Are the Pololu A4983 stepper driver PCBs open hardware or not?

Are the Pololu A4983 stepper driver PCBs (http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1201) open hardware (aka "where are the EAGLE files with an Open Source license") or not?

I tried to find the answer to this question at said website, but didn't find any EAGLE files or so, nor an answer to my licencse question, although some other info (schematic) is available.

peer Wrote:
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> Are the Pololu A4983 stepper driver PCBs
> (http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1201) open
> hardware (aka "where are the EAGLE files with an
> Open Source license") or not?
>
> I tried to find the answer to this question at
> said website, but didn't find any EAGLE files or
> so, nor an answer to my licencse question,
> although some other info (schematic) is available.


No, the files are not available. The board is well documented enough someone could probably design something doable with stuff from radio shack though. I think the issue is the traces are so tiny and the SMT stuff would need a stereo microscope, you would be paying 20USD per board for a small production run, and then the soldering of components would make it very hard to reach the 12USD per board they are right now. The current design would be very difficult to replicate at the home brew level, making the designs kind of useless.

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-Steve

Well, there are more scenarios.

This basically is the "open source <=> closed source" question, always linked to the "hackable or not hackable" question. And also, btw, to the "self-replicable or not (or %)" question.
I suppose we already experienced where "closed" and where "open" can get us.

Based on the information that exists, it should be possible to quickly release a design of the A4983 stepper driver that would be open source (Covering what people feel is needed for an opensource hardware design), based on the datasheet for the chip as well. as the reality is this is just a breakout board in order to use the SMT chip in a test environment.

(I am not getting in to the the open source hardware license requirements thing, as my view is far more to do with what you can do with the "design" rather than how the information is presented to you).

David

pololu do however publish the circuit diagram, and I agree that their price for assembled boards is hard to beat.

The only improvements I can think of would be an easier way to heatsink them, and to make the boards big enough to have screw terminals and mounting holes

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Wooden Mendel
Teacup Firmware