better experience for all of you ;)

The link was posted by project's author so probably should have been Show HN.

Feels more like AI slop list of "a bunch of hardware that you can buy from hobbyist electronic stores" which has no idea what it wants to be, shiny on surface but deeper you look less sense it makes. Not surprised, the company who made it (likely single person) describes itself as "We're crafting interesting tools to speed up software development using Artificial Intelligence."

Good chunk of that stuff is not open hardware by any definition -> neither the hardware design being open nor the firmware not even community written firmware for proprietary hardware.

If you ignore the poor description of the site is the parametric search at least good? The values in parameter dropdowns seem to be filled based on currently displayed items, that might be fine for narrowing down once you already made a search but for initial search it means you get random subset of available values. The fact that whole thing is non-categorized, random mix of mismatched type of hardware doesn't make the parametric search better. Good parametric search needs well curated and structured database of descriptions made by people who understand corresponding product category, otherwise it's garbage in garbage out.

Having to wait half a minute while AI is reticulating splines even when you used quite specific keywords isn't a good search experience either.

So if it's not a good list of open hardware, not a good list of hardware you can flash open firmware, not a good search for electronic components what is it good for? Only value I see is as a fuzzy set of links and ~~tags~~ for exploring a subset of related hardware topics.

Edit: not tags those are broken. #tags return error, other tags(uses cases) and other other tags(compatible firmware) in many cases returns only 1-2 results which doesn't even include the item where you clicked on tag even though there are a lot more items using it.

Show HN and it's AI sludge vibecoded into a website like every other one of these boilerplate websites ends up being.

Agreed, alarm bells started ringing with the OnePlus phone that is the very opposite of open hardware...

we are scraping the products using Claude Opus and we also saw some problems.. we will have to review everythign manually and improve (not an easy job.. but if it's useufl for people, we will do it -- i did not expected so much demand for it)

AI slop. Most of the things on this list are not open hardware, and some of the items are completely proprietary. For example, the SLAMTEC RPLiDAR A1 [1]. This part doesn't even have user-upgradeable firmware.

[1] https://openhardware.directory/devices/slamtec-rplidar-a1

Please add the Sensor Watch to the list. It's an amazing project which created an open source replacement PCB and and even a custom LCD for the legendary Casio F-91W. Fully customizable open source firmware. It's got a temperature sensor which makes it a world class temperature compensated quartz watch.

I've contributed some work to it. Improved the pulsometer so it could also be used as an asthmometer which I really needed. Also improved the TOTP auth apps a bit. I was even one of the maintainers for a while.

It's an awesome project to hack on. Lots of nice people in the community. Highly recommended.

I'm looking for:

- a watch face to show the next seasons

- a watch face to upload/download data (using the photoresistor diode to receive, and the led and/or chirp-fx to send)

- how can I increase storage? I can't upload the astronomy face!

Well I fell down an RGB keyboard rabbit hole there. At first I thought I wouldn't find something compelling in this list but it only took me to the second scroll to get drawn in. The end result was a customizable keyboard from Canada.

Can I give it a link to my weird (but open) hardware?

How many of these are something that a normal consumer would buy, e.g. not a dev board that you can obviously flash your own code onto? I was sort of hoping for a list of things like "spotify car thing", "facebook portal" (I know neither of those are flashable yet, they've just been on my mind) and them maybe a list of projects for them or a link to a wiki page or something

All of your sensors are lies

There are another ~3k devices on the OpenWRT table of hardware that would fall into this category: https://toh.openwrt.org/

This is "Open Hardware" which usually means open PCB or chip schematics, so people can modify or extend the board. OpenWRT is "Open Software that runs on closed hardware".

After checking a couple, Kind of seems like a lot of boards on this "open hardware" list might not actually be open hardware?

Here's an example of what open hardware is supposed to be: https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/tree/master/h...

by open, we mean that you can flash your own firmware. - but yes, we will need to check manualy each device/board or improve the Claude Opus prompt to make sure that it's doing a very good research when extracting these devices

Yeah, that OnePlus phone is defo the very opposite of open hardware...

If one's looking for an actual open hardware smartphone: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/l5-schematic

The name is closely deceptive to sound like open-source hardware

Yes, we need to better explain our name. I was creating this website for myself because I'm a developer and I want to change the firmware on existing boards, as I don't have that much experience with electronic circuits and so on.

Also, prices for everything is 1.5 - 2.5X.

I wonder what (api?) creators are using to programmatically calculate this pricing.

we were scraping the prices using claude code and pushed them with an mcp to the directory

I strongly feel that each board should display pricing in two ways 1. Market price. buy now price. 2. Get it used (used market price).

I wonder how this compares to the alternatives mentioned in the thread.

very poorly

What a horrible implementation of AI.

yup, we have to work on improving the search, this is just the MVP :)

more often than not, you could just buy the same new CPU on the open market and swap it in. It bypasses secure boot, etc.

> more than 135

136?

now, we've indexed 463 :) but we will index more and more boards and make the platform as good as we can

Having used only various ESP and RPi types, I found the article informative and the comments moreso. AI slop or not, a list is a good place to start.

What about penalty points for AI slop ?

[dead]