Electrolama Community Projects

As part of our efforts in being good citizens in the Open Source Home Automation Space, we are putting aside some free hardware each month to send to developers working on cool stuff.

What can we provide?

Any of the current and upcoming Electrolama products, prototypes and even one off test setups as needed by projects.

We are hardware folks hoping to support software/integration developers. Interested in exploring a new variant of a chip that we already use? - we can rework some boards and send them your way. Have a great idea but you need a couple of extra zzh sticks to explore it? Send us a proposal and if we think it adds value to the existing Open Source community we’ll send them your way!

Boards and shipping fees are covered by us but you might have to deal with customs/admin fees upon the package arriving in your country. The boards you receive are yours to keep - we won’t ask for them back.

What are we looking for?

We're looking for projects and/or developers exploring things in and around the Open Source Home Automation space, particularly around Thread/OpenThread. We are also keen to improve support for tooling around these subjects, such as contributions to our own llama-bsl or any other tools that improve the beginner user experience.

Do you have a tutorial or an article in mind that can help out folks just starting out on their journey, a video perhaps? We are also keen to support folks improving documentation around projects.

Rules and limitations

It costs us money to manufacture and ship hardware, especially if we’re talking about prototypes that are hand assembled and super costly both in terms of parts/effort. Therefore, we will only have a limited number of kits per month to ship out.

To make the most impact, we are looking to support active developers with established history around these subjects but if you come up with a concrete proposal, we’ll definitely consider your project even if you don’t have the most active Github account.

With regards to documentation contributions - proposals for meaningful articles/tutorials are most welcome. Minor edits/typo fixes not so much.

The key requirement is that the work that results from us donating you some hardware has to be released under an acceptable Open Source licence. MIT/Apache is great, GPL in a pinch. Anything else is not preferred.

We ask that you keep us up to date with the developments on the discussion thread you opened - other folks might be interested to follow the developments!

Process

Head over to the Project Ideas discussions and start a thread. Please use the following template when submitting a proposal:

Project Title: ...
Brief: ...
Link to previous work: ...
Timeline: ...
Hardware requirements: ...
Licence: ...
Output/Measurable outcome:
- ...
- ...
- ...

Here’s an example proposal:

Project Title: OTA updates for CC2652 based Zigbee routers
Brief: Current router firmware images in the community firmware repo do not support OTA updates. I’d like to add support for OTA for boards that support it.
Link to previous work: (github link/blog post/twitter thread about relevant previous project(s))
Timeline: 6 months
Hardware requirements: CC2652 P7/R7 variant chip or a board with extra SPI flash.
Licence: Same as the repositories contributed to
Output/Measurable outcome:
- PR to the community firmware repo with OTA capable versions of the router firmware
- PR to zigbee2mqtt project with the OTA support for the CC2652 routers
- Documentation on the process in case others need to take over in the future

This is an experiment