A few days ago we received an official confirmation that ANAVI Gardening uHAT has been certified as open source hardware by the Open Source Hardware Association with UID BG000079.
The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) is a non-profit organization that supports the open source movement and maintains an open source hardware certification registry. OSHWA Certification provides an easy and straight-forward way to quickly check if a product complies with a uniform and well-defined standard for open source hardware.
Open source hardware certification guarantees the sharing of knowledge and keeps prices fairly based on the bill of materials of the hardware’s components. ANAVI Gardening uHAT hardware design files are available under CC BY-SA 4.0, which allows you to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
In a nutshell, OSHWA certifies a project as open source based on public access to four elements:
- Hardware – functional elements of the product
- Software – code, firmware, or other software involved in the product’s functionality
- Documentation – including design files, schematics, and instructions
- Branding – brand names, product names, logos, and product design
The exact certified version of each product receives a unique UID, for example, ANAVI Gardening uHAT is with UID BG000079. The prefix is the country code. We make our open source hardware in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, so the country code is BG. The suffix is a sequential ID number. At the moment, there are 79 certified open source hardware products from Bulgaria. For a comparison, the United States is leading with the amazing 2052 certified products, followed by Germany with 116. Bulgaria comes in at the third place, primarily thanks to our awesome open source neighbors from Olimex.
As a very small company we are all proud to have contributed to the Bulgarian success in this field. Hopefully, the popularity of the open source hardware movement will continue to increase worldwide.
