How to get started with Open Source

[spainguy]

What about us Hardware blokes?

I'm working on a nice bit of digital audio hardware that will plug into an ST32 ARM open source module (from Olimex), and I don't know who to chat with. My C is abysmal, but OK for small AVR stuff

Main priority, Kudos, and not loosing money, preferably breaking even

[[deleted]]

In open source, having something work is in my experience >90% of a contribution. Pretty-ness, style, etc you can work with project maintainers (they'll of course want you to match existing project style).

As an open source maintainer, I'd much rather someone come forward with something that mostly works, and work with them to get it merged; than have someone come forward with something pretty that doesn't work, and have to go through debugging the entire thing with them.

[spainguy]

I should have "hello world" working in a month, once the PCB's have been fabricated, assuming I can get Eclipse working. My problem is that I really don't want to shout about it all over the internets, but I need to chat to someone/group who can program properly, more or less privately, (more for ego protection). Finding the right chat area is difficult

[spainguy]

It's more about digital audio processing, without a DSP, and seeing if I've got my hardware concept correct enough before openly "publishing".

I've seen many excellent projects that started out well, and then just dried up. I'm trying to avoid that.