No problem! If you have new project idea and you can implement it with some of our boards let us know and if we find your project interesting we will send you the board free of charge.

Our requirements are simple:

The project code and files must be made available under an Open Source license.

We are allowed to link to your project from our development board web page and/or include a picture of your project in the photo gallery.

Depending on your project, we can also provide you with a programmer.

Please email your project proposal to openprojects@olimex.com in PDF format, write also summary and link other projects which you already have done, put your physical address and email on the top of your summary page.

We will honour with free boards all original and interesting projects (not copy and paste of something already done on the net) and list them on this web page with link to the project web site where everyone can monitor the project progress and will move in the completed section when it's done.

Note: this is not an give-away offer. Te purpose of this project is to reward people who do open source and contribute to the community. We admire these people and want to reward them for the good work they do.

We got e-mails on daily basis from people with no knowledge, who just want to learn electronics and asking for free boards, we can't honour such requests.

05-SEP-2011:As we already got few e-mails with questions we can make here FAQ so people do not ask same questions again:

Q: Can I select the platform and board to complete my project?
A: Of course you should select the platform and processor to complete your project, we can assist you as much as we can. For instance if you selected processor which obviously can't do the job we can guide you in the platform selection, but you are who decide which board to use for your project.

Q: I have several old projects done and they are open source, can I have boards for them?
A: No, if you already done these projects you do not need board, right? The idea of this page is to support peoples who want to contribute to the open source community, we like open source spirit and think peoples who would like to contribute to the community should be rewarded with free hardware for the good job they do!

Q: Can I submit more than one project?
A: Definitely yes! You can submit as many projects as you want, if we find them interesting we will reward them all with free boards, but we will do this step by step, you have to choose the first project which you want to go first and once you complete it we will send you board for the next project.

APPROVED PROJECTS:

ENTRY #1

September-7th, 2011 - "Porting Android on SAM9-L9260" by Thang Le an electronics engineer from Vietnam working in Java Enterprise (J2EE). His blog is at http://letrungthang.blogspot.com where you can monitor his progress on the project. Good Luck! We mail one SAM9-L9260 to Thang Le today.

ENTRY #2

September-21th, 2011 - "PoE CLOCK / DISPLAY / TIMER" by Arno Teigseth an electronics engineer from Ecuador, rewarded with PIC-MICRO-WEB + PIC-ICD2-POCKET: . Here is his proposal Page1 and Page2, and here is his project page: http://arno.homelinux.org/oshw/countdownclock/

ENTRY #3

October 11th, 2011 - "Sound Level Data Logger" with STM32-103STK by Bill Hoeneveld from Australia. Here is his proporal and the project web page is: http://billsprojects.blogspot.com/

ENTRY #4

October 16th, 2011 - "Wireless RFID TAG Network with Duinomite" with DUINOMITE-MEGA by Shane Morris from Australia. Here is his proporal and the project web page is: http://rackingwoes.wordpress.com

ENTRY #5

November 11th, 2011 - "AVR Based Mains power controller and monitor" with AVR-USB-STK and AVR-ISP500 by Alan Anderson from UK. Here and Here is his proporal and the project web page is: http://avrpowermeter.blogspot.com

ENTRY #6

November 28th, 2011 - "Solar Panel Monitor and Heat pump controller" with PIC32-MAXI-WEB by Luc Friant from Belgium. Here is his proporal and the project web page is: http://users.telenet.be/energy-monitor/

ENTRY #7

December 5th, 2011 - "Dual universe DMX512 controller" by Erik Van Hamme from Belgium with STM32-P103 and MOD-RS485. Here is his proporal and the project web page is at http://code.google.com/p/stm32-dmx512/

ENTRY #8

December 8th, 2011 - "Couch Potato Monitor" and "Plot-A-Watt-Wireless-Monitor" by Alex Chen from USA with PIC32-PINGUINO-MICRO , MOD-IRDA and MOD-WIFI. Here is his proporal and the project web page is: http://x2c2mega.blogspot.com

UPDATE 15/03/2012 we have to put this projects idea on hold for a while, as for the last 6 months we got lot of applications, trying to exlude the projects "I want to make open source LED blinker, please give me your board xxx", but even on the approved projects as you can see yourself from the links above there is no significant progress except the Entry #6, it seems once people got the free boards they lost interest to complete what they intended or just over estimated their capabilities? We are still open to hear your opinion how we can improve this. Maybe we have to change the rules and to give away free boards only to people who submite project idea and complete it first?