Dear all,
In the last six months, I have been compiling diverse source of best practices in hardware documentation and got to a first version of a guide/template.
You will see in the name of the repository that I was first aiming at a minimal template, but I changed goal midways and went for a guide for exhaustive documentation.
While I will continue to refine it in the coming months, I think it is ready to be used and tested and will be very glad to get feedback at this point.
The main novelty compared to previous attempts are:
- Documentation is not focusing on the technical aspect necessary to rebuild, but on the collaborative working aspects necessary for new collaborators to be onboarded and modify the hardware.
- A path is proposed for making the documentation grow with the project, starting at the ideation phase.
Here the links to the online book entry point into the guide/template: Hardware documentation Guide (note the development is not organised on github, but on codeberg)
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This is a nice start, @Juliencolomb . I don’t use GitHub enough, but the following are resources I use for my maker class that all of you might find useful.
Making You a Better Maker - an electronic textbook
Within https://fit.instructure.com/courses/674646/files/folder/projects2025/Clinostat/General
the following resources should be helpful:
Basics of Making Blank Folders for Projects.zip - Unzip this into a Google drive folder, and it should generate subfolders for managing most aspects of a maker project.
finalprojectpresentationtemplate.pptx - Title slides for many aspects of a maker project
finalreporttableofcontentsform.docx - A template for final reports on a maker project
interfacespreadsheetv2.xlsx - An Excel file that allows groups to manage the many files of group maker projects. Just put hyperlinks to the filenames into the appropriate cells.
projectsteps.pdf - A list of steps in a maker project
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all three links get me to a login page.
Sorry, @juliencolomb . I have set everything on that site to “public”, but I’m not allowed to publish them as an external web site because of how my university interprets the Americans with Disabilities Act compliance. I’ll post what I can on a GoogleDrive site instead at
Unfortunately, this doesn’t include all of the modules, but you have access to all the project organizing tools and the electronic textbook, Making You a Better Maker (almost 300 megabytes).
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This is a great initiative! Focusing documentation on collaboration and project growth rather than just replication is a smart and much-needed shift. The staged approach from ideation onward makes it especially practical for real-world hardware projects. Looking forward to seeing how the guide evolves and contributes to better onboarding and knowledge sharing.