Today marks the official relaunch of FreeIO.org’s website! When Marty founded the site back in March of 2000, he envisioned it as the center of a community interested in hardware freedom. He contributed to that community by developing some of the early free hardware designs and releasing them on this site under the GNU GPL. Marty’s designs were perhaps best know for his unique penchant of naming each board after a different breakfast treat.

Marty passed away on October 25, 2007. But before he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer, Marty passed on all his hardware prototypes, development gear, and this website to me. I’m Steve, better known as Steevithak online. I’ve kept Marty’s original FreeIO.org website intact and online since then, while I pondered what to do with it.

The time has come to get things rolling again and I’m starting with a relaunch of the website. Marty’s free hardware designs are still here and hopefully we’ll find volunteers to work on new hardware projects to add. I’ll also start updating the resource pages to make them more useful again. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to make the site more immediately useful by aggregating all the free hardware and open hardware news, so members of the open hardware community can have one central place to find out what’s going on.

We’re tracking news from the Open Source Hardware User Group, the Open Source Hardware Association, the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, and Open Collector. I’m also following blogs for major open source hardware projects like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. To round it out, we’ll have postings of general interest to hardware hackers such as application notes and new product releases from component vendors. If you can think of any cool free/open hardware blogs or news sources we should add, post a comment below. In fact, comments of any sort on how we can make the website more useful to the community are welcome.