Mr Kombat Sam Kwame, an electrical engineer has urged members of the technology community, IoT network Hub, to tinker and exploit open source technologies to solve problems locally.
He stressed on the importance of heeding to the guidelines in electronics for one to complete projects successfully.
He said this during the community’s monthly meet-up at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT when he was invited to teach members of the community on how to build personalised projects using Arduino in conjunction with proteus, both open source hardware and software respectively.
Open-source Hardware Month
The month of October marked the celebration of open-source hardware worldwide. Mr Joshua Opoku, President of the IoT network hub took his turn to speak on open source technology. “Open source technology allows one to inspect, study, sell and design its resources freely”, he revealed in his presentation. He also elucidated on the terms and conditions that borders on the use of these open-source technologies, and the governing body that set the parameters of opensource technology internationally.
A young electric engineer and freelancer, Sandy Gbotta, who reuses scraps from e-waste to build robotic and electronic projects like 3D printers reiterated Mr. Opoku’s point. “Open source technology affords the general public to reverse engineer and backtrack how equipment and gadgets are made from electronic waste dumped especially into this part of our world”, he said. He sees e-waste as an opportunity for Africans to learn how gadgets are manufactured through open-source, once its schematic is made public. He noted that the practice will go a long way to cement knowledge in manufacturing as well as develop creative ways in solving problems.
The meet-up was rounded up by Mr Douglast Ayittey, an electrical engineer and a trainer who demonstrated an IoT project he had worked on. He showed how one could control lights in the house by the use of the voice, over the internet with services like IFTTT and google assistant.
