Now it's time to talk to you about the Mezzanine Community Initiative we've been kind of hinting out throughout the course over the last few videos. Now, I know we've been talking about this mezzanine ecosystem and everything that it entails. But it's not as easy to just say, hey, go do this, go build the mezzanine, without offering you the means or the channels for which to do so. Now that is where the Mezzanine Community Initiative was born. So in this video, we're going to to talk you about the initiative. What exactly is it? What is it? How can you find out more about it? How you contribute and in what ways you can contribute. What is the pipeline of mezzanines that are going to be coming out over the course of hopefully the near future. Acknowledgements for the repository itself. Some of our key contributors and the people who are maintaining it. And then how you can get involved. And for those of you who are checking out the slide here, you can see there's some mezzanines on the slide. These were not made by big companies. These were made by people like you, people in the community, people who just wanted to get involved building something for their own use that they then allowed the community to consume and use as well. So again, a very good initiative that's still in its infancy but already showing results. So kudos to everyone that's already been involved. Now I can bubble on about the Mezzanine Initiative. The best thing for you to do is to go read about it. We've already put time into the repository, there's an about section, how to contribute. There's a nice little section for learning our contribution policy, so to say. You can find our boards that have already been made, different stuff in there. There's a lot to read about. github.com/96boards/mezzanine-community. Please check that out, read some more and if you have any things that you would like us to know drop us a line in the issue section. So there's a way to contribute already. If you feel that you want to know something about the section that's not already documented in the repo, just drop us a line. Now, why was this Mezzanine formed? And this is kind of a myth, I want to touch on this. I thought it was just kind of fun, but if you build it, they will come. Now, this Mezzanine Initiative wasn't necessarily formed because we wanted to create something grand that we could own, 96Boards could own. This was created by community. This is created by community and for community. Now, looking at, if you build it they will come, that's not entirely true. I call it a myth, because our focus is not just to build something that nobody wants. We want to build something that everybody wants, or at least a lot of people want, right? So if you build it, document it, market it and maintain it, they'll come. And if you do it properly, they will stay and that's the goal of this initiative. We want to make sure that the people who are getting involved in this, genuinely care about the well-being of the community and consuming everyone's needs. The win, win, win of open source and that's what we're really geared towards. We really want to set that as an example for this initiative, and the initiatives to come. So for those of you who want to get started with the Mezzanine Initiative, remember this motto. [LAUGH] >> And I think you hit a very good point. For those who want to get started, right? So I think I have mentioned this to you before, I am more of a software applications development guy. So hardware design is always that hurdle for me to cross. It's taking that first step into that space is always daunting for me, right? Since the Mezzanine ecosystem is very, very defined, like we talked about this with the guidelines on how to develop a Mezzanine. And with the whole open source community where somebody can come in and consume work that has already been done by these great industry professionals. It's a a very good starting point for somebody who is starting off in hardware design. Not just 96Board ecosystem but somebody who wants to play around with hardware design. It's a good starting point. >> Absolutely, and in fact, this is, you can see it, it's in bold, it's the last point here. This is a great entry point, right? So, we'll talk about that a little more as we elaborate on this. But what is this repository and how can you contribute to it? It is a open source repository, right? Now, we've tried our best to make sure that the license is on this repository because there is a barrier of entering, and you have to learn how to do things. And getting used to open source, in general, if you aren't already familiar with it can be slightly daunting. So we've tried to make the licenses as loose as possible. You can consume very openly our templates which we have many to choose from at this point now. You can consume very openly and you can just start plugging away. Getting familiar with different computer rated design programs that are template catered too. And then when you've created something and you want to contribute it back to our repository, you can contribute it back with a different license. That's one of the beauties of it. Now we would encourage everyone to contribute it back with another open license that allows people to contribute and consume and contribute as well, right? But there are no limits and the repository is geared towards hopefully helping everyone. So again, that's something that we would look at, right? Experienced maintainers, and this goes right back into what John was talking about with regards to how he's a software guy, but maybe you want to get into hardware. Now, the people who are maintaining this repository, which we are going to give credit to in just a second, we have very experienced people that have been in the hardware industry for a long time. One of our guys, Michael Welling, he's the guy who's maintaining our kiCAD template. So if you have questions on kiCAD and you want to get into open source computer aided drafting or computer aided design, then this is the repository for you to start at. Everyone is very kind. Everyone is very helpful. You want to develop your first piece of hardware, consume our template. Work with our repository, with our maintainers. And boom there you go, your first experiences is under your belt, add that to your resume [LAUGH]. Very helpful community, so even though someone might not be a maintainer, we have all these channels. And we touched on them kind of in the resources video, but all these channels for people to kind of interact and help each other out. A very engaging, very, again, vibrant community. And, once again, it's a great entry point. So for those of you who have zero hardware experience. For those of you who have zero open source experience. We're not there to make fun of you. We're there to help you. Our maintainers are there to help you. We want to make sure that you learn and have the best experience possible with your first open source contributions, and this is a good place to do that. Not only, I don't think I touched on it, but not only do we offer the ability to submit issues on our repository, not only can you join us in our IRC chat at #openhours or #96boards. But we have weekly video conference calls, I mean you can join us me, Rajan, the maintainers of the repository, you can join us all on a weekly basis and have fun with us and learn about open source on weekly basis. So, great entry point for any of you who want to just kind of continue on working in this world. Now I mentioned templates. We have currently three templates. If you are familiar with kiCAD, Altium or EagleCAD, you can consume our templates and built a Mezzanine right off the bat. We've already confirmed the locations of the high speed and low speed headers. In fact, this board right here was one of the boards, I don't know if you can see that there, but this right here was one of the boards that was built right out of the Mezzanine Initiative. It's just a simple IO board. The main purpose was to test that the high speed and the low speed header were perfectly positioned to snap in to the dragging board 410C footprint, the 96 points footprint. That came out of our Mezzanine initiative. So we've confirmed all of our CAD templates. Consume, modify, contribute, that's your path. Looking at the pipeline in the future, what kind of boards is this initiative working on? You might think, newbies, community people, they're working on nothing very complex, but that's not true. Our people are working on some very interesting things. Already, we have on the docket GPS Mezzanine. A new, more complex compliance version of the I/O testing Mezzanine. We're working on DSI touch displays. Possibly an RPi header, similar to what you saw in another video with the arduino header. HiFi which is a high end audio mezzanine. LoWPAN 3G network, industrial neroban network mezzanines, and then Remote Power Mezzanine. So I mean, allowing you to cycle your 96Boards anywhere in the world. And the list goes on and on. Again, check out the repository to find out more about this pipeline and contribute to the pipeline. If there is something you want to see on there. Who are our contributors? Right now, and I know that this video could at some point go stale. But right now our primary contributors are the folks you see on the screen, I want to just make a shout out, Michael Welling, Rafael Christ, and Gustavo Pinheiro. I'm not going to shout out to myself, Sahaj Sarup also. >> I'll do that, shout out to Robert Wolff. >> [LAUGH] Thank you. But yeah, so as you can see, you have a lead maintainer who specializes in kiCAD, that's Michael Welling. You also have two other maintainers that specialize in Altium and Eagle. So you want to work on this hardware, you want to develop something that's usable, that's real, that's tangible, that you can access and have some fun with, these guys are going to help you on your path in the open source world. And we'll be there to help, steer it forward. Again, there's a link to the Mezzanine Community Initiative. How can you get involved? I kind of covered all that. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Mm-hm. >> Just reach out. Reach out, go to the Mezzanine repository, reach out to us, open an issue, join us on IRC chat. We look forward to interacting with you as much as possible. Join us during our open hours calls, join us during our weekly Mezzanine meetings, and there you go, that's how you get involved. We'll be there all the time. You want to wrap this one up? >> Yeah, so like always, it's time to pause and replay. Let's take a look at some resources that we have. In this section, we took a look at the community initiative, right? So we have a couple of resources on there for the community initiative GitHub, that's on there. And like Robert said, go poke around, go read up on the community initiative. Anybody who is getting started with hardware design and just 96Boards Ecosystem, it's a very good starting place for you. Yeah, we'll see you in the next video. I believe we are going to be talking about verticals and how to create your path to product. >> Yap.
