Bachelor Thesis on OSH Documentation

Basics

Thesis by O. Dinkela at Helmut Schmidt University

Abstract

Due to the lack of guidelines and standards in the field of documentation of open source hardware – which is significant for the reproducibility of the projects – a method for the creation of open source hardware documentation is developed within the scope of this work. The historical development of open source hardware (OSH) is described for this purpose in order to better place the relevance of the topic in the overall context. In addition, two projects are presented to illustrate the potential of open source hardware. Various existing methods have been used to develop the method for creating open source hardware documentation. For example, the method divide and conquer. In addition, existing standards of similar areas have been checked for their applicability in the open source hard- ware area and transferred. The development has resulted a split of the documentation into three main areas. The result is a user manual, files and licenses that are described and explained individually in the method. From the analysis of existing OSH projects and their documentation, the idea of an Explanation file was developed, which describes the individual files and the structure of the folders. In addition, there are hints for sharing, labeling, and certifying to help you publish an OSH project. For the visualization of all contents and the structural layout of the method, an additional schematic diagram has been developed, which is useful for an overview and as a guideline for the creation of an OSH documentation.