Why You Should Document Your Open Source Hardware Project

It’s just few months that I’m strongly involved in the open source hardware movement and, despite I still not have a clear idea of how this community is composed.

I’ve got some impressions, especially by talking with lots of fabbers and makers, one of them is, luckily, my brother in law that built a CNC milling machine basically from scratch in his garage. I often enjoy talking with them, trying to know what are their plans, interest and attitude towards the community.

First, the oshw community is really vertical, with people focused on their own projects, industry or interest: they often want to build and stop talking. Especially when you start, you only want to build the thing and this often ends up in fairly unplanned activities that make building stuff a fascinating though challenging experience where you learn a lot.