Inman

Bringing the open-source spirit of innovation to hardware [VIDEO]

Matt Murphy demonstrates Knockey.

Most of us are familiar with open-source software like Mozilla Firefox, the Linux operating system and its popular offspring, Android. To encourage innovation, open-source software developers copyright their work, but allow others to make changes and distribute it.

So what the heck is open-source hardware? It’s a physical platform that can serve as a building block for tinkerers.

Software developer, real estate tech consultant and “maker” of things Matt Murphy has been exploring the possibilities of open-source hardware with a personal side project, Knockey, a keyless entry system he built with Arduino, the open-source hardware prototyping platform.

Matt Murphy talks about the future of open-source hardware (11:03).