In this article we discuss how the concepts of freedom and openness of knowledge are being integrated and adopted in the principles and projects of the Academic Technology Center of the Institute of Physics and of the College of Application, both in the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS. We point to the collaborative development of Open and Free Hardware as the current challenge for the integration and consolidation of a culture of freedom. We describe how the methods and principles of free software, open education and open science can be integrated into the formation of self-managed Open and Free Hardware project development teams while also serving as educational platforms for teaching sciences and engineering, based on the concept of the hiperobject.