Ch00ftech Goes Open Source!

Over the past year since I started writing this blog, I’ve had a lot of people send me emails asking for help recreating what I’ve made.  These questions range from simple help with part numbers to requests for full-on tutorials.  One reader went as far as to ask me to redesign something to make it easier for him to copy.

I’ve always been adamantly opposed to writing tutorials as I feel that they usually devolve into just telling the reader what to solder where without exercising any of his or her problem solving skills.  This is the same reason I’ve always avoided supplying source code and PCB files on my blog as I fear that someone might try to blanket copy them without learning anything in the process.

That being said, I learned a lot of what I know now by reading others’ source code and looking at their PCB designs.  For this reason, I’ve decided to supply these files for my projects (excluding only the miserable failures and the breadboard projects I never documented).

If you look at the bottom of the page for most of my past projects, you will find a link to download a zip file containing (where applicable) source code, Eagle schematic/pcb files, and any supporting software I wrote for the project.

As a warning, I wasn’t very careful about documenting my work for some of my earlier projects, so a lot of these files will have errors due to undocumented changes.  The code is also very messy and in many places uncommented.  I suspect that blanket copying these projects will not give you the desired result.  This is less-so for more recent projects, but regardless, I’m submitting them to you as a reference, not as a user guide.

If you have any specific questions about something you find in one of my files, you can ask me, but don’t be disappointed if the answer is “You’re on your own”.  These projects were never designed for release, and I simply don’t have the time to support all of them.  If I get enough requests, I might re-open the Ch00ftech forums for inter-user discussion.  I will try to document future projects better.

Please do inform me of any egregious errors though (like, if one of the zip files is missing a folder or something).  I compiled these files after a 10 hour plane ride from China, so I might have made a mistake here and there.

They are all posted here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  That means that you can use what you find for your personal projects and distribute it freely so long as you give attribution to my site (a link and short explanation of what you used will suffice), but you may not use it for any commercial ventures without my consent.

Happy building!

One thought on “Ch00ftech Goes Open Source!

  1. I really appreciate you doing this. Like you, I learn an awful lot from other peoples’ blog posts and such. I find that a lot of the time even *wrong* information on blogs (like a slightly incorrect schematic) is enough to give me a starting point to investigate, learn, and eventually realize that I was starting from an incorrect assumption.
    Thanks for sharing 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *