Bug Labs wants to make innovating hardware as simple as innovating software. So they created the Bug, an open source hardware design and software for building modular mobile devices. Developers can snap together a cell phone, camera, LCD display, GPS, accelerometer, and more to build custom tools.

Software innovators have a simpler job than hardware innovators, said Peter Semmelhack, president and CEO of Bug Labs, making a presentation at the O'Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego Wednesday. "The world of atoms is very different from the world of bits," he said. Software innovators with an idea for a new application have a wealth of open source code to use, and the Internet handles distribution.

Hardware developers, on the other hand, have to deal with immense practical considerations when bringing products to market. They need to work out details of supply chains, manufacturing, distribution, and other logistics.

But the Bug is designed to shield hardware innovators from those complications.

The components of the Bug snap together like Legos, and developers can then write open source applications that run on top of the assembled devices. Because the devices are open source, and rely on an open source community to develop, maintain, and cross-fertilize ideas, Bug Labs calls the Bug an example of "community electronics" as opposed to "consumer electronics."

Bug Labs hopes to drive increased variety in mobile electronics, with specialized, custom devices catering to niche markets of hundreds of thousands of users or less, which would be too expensive to serve with a mass-market consumer devices. For example, Semmelhack said the Bug might be used to build devices to serve the blind, a population of 2 million people in the United States -- hardly a small number, but not cost-effective to build devices for given the current state of the electronics market.

Semmelhack said the device is similar to Lego Mindstorms toys, which also include components that snap together to get work done.

The software running on top of the hardware is based on Linux, with an Eclipse-based development environment called Dragonfly. The Bugnet community lets users share designs quickly.

The SDK recognizes the Bug, when attached to the PC, the same way that iTunes recognizes an iPod or iPhone. It reads the configuration of the Bug and displays a diagram showing the configuration. If you change the configuration -- for example, moving a module from one side of the Bug to another -- the SDK recognizes the change. The SDK automatically connects to Bugnet, and displays a selection of applications written for the Bug in the particular configuration that the user has attached.

Bug Labs hopes to make money from manufacturing, and from providing services for the Bug.

The Bug isn't the only open source mobile hardware platform available. Google, of course, is developing the Android open source cell phone. And the Chumby was described by Make magazine as an "open source squeezable Wi-Fi beanbag computer."