When I was a kid, we used to get advent calendars, with a chocolate for every day from December 1 to Christmas Day. Often, the chocolate tasted terrible, but the anticipation of a treat every day was one of the best parts.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to do the same kind of thing, but with electronics projects. This isn’t an entirely new idea - vk2zay does the Avent Calendar of Circuits on YouTube - but I wanted to do my own version. This year, I’m trying it: the Open Hardware Advent Calendar. Every day between now and Christmas, I’m going to try and release a different open-source hardware project.

Some are going to be very simple, and some are going to be things that have been sitting on the shelf for a year or so, waiting for me to document them. Either way: every day, my goal is to put up a circuit board, schematic, piece of firmware, or whatever, so that people can build it themselves and enjoy screwing around with electronics.

I warn you in advance, some of these are going to be much simpler than others, and some are going to be much more complicated to build than others. I’ve got a wide range planned, from breadboardable projects to tiny surface mount-only PCBs. I hope everyone will be able to find something interesting in what’s coming over the next few weeks. I’ll try and keep this post updated with a list of projects as we go.

Onward with the first project!

The Projects