An ecosystem engineered to outlive us.
How parts, prints, and finished Canaries are meant to reach people without SecuraCV in the middle — and keep reaching them when nobody's tending it. Most of it is still in design; each layer says which.
State in git. Checks in CI. Incentives elsewhere.
Ecosystems die of rot — a broken link, a stale part, a page nobody owns. So every piece here is one of three durable things.
Files are the database
Vendor lists, galleries, rosters, bills of materials — each a plain file in the public repo, edited by pull request. No server to breach; the gallery already reads builds.json this way.
CI is the caretaker
Scheduled jobs check what humans forget — stock, dead links, models that no longer match their source — and open an issue when something drifts.
Incentives live elsewhere
Whoever ships hardware has their own reason to keep shipping — a fab's commission, a vendor's margin, a maker's pride. The project maintains only firmware, docs, a flasher and a catalog.
Five layers, no one in the middle
Each layer names who does the work, and what the project keeps. Status labels are honest — most machinery is designed, not shipped.
Parts find their way to makers BOMs live nightly stock check
Every device's bill of materials is a public file with part numbers at more than one distributor; one click builds a Digi-Key cart. A nightly job checks each line for stock, price and end-of-life and opens an issue when a part fades — the Engine Room shows it running.
Who ships: Mouser, Digi-Key, Seeed — parts we never touch. We keep: the CSVs and the checking robots.
Printed parts, printed forward models live program in design
Every enclosure is free under Apache-2.0 — a license that can't be revoked for anything already released — parametric OpenSCAD with committed STLs. For people without printers, vetted community members print at cost ("filament, energy, and wear"), the pattern the Voron project proved at 15,000-printer scale. Ours adds one thing: a finished Canary signs its own build and health, so the evidence is the device's self-test, not a photo. Print-on-demand farms give anyone a card-payment path without touching our time.
Who ships: neighbors with printers, print farms. We keep: the models, the vetting checklist, and a roster file.
Kits built and sold by partners in design
The designs are open, so fabs, kit partners and independent sellers can build and sell them without asking — the license already said yes. A share of fab orders is meant to flow to the community pool.
Who ships: PCB fabs, kit partners, independent vendors. We keep: the shared-project listings and a vendors page.
The blessing: badges, not gatekeeping badge & vendors page live OSHWA pending
A free compatibility badge — Works with SecuraCV — that any seller, printer, or enclosure remixer may use without asking. A primary mark reserved by simple public grant, recorded in a file anyone can audit. A vendors page that is itself a repo file: alphabetical, neutral descriptions, no rankings. And open-source-hardware certification from OSHWA, the neutral registry that tells commercial makers they're welcomed, not tolerated.
Who benefits: every honest seller. We keep: two documents and a badge file.
Money that never touches us in design
Commissions, royalties and donations are meant to land in a fiscally hosted community fund with a public ledger, paying a maker's parts and time when a neighbor asks for one they can't build. Money would flow partner → fund → maker, in the open — never customer → us. No host is stood up yet, so no money moves here today.
Who will hold it: a fiscal host with a public ledger (not yet chosen; Open Source Collective is the candidate). We keep: nothing — that's the feature.
Every remix credited, forever
The maker-community habits that work, kept in files and git.
Every remix names its source
Each entry in builds.json can name what it remixed — even a model on Printables or Thingiverse — so credit lives in git, not in someone's database.
Makes, with photos
"I made one" — a photo of real hardware on a real shelf — is the heartbeat of every maker community, and the honesty filter: real prints, not renders. Makes join the gallery by pull request.
Sliders in your browser
The enclosures are parametric OpenSCAD, the format behind the Thingiverse Customizer. Ours runs as WebAssembly on this static site — adjust, preview, download your STL, with no server to rot. Try the enclosure builder →
Mirrors, with the repo canonical
Planned profiles on Printables and MakerWorld will carry the models to where makers already are, each linking back here. Never exclusive: the repo is the original.
Proven elsewhere, borrowed honestly
None of this is invented here. Each mechanism has a project that proved it — and one cautionary tale.
Meshtastic — sell nothing, catalog everything
The LoRa mesh project ships zero hardware: manufacturers sell the radios; the project keeps the firmware, a device catalog, a web flasher and a two-tier trademark policy.
Voron — Print It Forward
Vetted community members print the parts at cost from a public queue — over 15,000 serialized machines, none shipped by the project.
ESPHome — "for X" is the whole rule
Vendors sell pre-flashed devices named "… for ESPHome," and only if the config is open and the buyer can re-flash.
Thingiverse — the cautionary tale
It invented the remix graph, photo makes and the Customizer — then closed the hardware, rewrote the terms, let the tools rot and leaked its users' data. The lesson: never betray a commons. No silent relicensing, no exclusivity, no hostage data.
Why every file here stays in the open repo, forkable, forever.
OpenFlexure — eleven vendors, five continents
An open microscope built by independent makers from Tanzania to Chile, coordinated by a vendors page and a shared design — the closest analog to a Canary ecosystem.
OSHWA — certification with teeth
Free self-certification with a public registry and real enforcement — a neutral signal that commercial derivatives are welcome.
Read the engineering
The full design — tools, fees and precedents, cited — is strategy doc 19 in the open repo. That markdown is the record; this page is the short version.
Everything labeled "in design" is exactly that — designed, argued, and written down, not shipped. In the spirit of the product, this page never pretends otherwise.