Art, nature and technology converged at the Museum Bandstand in Thiruvananthapuram when members of SPACE, Beginow, and FSUG-TVM gathered to celebrate Hardware Freedom Day 20 April 2013. Musical notes sprang from plantains at the touch of fingers, robots darted across the floor in hot pursuit of its spectators and a 3 D printer coughed up physical replicas of three dimensional images fed to it creating quite a stir among those gathered at there.
It was for the first time that Thiruvananthapuram was hosting such an event in celebration of hardware freedom, a movement that draws its philosophy from free software. Though a relatively young movement, it has already led to the development of several important technologies. The spirit of freedom in computing is nothing new to Kerala, which boasts of the largest deployment of free software anywhere in the world and was witness to the world's first ever rallying call for freedom in computing. It is therefore only befitting that Kerala assume leadership of this young movement in India as well.
Other open hardware projects on display were international initiatives like Arduino for robotics, Raspberry Pi for low cost computing and the Indian project expEYES for scientific experimentation. The event drew students from various engineering colleges and technical professionals who expressed their interest to build further on some of the technologies demonstrated. The event was held from 3 pm to 7 pm.
