CHIP

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= C.H.I.P. is a personal single-board computer advertised as "the world's first $9 computer".

URL = https://getchip.com

Description

DIDIY:

"CHIP (stylised as C.H.I.P.) is a personal single-board computer created by Next Thing Co., initially released on Kickstarter. It is advertised as "the world's first $9 computer". Its Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded in May 2015, which had started with a goal of $50,000 USD and ended with 39,560 backers pledging $2,071,927.

The system is built around the System on a Chip processor R8 from AllWinner and packs an amazing number of features into a small and documented Open Source Hardware project." (http://www.didiy.eu/public/deliverables/didiy-d6.3-1.0-pub.pdf)

Business Models

Revenue models

• Hardware sales through the kickstarter campaign and through the webshop: https://getchip.com/pages/store. • Apparently chip manufacturer Allwinner has a strategic stake in the project to help it become a platform with many users, that will need the Allwinner chips. • Custom development, consultancy and training.


Modes of production:

While the Next Thing Co. team works from Oakland (California), the manufacturing is contracted in Shenzen (China). Summarising, part of the development work takes place inhouse (intrafirm), while other parts are done by peers in the community and the material production is contract manufactured (market based). Next Thing Co. is a startup that came out of the HAXLR8R acceleration programme17 and previously run another successful kickstarter for their OTTO camera module." (http://www.didiy.eu/public/deliverables/didiy-d6.3-1.0-pub.pdf)


Governance

DIDIY:

• The company Next Thing Co. is the owner and leader of the project. • The project is documented under free licenses and is replicable. This is presented as a powerful feature allowing others to build derived products on top of it, without requiring any NonDisclosure Agreement or special permission."

(http://www.didiy.eu/public/deliverables/didiy-d6.3-1.0-pub.pdf)


Status

DIDIY:

"Indicators of impact

• Almost 40.000 backers at kickstarter. • Thousands of C.H.I.P.’s sold in the first batch through the webstore. • 23 employees by November 201618 . • Google Incoming Links (http://getchip.com): 117.000. • Alexa Global Rank (http://getchip.com): 72.429."

(http://www.didiy.eu/public/deliverables/didiy-d6.3-1.0-pub.pdf)

More Information

Community Documentation: https://docs.getchip.com/chip.html. Forum at: https://bbs.nextthing.co.

A dedicated section at the Hackster.io web platform to encourage the community to share their projects based on CHIP: https://chip.hackster.io.

Licensing The hardware designs, schematics and PCB layouts are published under the CC BY-SA v3 license: https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIPHardware.

The documentation is licensed under a free license: the Apache 2.0 license. The software is based on Debian Linux, under the GPL v2 license.

See for more examples, our directory of open computer at Product Hacking