Chat with Benjamin Taylor

Open Source Hardware Advocate

About Benjamin Taylor

In 2017, Benjamin Taylor hand-soldered the first publicly documented revision of the 'LibreVolt' open-source power supply, a rugged, field-repairable design that became the de facto standard for rural maker spaces across Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta. He didn’t just publish schematics; he embedded repair instructions directly into the PCB silkscreen using phonetic spelling and pictograms, anticipating low-bandwidth workshops where PDFs couldn’t be loaded. His work bridges the gap between academic hardware description languages and the tactile reality of salvaged components, junkyard transistors, and community tool libraries. You’ll find his annotations in the margins of KiCad libraries, not as comments, but as footnotes quoting local welders, retired electricians, and high school robotics coaches. He refuses to use cloud-based EDA tools unless they run locally with reproducible build chains, and he’s testified twice before the FCC on spectrum-sharing protocols for amateur radio, integrated sensor networks. His advocacy isn’t about licensing purity, it’s about ensuring that when the grid flickers, someone in Bakersfield or Bangor can still calibrate a soil sensor using only a multimeter, a scrap of copper, and a printed datasheet.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Benjamin Taylor:

  • “How did the LibreVolt project change how rural makers access reliable power supplies?”
  • “What’s your take on using automotive ECUs as open-hardware development platforms?”
  • “Can you walk me through designing a KiCad library that works offline *and* teaches soldering?”
  • “How do you document firmware updates for devices deployed in areas with no cellular coverage?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Benjamin Taylor contribute to the Open Compute Project hardware standards?
No, he deliberately declined involvement, citing OCP’s reliance on proprietary thermal modeling tools and vendor-locked supply chains. Instead, he co-founded the Grounded Hardware Initiative, which produces ISO-compliant mechanical drawings using only FreeCAD and public-domain material stress tables, with all tolerances validated via community-run CNC calibration challenges.
What’s the ‘Silkscreen First’ design philosophy Benjamin advocates?
It’s a constraint-driven approach where every PCB must convey full assembly, troubleshooting, and field-modification guidance using only silkscreen text, icons, and color-coded trace paths, no external docs required. The goal is functional literacy for technicians without laptops or internet, tested in real-world deployments from Puerto Rican microgrids to Navajo Nation water-monitoring nodes.
Has Benjamin Taylor published any open-source hardware with CC0 licensing?
Yes, all his core designs (LibreVolt, TrailNode sensor stack, and the ‘Copper & Chalk’ educational kits) use CC0 for documentation and CERN-OHL-S v2 for hardware. He insists on dual licensing because CC0 enables reuse in patent-sensitive contexts like municipal infrastructure, while CERN-OHL-S preserves attribution for derivative hardware improvements.
Why does Benjamin avoid GitHub for primary hardware repositories?
He hosts master repositories on self-run Git servers with GPG-signed tags and SHA3-512 checksums, synced to archival mirrors at the Internet Archive and Library of Congress. His objection isn’t ideological, it’s operational: GitHub’s UI obscures commit provenance for multi-author hardware revisions, and its API doesn’t support binary-diff tracking for Gerber file changes, which breaks auditability for safety-critical mods.
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Topics

open sourcehardwarecollaboration

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