The blog and forums have been somewhat quiet for the last week, and some of you may have been curious what we were up to.

NBitWonder is an open source hardware website and community, with a number of projects in development, by multiple developers. When you have multiple developers, things get written and thought about in different ways. This is fantastic when tackling problems and proposing solutions, but can make things nebulous and incoherent for end users and developers interested in your project. So what do you do? Standardize!

I sat down with the other NBitWonder developers a few weeks back and talked about how to standardize our directory structure. The structure should be intuitive and easy to follow, but versatile and powerful enough to be applicable to any open source hardware project. It should be extremely easy to use; when starting a new project I want to simply be able to pull down the latest version of the standard directory structure, change a few names, and begin working on my project immediately. It was out of these discussions that I sketched out what our repository structure should look like:

As a result of these efforts, NBitWonder created a new software tool, called NewProject. Simply put, NewProject is NBitWonder’s standard directory structure, adaptable by any hobbyist to create flexible, standardized documentation, to facilitate the creation of well-documented, easy to understand open source projects. Starting a new project is a simple matter of pulling down a copy of our NewProject repository. All directories, complete with navigation and readme files, as well as copies of open source licenses are already there – just delete unnecessary project components, change a few names, and you’re ready to go!

All NBitWonder project repositories now use this new, standardized project format. Check it out!