The Open Hardware Observatory (OHO)

Claim

OHO is a search engine for open hardware, open design and maker projects. We crawl the web and make its content searchable for you. Start searching and build a better tomorrow.

Goals

OHO seeks to strike a new path for the future of OSH by serving as a meta source for complex open hardware products.

It follows three main objectives:

1. Create a crawler-based search engine to find and disseminate complex OSH products
2. Provide and curate a wide-ranging directory of complex OSH products with needed information to assess their level of openness
3. Build a strong and diverse open hardware community that supports the further development of OHO

Products

This results in the following three products that have been integrated so far as part of OHO:

OHO Search engine

Using an automatic crawler-based search technique, publicly available products with a particular focus on sustainability are searched for throughout the web, entered into an (expandable) category system and displayed as search results together with preview photos and a short description. Products published under free licenses or where their original developer are in contact with us will be documented in more details especially when construction plans and part lists are available.

OHO Product directory

An extensive collection of relevant complex OSH products is available on The OHO Product Directory. The directory consists of:

i) Crawled data sets for complex open hardware productsimproving searchability of the projects and their documentation
ii) Manually entered and curated data sets for complex open hardware products reporting on their openness according to product- and process-related criteria

In addition, the directory will create an important database for research on the field of OSH. Currently, anyone interested can already upload data such as photos, videos, texts, comments, CAD drawings, parts lists, etc. and thus add new products or documents for existing products. Please register here.

OHO community

As a basis for gathering free technical knowledge and (further) developing open products, it is essential to create, organize and support a broad community of interested parties and participants (organizations, companies and individuals). For this reason, the website itself is an open project, which means that anyone interested is welcome to contribute as follows:

• Provide information on interesting products more
• Supplement existing information, uploading new information more
• Give general feedback on this platform, ideas and suggestions more (tbd)
• Extend the platform with your own solutions more (tbd)