Funds of the Tessel Project are held by the Bocoup Foundation.
Funds for the Tessel Project are generated in a few ways:
- We receive royalties from our manufacturing partners, usually a few percentage points of each product sold.
- We generated money through Amazon referral links for hardware, for example our hardware modules recommendation list.
- We receive money directly through donations at Tessel's Open Collective page.
- We receive money through partnerships or sponsorships with companies.
The Tessel Project has no persons on payroll and is staffed entirely by volunteers. Funds must be approved for use by the Steering Committee. These are allocated for a few broad uses:
- Server hosting and domain names.
- Purchasing of hardware directly from manufacturing partners for use in hackathons, advertisements, conferences, or direct engagement with customers or team members. Expenses of this type can be submitted through the Open Collective page
- Equipment for the testing and validation of hardware. For example: micro USB cables, Tessels, and Tessel modules may be purchased to diagnose a specific hardware issue occurring under circumstances we need to recreate in-house. Another example is the purchase of logic or radio analyzers, which are usually shared within the team.
- In limited (one-off) quantities, we may purchase swag to reward project contributors.
- The funding of additional R&D, when required. For example: if the Tessel Project moves forward with a new module, we may need to fund the purchase of a breakout board or potentially a prototype board.
- In limited circumstances, we may fund contracting work done by individuals, depending on the urgency of the task for the community.
The Tessel Project is open to directly funding tools, R&D, and bug/feature bounties. Please submit an RFC to suggest any of these.