Atadiat

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

= an Open Source Hardware Startup operating in Syria.

URL = http://www.atadiat.com/

Makers of the Shamduino board: http://www.atadiat.com/?products=shamduino


Principles

Simone Cicero, citing co-founder Yahya Tawil:

"1) Our slogan is: designing manufacturing sharing.

2) We make open content in our learning center in our website.

3) Until now all of our products are based on open hardware components and origins

4) All of our products are well documented.

“Our strategic goal is to bring real open hardware to market in Syria and to support hardware startuppers here”." (http://www.open-electronics.org/the-story-behind-atadiat-bringing-open-source-hardware-to-syria/)


Interview

Yahya Tawil (interviewed by Simone Cicero):

(some interspersed commentary may be from Simone Cicero)

"Everything started two years ago, more or less, when we started to learn and publish open source hardware and the Arduino culture in our community. I was part in the process of founding communities in Syria, and in the whole Arab world, ok likeminded persons interested in Open Hardware, DIY, digital personal fabrication and hacking. One of these communities is fablogia, which is a Syrian sub-community of a bigger one called wikilogia. The second community is called OHDIY (Open Hardware and DIY Group) which, basically, consists of an arabic facebook page with more than one thousands fans and facebook group with almost two thousands members which gathers makers and hackers from the whole arab world. One of OHDIY’s internet event was the translation of upverter guide. I’ve organized lot’s of other activities with great people from the region: a lot of Arduino meetups and related workshops (on CadSoft Eagle or plain electronics for example) and I gave lectures about open hardware and hardware entrepreneurship.

..

"We faced a lot of difficulties especially because we are in a war and revolutionary situations, and we couldn’t bring Arduinos and other stuff from outside Syria. That’s when we tried to make our local circuits.” – so it was not about responsible manufacturing, but more a response limits to trading imposed by the situation – “within a year, my friend Anas (co-founder at atadiat) eventually created a prototype of a locally designed Arduino compatible board with a usb-serial converter as we don’t have access to machines that could print the very same Arduino PCB, for example we don’t access to machines to create Vias on PCBs."

...

what’s preventing them to be 100% open?

“The problem is that we don’t have the tools to face the cloners: they have money and resources we don’t have. We don’t even have tools. Consider we do all of our products by hand and imagine how a, well done, SMD soldering takes efforts and time for us. Also PCBs: we don’t have circuit milling machines and we can print our circuits at one facility that doesn’t even have the ability to do VIAs in PCBs! Remember that they’re almost monopolists and they don’t want us to damage their high rates of revenues. Before us, they were the only way to get electronics for local needs, and they don’t like the kind of innovation we would like to bring” (http://www.open-electronics.org/the-story-behind-atadiat-bringing-open-source-hardware-to-syria/)

More Information