Introduction

Few open source hardware (OSHW) projects today have succeeded in reaching the impact of OSS projects. One might say that none have. One reason is the apparent challenges that come from developing physical products. Challenges in regard to manufacturing and validation makes especially complex product development difficult, and more so when the development tools and set-up used by many OSHW projects are designed for software development leaving a insufficient data management structure and a high entry barrier for new developers. Allowing OSHW projects to easier implement partial design development might be a way to overcome these challenges and permit the OSHW communities to heighten the efficiency of OSHW development in general. This project will contribute to the field of OSHW by conceptualizing a development platform/system, focusing on allowing OSHW communities to undertake partial design development via modularization and PDM systems suitable for distributed physical product development, while lowering the entry barrier for new developers by looking at ideas from crowdsourcing. Modularization will lower the cost of integration alongside making it easier and cheaper to perform test and validation of designs. A multi layered cloud PDM system will make partial design development easier to control alongside making it unnecessary for the often small OSHW projects to invest in a complex IT infrastructure.  Lowering the entry barrier for new developers will allow a better utilization of the crowd letting OSHW projects harvest the benefits of actually being Open Source.