Insructables' open source mission announced at Maker Faire

This from Lifehacker:

"Of all the presentations I checked out at the Maker Faire, I found none more promising than the presentation by Instructables co-founder Eric Wilhelm, who described Instructables as working towards the goal of open source hardware. By lowering the threshold of documentation (his words), Instructables hopes in turn to lower the threshold for participating and MAKE-ing. Sounds like a nice world to me, especially as someone who’s never found a particularly easy jumping-off point for getting down and dirty with hardware DIY."

Those instructable guys get around. Man I wish I could be at Maker Faire right now...

More DIY windpower

Wind generators must be a popular subject for open sourcing. Gotwind.org has a range of info and is running a competition:

"We are looking for everyone to use their skill and ingenuity to design a DIY wind generator for under £100 ($175)

You are required to design, but not necessarily build a workable wind generator that produces a good useable amount of electricity.

You can use the projects within this site as a basis for new designs. "

Micro energy generation

In a post that touches on both sustainability and open source, my flatmate and fellow blogger Gareth has chanced upon some great instructions for building a wind trubine and hydroelectric generator

Treehugger launches first product

As threatened, Treehugger has launched their first product, the 'Stuffbump' - a storage solution. This will surely do fantastically given Treehugger's enormous reader base - a new kind of marketing where you build up your fanbase firstthrough blogging, then hit them with a product? A very specific but perhaps relatively niche form of marketing. Anyway, the product looks pretty good, sound in materials and production labour (sewn felt and card, produced in prisons, all local in Spain).

Perfect T-shirt: Voting open now

The Perfect T-shirt has moved into a new stage of development. All are invited to vote in their concept evaluation of 4 different socially and environmentally responsible t-shirt production models.

Wiring: open source hardware for open source software

"Wiring is a programming environment and electronics i/o board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design and tangible media aspects."

More intelligbily, it is the sister open project of Processing, the open source programming lanuguage for artists and designers. It makes sense that there should be an open source I/O (input/output, ie. to connect peripheral devices to your Processing program) device, and here it is.