Bug Labs banks on DIY desire

Open source revolutionized the software industry, but can it have the same impact on the low-margin, outsourced-manufacturing-driven world of hardware devices?

Betting that it can is start-up Bug Labs, which only recently has begun to come out of stealth mode. It showed its products publicly for the first time last week, with a full launch of the company and its products slated for this fall.

Bug Labs, led by CEO Peter Semmelhack and backed by venture capitalists including Web 2.0-savvy Union Square Ventures, has unveiled a software and hardware architecture for “pluggable” gadget components. What does that mean? Think Lego bricks. Users will be able to purchase — and then hack up — ultimately hundreds of individual hardware components such as a screen, CPU, keyboard, GPS unit and more — each with software and network interfaces for connecting and sharing data.

Also available for tweaking and extending are software interfaces that enable the hardware pieces to “talk” with one another, including likely Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and hardware interfaces such as USB. All the hardware and software is open-source. Bug Labs also has built a design platform based on the Eclipse programming environment to enable users to imagine and build devices.

“We envision a world where ‘CE’ stands for ‘community electronics,’ where the long tail of devices profitably exists and hardware mashups are as prevalent as their software counterparts,” said Semmelhack in a blog post unveiling the company. “In essence, we're building an open source-based platform for programmers to build not only the applications they want but the hardware to run it on.”

Today, Bug Labs is clearly targeting the hobbyist/enthusiast market. But open-source software from Apache to Linux to mySQL started in dorm rooms, too, and now such software helps run many of the world's largest Web sites, corporate intranets and more.

In the open-source and do-it-yourself spirit, Bug Labs is rolling out its products — or really, its ideas — in a series of meetings over the coming weeks and months. Company executives held their first event Aug. 14 in New York, with more to come.

At that meeting, Bug Labs showed three circuit boards for a base processing unit, an accelerometer/motion detector and a camera, according to online reports. Company execs said they expect the initial kits to cost in the hundreds of dollars.