Open Compute Project is hosting for the first time a hardware hack event.

OCP Hardware Hack!

Wednesday, December 5, 2012· Posted by John Kenevey at 16:07 PM

OCP is hosting its first hardware hackathon at the upcoming Open Compute Summit, January 16-17, 2013 in Santa Clara, California. Starting today, you can register for the hack. We are limiting attendance to 100 people. Registering for the hack also registers you for the entire OCP summit, so you can register for both events at once. The summit and the hack are both being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

We ask that once you register for the hack, you participate in the entire hack, which will last 6-10 hours over the course of the two day summit.

An example hack project is.

Example hack project: Use low-power sensors for temperature information across a data center. Use the Zigbee wireless protocol and aggregate the heat data across the data center. This has the benefit of not requiring any additional wiring or interfaces.

Here is what you can expect.

Goals, Tools and an Example

Goal: Design a set of “Lego” blocks that can be applied to the scale compute data center space with a focus on improving energy efficiency, operational efficiency and cost reduction.

Design tools:

ECAD, electrical and holistic collaboration: Upverter

Software collaboration: GitHub

Mechanical collaboration: GrabCAD

Skill set: electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, software engineer, designer. (Ideally each team has a combination of these skill sets.)

Starting point: We recommend starting with a really simple circuit that can be modified, or even whole-scale deleted, but provides a great base to scaffold onto. It could be a connector, a micro-controller or a power circuit.