Welcome to Offtheground.net

Welcome to Offtheground.net, a place for you to grow your ideas with a community willing to advance and nurture them into working and viable endeavors. We aim to provide options to enable open source style collaboration or a closed system for an idea you want to make a commercial profit form by making use of non disclosure agreements and sub contracting employment contracts which will be available from the site. By doing these things and by bringing the right people together we hope to help you make your ideas flourish and eventually get them off the ground.

Open Source Hardware, An Analysis

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Offtheground.net is a place that encourages cooperation between projects or at the very least gives a dreamer a wall to bounce their ideas off of, and in this article I will look at a very important result of this mindset, open source hardware.

The idea of open source hardware is basically exactly what it says, open source. This means that any plans and instructions are available freely so that anyone can familiarise themselves with the operation of the device. Today this is exemplified by several case studies that we will see below but its roots go far back into history.

Mixpicks.info, MY commercial idea

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Plectrums on the counter of Plectrums Pens and Paints in Folkestone

You may well be wondering what exactly is it that makes me qualified to help anyone start their own commercial venture. Well before offtheground.net got underway I set up a small scale manufacturing effort in the shape of mix picks, which are plectrums made from old vinyl records. They are now available on ebay so i will describe here what i did. I will not tell you how they are made, because they are my business but I will tell you how I got the message about them out, and explain why i did certain things.

Times Past

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Description: Times Past (working title). A way of viewing historical data in a geographical context.

An idea that I have had for a long while now is for a way of using a computer to search a geographical area in conjunction with a timeline of some kind in order to see more clearly just what was going on there during the period i am interested in. The reason for this is that I find it difficult to build a picture in my mind of exactly what is being talked about just looking at dates in large bodies of text.

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