Open hardware for mobile phones. Its pretty exciting. Just a couple weekends ago I was at the p.irateship (co-working/makerspace) in Somerville at a workshop to brainstorm putting air quality sensors on bicycles, and one of the many ideas was thinking of how cool it would be to have the sensor send the data to your phone, which would store the data and geotag it. This could easily allow for upload.

How hard is this? You could probably connect over wi-fi to the phone, but that ups costs significantly. Recently google announced the Android SDK, which is built on the open source Arduino, for any android device. Talk from Google IO.

So now you can hook up all that power thats in your smartphone to all sorts of things. Maybe I want to code up a synthesizer on my phone… now I can create my own hardware interfaces, and use the touch screen for modulation.

A side note: at barcamp NYC I was talking to Alicia of Bug Labs and the Open Hardware Summit, and she mentioned the folks at Arduino had no idea about the Arduino Android release. Arduino is open source, so it all should be allright, but now they have to handle all of the support calls. Google meant no harm, they just wanted to keep things secret for a nice suprise at IO.

Now wouldn’t it be awesome if there were open hardware platforms for all sorts of other phones, like the most popular phone in the world? Thats what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is some powerful technology in phones, there are tons of ways they can be used to make great, useful things for people all around the world.

Decentralize the innovation process- and it becomes easier for people to get what they want, through individual customization, and through providing platforms for jobs to grow upon.