Building Up Excitement for Teardown 2024

Maker News
Building Up Excitement for Teardown 2024

Each year in Portland, Oregon, hackers, artists, and enthusiasts congregate at the behest of open-source crowdfunding platform Crowd Supply. This year’s event is a particular cause for excitement for me, a) because I’m attending and b) because they have handed the reins to my friend Helen Leigh, which implies a smashing good time will be had by all.

So what is Teardown? Put simply, it’s a three-day event focused on hacking, discovering, and sharing hardware. This is achieved by a combination of talks, workshops, installations, demos, and space and time to just hack. All are welcome and encouraged to attend, from artists to engineers, designers to educators.

Personally, I’m mostly excited by the amazing roster of people who are attending. A quick perusal of the schedule reveals a plethora of extraordinary makers and fantastic topics, including my friend chipperdoodlesAnwaar Faceplate workshop, a talk about using 3d-printed parts in production by my personal hero Carrie Sundra, a chance to go hands-on with Kevin Santo Cappuccio’s Jumperless breadboard, and the story of the “creation, design, manufacture, sales and eventual profit of the Arduboy” by its creator, Kevin Bates. And that’s just the first day!!

Helen and I also did a livestream recently about the event, if you’d like to get a feel for the flavour:

YouTube player

(pun not intended, but as you’ll see, Helen is really excited about the food, so now I am too!) Herein you’ll also learn more about the unique venue this year, which I think is going to lend itself to a particularly exciting vibe. You can also watch last year’s recap, or listen to The Amp Hour or Embedded.fm podcasts to learn more.

Photo credit Adam McCombs @nanographs@chaos.social

Intrigued? Head to Crowd Supply’s Teardown page to learn more or grab your tickets, which are also available at the door, as well as discounted or free for volunteer, low-income, or hackerspace attendees.

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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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