Circuit Board Design Files

If anyone's interested, @DrAzzy's store is: https://www.tindie.com/stores/DrAzzy/

As @DrAzzy says, custom PCBs take a few weeks to arrive usually, so if you want something now, which you usually do, it's better to pay a little extra and buy direct :)

Also, if you've tried to compile Open Source software off GitHub, you'll find it often takes a few tweaks to get it working. When each tweak costs you at least $20 and takes 2 weeks, suddenly the option of just buying something off the shelf that works looks a lot more appealing!

If you're interested, there are a lot of PCB designs posted up here: http://dirtypcbs.com/store/designer/pcbs­

I'm not 100% sure if they're downloadable, but it's interesting to see what's there. Also Adafruit are pretty amazing and do Open Source all their PCB designs, even if it's sometimes a bit hard to find them on GitHub: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Fea­ther-M0-Basic-Proto-PCB

I think when working on software, generally all you're losing is your time. Pretty much always designing hardware will require you to spend money (although often not that much) - but maybe just having spent any money at all developing something makes you less willing to share it for free.

Just to add: there are upsides to Open Sourcing your hardware, but for me at least there are downsides too:

• I've had a company in China making 'clone' Espruino boards
  
• I've had people try and beat me down on price by saying "well, I could just get 1000 of these made in China for less as I have the design" (if anyone's thinking about it, good luck - it's harder than just emailing a company the GitHub URL :)
  
• There have been a bunch of cases where people have copied the Espruino schematic, laid it out in a different layout, and then used it for their own products with the Espruino software - obviously I make absolutely nothing from that at all.
  
  

Having said that, we can't kid ourselves. Most of the hardware individuals produce will be 2 layer. It's trivial to reverse engineer (unsolder the components, stick it in a scanner, photoshop and trace) - however it does take a lot of time. By not open-sourcing the design files you're basically just stopping the lazy copycats - anyone who really cared could still copy it.