I’m starting to get interested in open source hardware, through building a motion control track to work with DragonFrame’s new ARC moco control. I have been using Arduino Uno and EasyStepper open source boards for this. They are tiny and beautiful in form and concept.
At the same time Michael Gove has started talking about bringing ICT from out under learning to use Microsoft Office into code, which is a Good Thing, although Michael Gove generally has been a Bad Thing. Maybe the LibDems having a positive influence, who knows.
Also at the same time Raspberry Pi is being launched, an excellent initiative making open-source, single board computing available to kids, 30 years after BBC micro launched a revolution in the UK. Back room enthusiasts have had a big part to play in Tech development, Apple started in a garage along with everything else and the start of things doesn’t have to be a spaceship like hothouse.
It’s a sad thing that this can’t all join up with the drive to rebalance the economy away from the deeply unstable and inequitable financial sector towards manufacturing:
The Raspberry Pi charity really really wanted to use UK manufacturing to make it’s credit card sized, pocket money priced computing cards, but has had to take production to the Far East. As with the tax evasion issues raised by UKuncut and the Occupy movement, Inland Revenue has a part to play in this story.
A quote from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509
“I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
So we have had to make the pragmatic decision and look to Taiwan and China for our manufacturing, at least for this first batch. We are still working hard on investigating UK possibilities; at the moment, we’re investigating an option which would mean that all the Model As (whose demand we expect to be much lower than that of the Model Bs) will be built in the UK, and at the moment that’s looking quite do-able, although it’s not as efficient economically as doing it in Asia. I’ll fill you in on how that goes later on.”
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