It’s that time of year again! The 2023 Open Hardware Summit by the Open Source Hardware Association is just around the corner. This year, the Summit will be held both in-person in New York City, as well as streamed online for virtual attendees all over the world! Tickets are available now; the summit is on April 28th and 29th, 2023.
Tindie is proud to once again be sponsoring the Summit. Our very own Laurel Cummings will be speaking on Day 2, at 11AM! Her talk is about creating a technological go-bag, for those of us that travel a lot or need to do work in the field often. Make sure to bookmark her talk!
There’s a litany of amazing speakers again this year; check out the full list here. One of the other talks that jumped out at me is Steph Piper’s talk on creating great instructions. One of the Achilles’ heels of many awesome open-source projects is a lack of quality documentation. It can make a huge difference; so if you’re an open-source project creator, make sure to check out Steph’s talk on Day 1 at 4pm.
If you attend in person, you’ll get a sweet swag bag with all sorts of cool stuff! For those who can’t make it physically, this year they’re also emailing out a digital swag bag. I think this is a really cool idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s in it!
The 2022 OHS was on April 22, 2022. It was held online this year — though hopefully next year will be in person! The summit was a great success, and it was hugely informative and entertaining. The opening keynote by Ashley Jane Lewis was simply amazing. As a white man, I don’t feel it’s my place to try and summarize or repeat her message — I simply would like you to go see it and hear it for yourself. You can watch the keynote here:
The summit celebrated all the amazing contributions to Open Hardware over the last year, and as I mentioned in my previous post I was really looking forward to the Open Source Toys for Endangered Animals talk. And they didn’t disappoint! Not only did we get to see some adorable animals (including tapirs and ocelots and sun bears) but we also got to see how Open Hardware was helping to make a real impact on the quality of life of these endangered species. Valencia the tapir showed us that interesting open source hardware doesn’t have to be high-tech! Often low-tech solutions (like a pineapple on a string) can solve the problem (tapir needing stimulation). Not coincidentally, I now really want to visit their lab (Dinalab) in Panama! You can see their entire talk here. Check out some of their clientele in the image below.
As sponsors of the 2022 Summit, we at Tindie got to chat with a bunch of attendees at our virtual “table”. We talked about neat products that are Open Hardware Certified, such as the Mooltipass and the Vinduino (a past Hackaday Prize winner!) that are listed on Tindie. Our sister website Hackaday was there also, revealing info about this year’s upcoming Hackaday Prize. The first challenge Planet-Friendly Power is almost over, and on May 1st the second challenge Reuse, Recycle, Revamp starts. So get your sustainable ideas flowing, and create a project on Hackaday.io to enter the contest!
Sustainability was another key topic at the summit. One of the talks that I really enjoyed was Helen Little’s talk about recycling plastics into 3D printable pellets. She works for a company called re:3D making large-scale 3D printers. They are very interested in creating a sustainable process for reusable, 3D printable plastics. While there are already some filaments available made with recycled plastics, they want to be able to feed ground up plastic directly into a printer.
In order for this process to be practical and sustainable, the resulting plastic pellets have to have material properties that are consistent and strong enough to displace some of the brand-new materials from the market. In order to test the materials, they first dehydrate the recycled plastic, as most plastics are hydrophilic and will pull water from the air. Then using an open-source tool called ImageJ, the particles of the plastic are analyzed to check for grain size differences between different recycling processes. Then they create many prints, including standard additive test pieces like NIST’s Standard Test Artifact (public domain!) and a few other prints for testing various parameters like bed adhesion and extrusion rate (like the Moai above!). There is just so much detail to go into that I strongly recommend you just go watch her talk if you are interested!
The entire summit was a lot of fun. It was great to connect with a bunch of other hackers interested in all sorts of things! If you’re working on something and want to get it certified as Open Hardware, check out their website at https://www.oshwa.org/ and click on the Certification page. If you want to watch the entire summit or just certain talks, check out their YouTube channel where the individual talks have now been uploaded. You can also see the archive of the whole stream.
The Open Hardware Summit happens every year in the spring, and this year is once again happening online on April 22, 2022. Every OHS is jam-packed with awesome talks; this year hackers working on everything from sustainability to pellet 3D printing to open source laptops will be filling the 8-hour event. This year, Tindie, Hackaday, and Supplyframe are all sponsoring the event, and will be running a virtual ‘booth’ on the OHS Discord server which we encourage you to check out during the summit! The booth will be discussing Tindie & Open Hardware, as well as details about this year’s Hackaday Prize.
There are so many fabulous talks this year, but a few to keep an eye on are Leon Anavi’s talk about using open source software to make open source hardware – Open Source Tools for Making Open Source Hardware runs from 11:50 to 12:10. Another Tindie friend, Alex Glow, will be talking about A Better Hardware Life Cycle: Build Stuff Without Feeling Like a Jerk from 10:40 to 11:00. This talk is all about sustainability in open hardware; how to choose materials, design, produce and repair in an Eco-friendly and sustainable way.
Another talk that shouldn’t be missed is Andy Quitmeyer’s Open Source Toys for Endangered Animals! I mean, we get to look at cute animals playing with open source hardware to help keep them stimulated, healthy, and happy! What’s not to love? This talk is at 15:20 and runs until 15:40.
Tickets are still available! The goodie bag has some really cool stuff in it this year, including some very awesome artwork by Dushan Milic. Buying a ticket helps support OSHWA and the costs of running OHS. If you are unable to afford a ticket due to financial difficulty, don’t worry – you can watch the livestream for free!
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