Content-addressable hardware

I've been doing a bit more hardware-related tomfoolery, and one thing that can be hard to get your head around is the sheer quantity and variety of nearly-identical hardware. This amazing documentary on Shenzhen goes into a lot of the mindset behind it, but basically everyone copies everything else, and that goes all the way from individual components up to entire products.

It can be very hard to keep everything straight, especially when a lot of things don't have model numbers, or use different model numbers for the same thing. Like in these results for breadboard power supplies, you end up with names like "red wings", "ywrobot v2", and "that white one with three capacitors". And the problem is, even if you have a sensible model number, everyone else will copy the whole thing anyway.

I think a nice way to approach this would be a pattern that turns up a lot in data management: content addressing. Instead of giving your hardware a name, the name is implied by what it describes. So if your hardware is a couple of capacitors and transistors rigged up in a certain configuration, its name would be determined by the transistors and capacitors used and the arrangement that they're in. Some components are already named by their properties so it seems like a logical continuation.

Of course, a single product could contain hundreds of components, so these names could be ridiculously long. But there's a nice answer to that too: content-addressed names can refer to other names. So a particular transistor has a consistent part number, and a configuration of those transistors (into, say, an op amp), can have a long-form name based on what it contains, but also a short-form one based on what it does. That way, you could name a breadboard power supply either as the parts it contains, or as its characteristics (input/output voltages, regulator type etc).

The goal is that, one way or another, you can get away from the idea of manufacturer-specific model numbers and just think in terms of descriptions of the parts themselves. I think that would be more in line with the open hardware mindset and hopefully lead to faster iteration and less confusion as a result.