Live: Open Hardware Summit 2023

Electronics
Live: Open Hardware Summit 2023

Welcome to Open Hardware Summit 2023! We’re on-site at NYU, bringing you live coverage — refresh often to make sure you see the latest! Learn more on the OHS web site, plus grab in-person and virtual tickets or stream online.


Friday consists of two parallel tracks: speakers and workshops, after opening remarks and an amazing keynote by Dr. Carlotta A. Berry.

Opening remarks by Claire⚡Cassidy, Sid Drmay and lee wilkins

Huaishu Peng’s talk How to DIY High-Resolution Flexible (and Kirigami) Circuits with a Fiber Laser Engraver demonstrated an incredible technique for creating high-quality, flexible PCBs using a fiber laser.

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Fibercuit: Prototyping High-Resolution Flexible and Kirigami Circuits with a Fiber Laser Engraver

During the lunch break, we took a trip over to Kelly Heaton‘s Circuit Garden installation, as well as to her lab at NYU Brooklyn.

Kelly Heaton’s Circuit Garden installation

Freyja Van De Boom’s The State of Glitch workshop was a fascinating exploration of the lack of regulation around AI and how we might preserve our humanity and autonomy.


A big hit with everyone, except perhaps the artwork on the walls, was Andy Quitmeyer’s Bubblepunk: Make Upcycled Toys for Fun and Science. By hacking cheap toys and adding highly-optimized bubble solution, participants were able to assemble “the AK-47 of bubble makers” and fill the air with prodigious portions of popables at a ridiculous rate.

Bubblepunk participants test out their contraptions.

In his Build-A-Book Workshop, Joey Castillo lead participants through assembly of an open hardware Raspberry Pi Pico-based e-book reader from scratch.

Open Book Abridged Edition kit

After talks and workshops, there was Knowledge Sharing & Zine Making, followed later by an afterparty at NYC Resistor in Brooklyn.

Nerding out with Arduino’s Massimo Banzi

Saturday kicked off with a reflection on the State of Open Hardware by OHSWA team members Alicia Gib, lee wilkins, Claire Cassidy and Sid Drmay. Alicia received a nice surprise recognition for her decade of stewardship of the organization.

Alicia’s surprise recognition slide; photo credit Rehana Al-Soltane

Parallel talk and workshop tracks resumed with Anuradha Reddy & Christin Lundgren’s highly-anticipated Kolam Antenna Workshop, during which we created functional Bluetooth antennas based on traditional South Indian folk patterns.

Kolam examples and antennae

Laurel Cummings gave a fantastic, Tinder-inspired talk called Your Technological Go-Bag and You: Consolidating Your Workbench for the Field, in which participants swiped right or left depending on whether they thought various tools should be part of the go-bag.

RolaTube masts? Swipe right!

Shaughn Martel’s Cross pollination for Cultural Shifts was a fascinating look at cross-disciplinary influences, as well as his extremely unique music projects.

Objects on a lazy susan give off their own unique frequencies

Becca Rose’s Potato Computer Club workshop was a delightful respite from soldering, consisting largely of acrostics, colouring, and making potato batteries.

Lighting an LED required collaboration with other Potato Club members!

Soldering irons were back out for Alex Lynd’s Solder Your Own Cat-Shaped USB Hacking Tool with the Nugget. This cute-looking device is actually more of a cat in hacker’s clothing, since it emulates an HID device, and can deploy attacks to a physically connected computer, such as Rickrolling, or even more malicious, thanks to a built-in scripting language.

One of the Linux examples cycles through display palettes, which is jarring, but harmless

The even concluded with an Un-Conference, followed by an industry/academic networking happy hour, which was an excellent chance to connect more with OSHWA’s Trailblazer fellows.

Winning Un-Conference topics; photo credit Claire ⚡ Cassidy
On the way to the Rooftop party; photo credit Amitabh Shrivastava

The 2023 Open Hardware Summit was an incredible event, representing the fusion of numerous maker and academic communities, and clearly demonstrating the impact of the open source movement. The organizers did an incredible job of delivering fascinating talks and engaging workshops, while ensuring an inclusive, safe experience for all. A huge congratulations to Claire⚡Cassidy, Sid Drmay, lee wilkins, and the entire OSHWA team on such an incredibly successful event! I can’t wait to see what 2024 brings!!!

The incredible OHS core team!
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David bought his first Arduino in 2007 as part of a Roomba hacking project. Since then, he has been obsessed with writing code that you can touch. David fell in love with the original Pebble smartwatch, and even more so with its successor, which allowed him to combine the beloved wearable with his passion for hardware hacking via its smartstrap functionality. Unable to part with his smartwatch sweetheart, David wrote a love letter to the Pebble community, which blossomed into Rebble, the service that keeps Pebbles ticking today, despite the company's demise in 2016. When he's not hacking on wearables, David can probably be found building a companion bot, experimenting with machine learning, growing his ever-increasing collection of dev boards, or hacking on DOS-based palmtops from the 90s.

Find David on Mastodon at @ishotjr@chaos.social and to a far lesser extent on Twitter at @IShJR.

View more articles by David Groom

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