I am preparing to release a design under the Open Source Hardware Association definition. By releasing a design this way you allow the electronic maker community to freely share and use the design. When following the community rules for open hardware, you can mark your equipment with the open source hardware logo. The logo itself is released under a Creative Commons licence (CC-SA) and is likewise free to copy and use, if you follow the rules.
While the OSHWA website links the logo in KiCAD and several other formats, it does not provide the logo in Eagle format. Off to the web to find an Eagle library with the logo… Hmmm… Found one, but it has issues.
There are a couple versions out there on the web. The one most commonly found to was created by NBitWonder. This has a couple issues… While it is very faithful to the official logo it is built from thousands of apertures. Running the CAM processor on it chokes, and chokes hard. While the PCB may take a couple seconds to process the CAM without it, place this logo on the PCB and be prepared to take several minutes to process the CAM. With the NBitWonder version the file sizes grow significantly as you would expect. My GenPIC PCB overlay Gerber file grows from 16kb to over 250kb to accommodate the logo.
The NBitWonder website also looks dead, a sign things may soon disappear. Not good, at least the logo library is on GitHub and should stick around for a while.
Looking to streamline things a bit I took the NBitWonder logo and simply traced the outline as a polygon. Using a 1 mil grid and hand tracing the outline results in a reasonably faithful version of the official logo, but without the massive overhead of the bitmap to aperture version. There are three sizes available, 5mm, 8mm, and 16mm.
With the text I took a bit more liberty, replacing it with the built-in Eagle proportional font. This does depart a bit from the appearance of the smooth modern font on the official logo, but should suffice.
Open Source Hardware Logo Eagle Library
Unpack the zip and drop the library file linked above into your Eagle library folder and select it with “Library->Use…” in the board tool to use. The logo can be included by placing the device on your schematic, or simply placing the package on your layout.
Remember to follow the OSHWA definitions when placing this logo on your work. Open hardware is a concept we should all support as members of the maker community. There is a time and place for profit, and a place for open designs.
Are boards/designs created with eagle actually OSHW compliant? I don’t think so as the software is not open-source and the free license does not allow commercial use of designs made with it.
“The project is licensed in a way to allow for modifications and derivative works without commercial restriction. *” is the requirement I’m talking about.
Thus it does not make sense to use the logo with Eagle at all. But I’m not a lawyer or from OSHWA so not qualified to say that.
Perhaps an arguable point. On the other hand the Gerbers are open, and can be produced by anyone without issue.
The _project license_ has to be open, not the one of some software with which one can edit it. And besides, eagle files are all xml, so everyone can modify them with a simple texteditor.