After attending Elecia White's "On Cats and Typing" talk, I felt a little more motivated to look into robots. The robot arm used in her demo was the MeArm by Mime Industries. It is built out of commodity micro servos and laser-cut acrylic. I looked at it and thought I could get one up and running on my own. It is sold as a self-assembled kit but in the spirit of open source, people are also allowed to laser-cut their own pieces using the open-sourced DXF file available via Github.

Or at least that was the theory.

In practice, the DXF doesn't work. Inkscape couldn't load it. CorelDRAW couldn't load it. Onshape couldn't load it. Fusion 360 - from Autodesk, the people who created AutoCAD which is where DXF came from - couldn't load it.

MeArm Broken

Well, that was disappointing.

Google results confirm I'm not alone. I found many reports of people failing to get this DXF to work for them, and not a single success story. Of course, there's a little selection bias here: people who encounter no problems rarely go on the internet to announce they had no problems. But I would have expected a few of the forum posts from people having problems to get some positive responses, and I didn't find any of those.

This is frustrating. I'm unlikely to go and buy the kit when I already had most of the pieces on hand and it is in theory open source for me to make my own. It's impossible to tell if there's a perfectly innocent explanation or if this was done maliciously to slap on the "open source" label without actually risking any cut into sales. Whatever the explanation for why this DXF is broken, it doesn't change the fact that it is broken. When the publicly available source file is unusable. Is it still open source?

I vote no.