Totally Random Weekend at the Open Hardware Summit 2024

Shout out to @fongkikid for this year’s branding. This illustrated PCB badge is so cool!

Totally random Montreal

This is my third time at the Open Hardware Summit and, I’ll just say it, it gets better and better every year! Technically, I’m an electrical engineer and have been living under the grad-school rock for the last two years so I am a bit of a newbie in maker and artist communities. The Summit is a great opportunity to connect with other hardware people from all over the world! I have been so fortunate to have been sent to the summit all three times by my ex-open-hardware-company, SparkFun!

This spring the summit took place in beautiful Montreal at Concordia University and LESPACEMAKER. The Summit was broken into two days: first day for talks and second day for workshops. Here is an overview of my experience.

Talks

[Keynote] Danielle Boyer - From Bytes to Bright Futures: The Robots Changing the World

Danielle Boyer is an indigenous roboticist, educator, and the founder of the STEAM Connection which provides free robotics education for youth. She designs robots for her community with her community in mind to equip indigenous communities with tech skills.

Her SkoBot was designed to revitalize indigenous languages that are going extinct due to colonization and assimilation. Language resources are dwindling and hard to access. The SkoBot sits on the shoulder of the wearer and teaches the youth their traditional languages. The SkoBot speaks four different languages that are vital to preserving indigenous cultures and identities.

Erik Contreras - Opportunities in Obsolescence

Erik is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer, engineer, and self-proclaimed dumpster diver whose work involves repurposing E-Waste. He’s from the Bay Area where there’s so much technological innovation but due to planned obsolescence and negligence, a lot of technology ends up in the dumpster. He created an “Office of Hacked Objects” in which he repurposed discarded, obsolete tech by repairing his finds with a touch of his personal style. For his office, he’s created the Arduino Auto Type(Writer), WebCam(corder), and Amazon Echo Answering Machine. His overarching question is: can we instill our identity and artistic expression onto mass produced objects?

Jorvon Moss - Making Robots Lifelike

Jorvon, aka Odd_Jayy, is an illustrator and self-taught technologist. He builds pet robots that express the illusion of life, essentially making robots as lifelike as possible, and the human brain does the rest. His designs focus on biomimicry and designing robots that reflect nature. His newest companion robot is a giant bug named “Digit” which sits on Jay’s shoulder and goes wherever he does!

Guy Dupont - How (and why) to Design Open Hardware for Your Loved Ones

Guy (pronounced guy) is a software engineer by day but the world’s best gift-giver the rest of the time! He’s made many cool, hyper-personalized hardware gifts for friends and family to solve their unique problems with a bit of technology (only if they want that of course). Here are some tips he shared for making the perfect gift:

Good gifts are ones that are “used”, unique, personal, handmade, and autonomous.
When giving a gift, you owe the recipient as much usability as possible because if it isn’t usable, the gift might not get used!
Make something that requires no maintenance for the recipients. Implement some discreet error reporting for when things go wrong (like an RGB LED).
Lean on paradigms/hardware the user is comfortable with, like buttons, knobs, LEDs, screens, etc.
People are usually more comfortable with using software than hardware so Guy likes to build a web user interface to easily configure hardware when updates need to be made.
Make sure that the gift isn’t fragile (or doesn’t look fragile) so people aren’t scared to use it.
Open-sourcing even very specific, personal hardware projects is still important because that information can be an entry point for people trying to get into whatever hardware, software, sensor, design technique you have some experience with!

Kari Love, David Rios, Shuang Cai, Becky Stern - Disposable Vape Batteries: The Why, The How, and the Vape Synth

This group of presenters includes faculty and researchers from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (my program!). They noticed the amount of trash created from the use of disposable vapes and they came together to think through a creative and joyous reuse of the discarded technology, so the vape synth was born.

In their presentation, team vape synth described the careful process of opening up and modifying the vape. Inside a vape is a battery, air pressure sensor, heat coil, and charge circuit. Through their reinvention, they had the goal to reuse as many parts of the original vape as possible, which even meant using the vape housing. They brought along their physical prototypes and have plans for another version of this vape with pushbuttons and the ability to transmit MIDI data over Bluetooth to be used in an audio software.

Fiona Bell & Leah Buechley - Developing Sustainable Biomaterials for 3D Printing

Fiona is a post-doc researcher at UNM’s Hand and Machine Lab and presented her research in developing an open source material that is bio-based and biodegradable for digital fabrication. She developed this material which she named Reclaym. It’s a biomaterial clay made from her composted food waste. This was a very physical practice as she used her hands to mold shapes with a material that was ever-changing based on what she cooked that week.

To create a biomaterial that is printable, the material needs to be extrudable (requires cohesion, hardness, inelasticity) and have the right print quality (stability, strength, and accuracy). Her lab sourced an open-source clay 3D printer to print biomaterials and create forms that can’t be achieved by hand. She brought in beautiful samples of 3D printed vessels made out of an eggshell paste. Not only can it be printed reliably into rigid shapes, this material biodegrades completely and reincorporates key nutrients to the soil. Developing biomaterials encourages a shift in thinking towards circular models of making and reminds us of the interconnections between humans and nature.

Gracy Whelihan - Psuedo Random Number Generator

Gracy is another member of the ITP community who presented on her graduate thesis at the Open Hardware Summit. She is fascinated by randomness and the algorithms behind the random functions in p5.js and Arduino. In her research she learned that computers are really bad at generating randomness so those algorithms only generate a pseudo random output (which only looks random). True randomness can only be found in nature, so she aspired to harness it’s unpredictability: Gracy used sensor hardware to gather environmental data to create a closer to true random number generator. Using multiple sensors, measuring different environmental data, in different locations she set up a broker to receive all the raw numbers. On a server, she runs some operations to concatenate the values to various lengths to create a seed number for the LCG algorithm. You can contribute your own sensor data following this Github repo’s instructions to make the output more random.

Workshops

Day 2 of the Summit was all workshops, held at the amazing LESPACEMAKER, a maker space and creative community in Montreal. The space itself was really unique. It looked like it operated out of some abandoned car shop. They set up a really nice outside space in front and staged some interestingly decorated work rooms for the Summit. These workshops were enticing and PACKED full of participants!

Léa Boudreau & Galen Macdonald - Dead Bugs & Other Electronic Critters

Léa and Galen lead a very fun and cute workshop on soldering together electronic critters which become kind of freeform circuit sculptures. We were given all the components to put together the analog circuit, the schematic diagram, and some soldering irons. For more info on this workshop, check out their excellent documentation.

Candide Uyanze - Pocket Portal Power Play: Crafting Wi-Fi Access Points

Candide showed a group of us how to create a wi-fi access point using a Wemos D1 mini board. You could use your wi-fi captive portal to share an article/essay/poem, welcome guests to your party, plug your mixtape, promote your event, etc. If you would like to create your own wi-fi access point, you can find a lot more information on this Github repo.

My wi-fi access point with custom SSID name!

Kate Hartman & Olivia Prior - Conductivity on the go: Make your own e-textile pocket conductivity tester!

I didn’t actually get to attend this workshop, but this is a great pic I got of another one of my professors/colleagues from ITP, Kate, co-leading her session on making a conductivity tester for e-textiles. Using a coin-cell battery, alligator clips, and an LED you can easily test if your material is conductive!

Check out more of their work at Ontario College of Art and Design University’s research lab, Social Body Lab.

Darcy Neal - Sensing the World Around You with EMF

Darcy designed these GORGEOUS printed circuit boards and let us populate these badges during her workshop. The EMF Explorer badge lets you listen to the invisible sounds of electromagnetic frequencies over a pair of headphones. As you move with the badge around the electronics around you, the audio frequency modulates based on the EMF that is being radiated. For more info on this project, check out Darcy’s website.

Some other totally random stuff from the weekend

Exciting to see SF products I designed on the DigiKey table!

Day 1 after party at North Star Machines À Piastres arcade bar

Furry wall and workshop schedule at LESPACEMAKER

Nate tells us about SparkFun’s high-precision GPS

Phone booth?! They got rid of these in NYC, totally random!

This was a whirlwind of a weekend and so much fun! Thanks so much to my SparkFun family for making it possible for me to get to Montreal. Thanks to OSHWA for organizing such a great panel of speakers and workshops. I met so many creative and passionate individuals, learned about great applications of open hardware which inspired me to get back to my own projects. I had to scurry back to NYC right after the Summit to return to my graduate thesis project. Here’s a very tired Priyanka, perpetually dreaming of open hardware, developing a synth prototype hours later. Keep on makin stuff and don’t forget to get your projects open source certified!