Social Events
| May 2: 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM |
Radio Snack | Hardware Happy Hour | Helen Leigh – Crowd Supply | Open Hardware Happy Hour is an informal way to socialize, show off your projects, and talk about the world of open source hardware. Join us for drinks, hacks and snacks to celebrate the start of Open Hardware Summit 2024. |
More Info Here 916 Ontario E Unit 430 |
| May 3: 8:00 PM – Late | North Star Machines À Piastres |
Afterparty | OSHWA | 3908 Boul. Saint-Laurent, Montréal, QC H2W 1Y2 | No RSVP |
| May 4: 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM |
LESPACEMAKER | Afterparty | LESPACEMAKER | Join us for a casual social after day 2 activities are over! | Conference attendees only |
Day 0 – Pre-Event on May 2nd
| Time | Location | Presenter | Title | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3:00 PM-6:00 PM |
Concordia Center for Creative Reuse |
Janna Frenzel, Christine White, Juan Gomez, Cyrus L-Khalatbari | Doing more with what we already have: a mini reuse make-a-thon | Open access to used materials can fuel creative practice and contribute to a circular economy. This workshop includes a short tour and mini-make-a-thon at Concordia University’s Centre for Creative Reuse (CUCCR). Together, we will explore institutional waste reduction strategies, afterlives of objects and creative reuse, and make funky things from old electronics and other discarded materials! For instance, we will isolate electronics components and cast these in clear epoxy resin or glycerine to preserve and turn them into ornamental objects – keychains, necklaces, or bracelets. | Signup Here, no Summit tickets required. |
| 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM | Radio Snack | Hardware Happy Hour | Helen Leigh – Crowd Supply | Open Hardware Happy Hour is an informal way to socialize, show off your projects, and talk about the world of open source hardware. Join us for drinks, hacks and snacks to celebrate the start of Open Hardware Summit 2024. | More Info Here |
Day 1 – Talks & Tables @ Concordia University on May 3rd
| Time | Presenter | Talk Title | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00 AM | Doors Open | ||
| 10:00 – 10:10 | Welcome! | ||
| 10:10 – 10: 55 | Keynote: Danielle Boyer | From Bytes to Bright Futures: The Robots Changing the World | Danielle Boyer, a youth robotics inventor, is deeply committed to promoting educational equity within her Anishinaabe community. The Anishinaabeg, an Indigenous people group that has resided in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States for millenia, have faced systemic oppression resulting in the erosion of cultural heritage, diminished resources, and limited opportunities. Drawing from her experiences and passion for robotics, Boyer shares her innovative approach to addressing these challenges. Through the creation of personal robots, she weaves together elements of cultural education, language revitalization, and technical proficiency to bridge critical knowledge gaps and elevate her community’s prospects — all for free of cost. From adorable (and wearable) droids dedicated to language preservation to affordable robots costing less than $10, discover the power of using technology for good. Having impacted the lives of 800,000 youths and disbursing tens of thousands of robots, Boyer highlights the transformative potential of community engagement and grassroots initiatives in effecting enduring change. |
| 10:55 – 11:05 | Erik Contreras | Opportunities In Obsolescence | This work focuses on creative approaches on repurposing obsolete tech and electronic waste using open source hardware. The hypothesis behind this work is that “true” ownership comes from the modification and repair of personal tech. |
| 11:05 – 11:25 | Ashwin Whitchurch | Taking open source medical devices to production for consumer use: The open & closed way | This is the story of two open source projects and how we took them from idea to a marketable product. One project is still open source and the other one was brought to market with venture funding. This talk focus on the experience, mistakes made and what worked during this process. |
| 11:25 – 11:40 |
Phil Lam | Tales from the shop: running an open source hardware company | Open sourcing a hardware product is just the first step; unlike software, relatively few users have the resources to build directly from designs. Sourcing and manufacturing infrastructure is thus key to hardware being meaningfully open, and in this talk we present a collection of anecdotes about what that looks like day-to-day. |
| BREAK | |||
| Lightning Talks: 11:50 | Zeyu Yan | SolderlessPCB: Empowering Electronic Component Reuse in PCB Prototyping with Detachable 3D Printed Housings | We introduces SolderlessPCB, a suite of techniques for solder-free PCB prototyping, designed to encourage the recycling and reuse of electronic components. Central to this approach are custom 3D-printable housings for mounting SMD components onto PCBs. |
| 11:55 | Rodney Trusty | Manufacturing E-Textiles that survive machine wash | Sewn soft circuits are often highly vulnerable to mechanical stress and typically result in unreliable connections between components. This vulnerability is completely exposed during machine wash. I will cover a few design rules that drastically increase reliability. |
| 12:00 | Jason Prince | Makers of the Built Environment: OpenHVAC and the Trades | Learn some Building Science, discover a community bringing Open Source to building mechanical systems (OpenHVAC), and consider a career near you to make buildings healthy, energy-efficient, and resilient. |
| 12:05 | Ivo Emanuilov | Patent pledges and open hardware | Back in 2014, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk famously pledged that ‘all our patent are belong to you’, effectively removing the ‘wall of Tesla patents’, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology. Despite the pledge, however, Tesla has recently engaged in patent infringement litigation with an Australian supercapacitor company. This has raised concerns among the uninitiated about the actual legal effect of patent pledges. This talk focuses on the questions about the nature and limitations of open patent pledges as cross-licensing agreements, and what they mean for open hardware companies’ freedom to operate. |
| 12:10 | Jorvon Moss (Odd_Jayy) | Illusion of life, making robots lifelike/sociable for modern day society | In my presentation, I will explore innovative strategies for designing robots that seamlessly integrate into human society by prioritizing comfort. By focusing on aspects such as physical appearance, behavior, and interaction capabilities, we aim to enhance acceptance and usability of robots in various human environments, fostering a harmonious relationship between humans and machines |
| 12:20 – 12:40 | Guy Dupont | The gift that keeps on blinking: how (and why) to design bespoke, open hardware for your loved ones. | The best gifts are one-of-a-kind, personal, and make recipients’ lives better. As technologists in 2024, we have never been better equipped to create custom devices to delight and/or assist our loved ones. This presentation will lay out some guidelines for designing bespoke hardware, as well as a collection of my favorite tools for getting things made quickly, affordably, and beautifully. |
| 12:40 – 1:00 |
Eurus Team | Eurus: Emergency Use ResUscitator System | Eurus is an Emergency-Use Resuscitator System (EURS) developed in response to the global call to action to engineers while the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to exhaust the available ventilator supply in most hospitals around the world. This system was designed by repurposing hospital supplies by automating an Ambu bag with a blood pressure cuff actuated by a pneumatic valve system operated by a microcontroller and other simple parts. |
| Lunch | |||
| 2:00 – 2:15 | Cyrus L-Khalatbari | Arts and design strategies to address climate emergency and action: the case of electronic waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana | Drawing from the summit’s focus on untold histories (and communities), our talk, structured in three sections, will be centred around the case-study of Accra, Ghana. The city is, in the context of e-waste discourses, “infamously” known for its connection with Agbogbloshie, referred by our western media as the world’s biggest “computer graveyard”. Taking the counterpoint of this narrative, our first section will map the e-waste landfil’s hidden human infrastructure of recyclers, repairers, scrap-dealers, burners. Our second section will introduce the Agbogbloshie Maker Space Platform (AMP), empowering the community through open access to hardware modification, recycling and literacy. The third section will dive into the reflective practice of Akwasi Bediako Afrane, creatively repurposing e-waste “gadgets” for collective critical awareness and action. These three sections will enable us to shed light on the role of open-hardware, participatory design and creative repurposing to federate and amplify voices of marginalised Ghanaian e-waste workers. |
| 2:15 – 2:25 | Finn Hafting | Modularize your electronics with BREAD [Broadly Reconfigurable and Expandable Automation Device] | BREAD was developed to make automation and data acquisition more accessible for scientists and researchers. In settings, where low costs and customizability are important, BREAD’s modular design allows users to swap components in and out according to the needs of their specific project. This talk will cover the design principles behind BREAD and its uses so far in the automation of industrial pilot projects and biological growth experiments. |
| 2:25 – 2:45 | Cedric Honnet | FiberCircuits: Miniature Flexible PCBs with MCUs & Sensors for Interactive Textile Fibers | FiberCircuits explore the miniaturization of electronics to be woven into textiles like fibers. With both scalability and DIY approach in mind, the presentation details design and fabrication details about high density PCB challenges, miniature component selection, encapsulation for embedding in fabrics, and (embedded) software tips. Finally, some applications are proposed to speculate about a future where electronics devices are seamlessly integrated into our clothing. https://fibercircuits.github.io |
| 2:45 – 2:55 | Thea Flowers | How the Voron community embodies peer production | The Voron team doesn’t sell any 3D printers, instead, they have an incredible community of people and vendors working together to create all of the parts, kits, and mods they need. You don’t just buy or build a Voron, you participate in a distributed ecosystem of peer production. This talk takes a look at how this open hardware community has thrived through their unorthodox means of production. |
| 2:55 – 3:55 | TABLE TIME | View all tables here | |
| 4:00 – 4:20 | Kari Love, David Rios, Shuang Cai, Becky Stern | Repurposing Disposable Vape Batteries: The Why, The How, and the Vape Synth | We will go over practical steps required to repurpose disposable vape batteries, as well as the economic and political history responsible for the proliferation of these “disposable” devices. Then we will share one example project, an electronic wind instrument Vape Synth, inspired by both the salvaged parts and the form of a discarded vape. |
| 4:20 – 4:40 | Fiona Bell & Leah Buechley | Developing Sustainable Biomaterials for 3D Printing | With rising concerns about sustainability, materials that are renewable and readily biodegradable (known as biomaterials) have become an increasingly important area of research. In this presentation, I will discuss how to develop sustainable biomaterials specifically for the purposes of 3D printing. |
| 4:40 – 4:55 | Mark Wu | Why I forget to add test points and why I never will again: Test Equipment Interface Project for YOU | As makers, we start projects with excitement and build quickly! Thinking about requirements, validation, and testing kills the vibe so we often forget to add traditional test interfaces. This project is a customizable framework I personally use which transformed my testing experience. |
| 4:55 – 5:15 | Jasmine Lu | ecoEDA: Recycling E-waste During Electronics Design | The amount of e-waste generated by discarding devices is enormous but options for recycling remain limited. However, inside a discarded device (from consumer devices to one’s own prototypes), an electronics designer could find dozens to thousands of reusable components, including microcontrollers, sensors, voltage regulators, etc. Despite this, existing electronic design tools assume users will buy all components anew. To tackle this, we developed ecoEDA, an interactive tool that enables electronics designers to explore recycling electronic components during the design process. In this talk, I’ll discuss our open source tool and how our approach to e-waste component reuse aligns with many of the goals of open-source hardware. |
| 5:15 – 5:30 | Gracy Whelihan | Psuedo Random Number Generator | This project originated from a curiosity about the generation of random numbers by humans and computers. While randomness has diverse applications, creating it poses a significant challenge. Computers generate pseudo-random numbers through deterministic processes, appearing statistically random, while nature can produce true randomness. Leveraging this concept, this project aims to develop a “closer to truly random” number generator by employing environmental sensors to collect data from the natural surroundings. The richness of this random number generation process lies not only in the diversity of the data and the variety of sensors but also in community contributions. |
| 5:30 – 6:00 | Community Checkin |
Day 2 – Discussions, Workshops, & Unconference @ LESPACEMAKER on May 4th
Workshop Room 1 – Bagel Room
Doors Open at 10am
| Time | Name | Title | Description | Signup Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10:30- 11:30 | Léa Boudreau & Galen Macdonald | Dead Bugs and Other Electronic Critters | This workshop proposes a simple and playful approach to freeform circuitry through a build-a-long activity and an exploration of creaturehood. | Signup Here (tickets for the conference required) |
| 11:30-1:00 | James Craig, Kyle Chisholm, Alex Warner | How to Make a Sex Toy with an Embedded PCB Strain Gage, and talk about other uses for sensors. | The focus of the workshop will be exploring the electronics and design of a strain gauge based paddle. We will cover the hardware and software of the paddle. Additionally we will discuss other sensors that have been used in the bedroom. | Signup Here (Tickets for the conference required) |
| 2:00 – 3:00 | Candide Uyanze | Pocket Portal Power Play: Crafting Wi-Fi Access Points with a Twist | In this hands-on workshop, you’ll turn a WEMOS D1 Mini board into a portable access point that can broadcast custom web pages to nearby devices (without actually connecting to WI-FI 😉). Join us as we explore the potential of captive portals for unique, unconventional, and subversive site-specific interventions. |
Signup Here (Tickets for the conference required) |
| 3:00 – 4:00 | Erin RobotZwrrl | Make a Robot Butterfly | Do robot butterflies dream of electric snails? ✨ 🦋 🐌 Find out in this hands-on workshop! Make a Robot Butterfly that adoringly flaps its wings and sparkles its lights in response to sensors. In this workshop you will be guided through soldering the electronics and assembling the pieces, all while learning interesting facts about nature along the way! |
Signup Here (Tickets for the conference required) |
| 4:00 – 5:30 | Darcy Neal | Sensing the world around you with EMF | Solder your very own EMF sensing board and discover the hidden world of Electromagnetic Frequencies around you. By listening to the ‘hidden’ frequencies that various electronics emit, you can begin to gain an understanding of various electronics functions. Listen to wifi, outlets, light switches, bluetooth, and anything that uses power! This workshop is accessible to all skill levels, and requires the use of a soldering iron. Participants will assemble their very own EMF sensor board, which comes with an illuminated design that can be worn on a lanyard for extra bling. | Signup Here (tickets for the conference required) |
Workshop Room 2 – Croissant Room
| Time | Name | Title | Description | Signup Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10:30- 11:30 | Kazmy Chi, Don Undeen | Making Paper Interfaces for an Interactive Musical Sculpture | In this workshop, participants will collaborate in the creation of an interactive sculpture. We will create folded paper objects integrated with conductive materials and musical Arduino circuitry as we explore the intersection of form, interactivity, sound, and materials. These elements, as pieces of the sculpture, will be activated to create an interactive piece, blending various viewpoints into a singular artwork. | Sign up here (tickets for the summit required) |
| 11:30-1:00 | Alyshia Bustos, Nanibah Chacon, Leah Buechley | Designing Interactive Murals: Blending traditional mural-making practices and ubiquitous computing | This workshop will start with an overview of Interactive Murals, a traditional mural with embedded electrical components. Although, we can’t make a mural during the workshop we will be able to create a mini interactive painting that follows the same process we use in our interactive mural projects. | Sign Up Here (Tickets for Summit required) |
| 3:00 – 4:00 | Kate Hartman & Olivia Prior | Conductivity on the Go | In this workshop, we will build off of existing work in the e-textile community and create DIY e-textile testers that can be used on the go to assess the conductivity of materials and continuity within circuits. A variety of materials will be provided to create bespoke testers that meet each hardware aficionado’s needs. At the end, we will document what we’ve created and share our results with the e-textile and open hardware communities! This workshop is open to all skill levels. |
Signup Here (Tickets for the conference required) |
| 1:30-3:00 | Giulia Tomasello | OltrePelle | Join Oltrepelle lab to experiment with soft electronics, bio second skins and sensors to hack your pleasure and craft your uniquely personalized and alluring design. During the workshop, participants will gain hands-on experience on soft electronics and sexual circuitry and experiment on growing biofabrics from algae and body fluids. Through bio-hacking practices and do-it-yourself technologies, we will speculate collectively on alternative and sustainable futures in the realm of intimate technologies, leading to the prototyping of unique wearable sensual devices. |
Signup Here (tickets for the conference required) |
| 4:00- 5:30 | Tricia Enns | Handmade Paper as an Amorphous Material for Experimentation | In this workshop we will discuss the ancient technology of paper making and how paper can be created in countless ways with countless materials. We will approach the concept of open source with regards to not only technique but also materials, digging into the numerous organic and human made matter that can be used to create pulp and be embedded within the paper. And of course participants will have the opportunity to try their hands at paper-making themselves, get to take home their own newly formed creations and learn accessible methods to continue their paper adventure beyond this workshop! | Signup Here (Tickets for the conference required) |
Un conference – Poutine Room / Hot Dog Room
| Name | Topic | Description | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brianna Johns, Nano Castro, Samuel Duah Boadu | How communities are working across the globe to democratize science hardware | Open Science Hardware (OScH) applies the principles of open source hardware to scientific instrumentation and is becoming increasingly recognized within open science and open source hardware movements. The emergence of several communities has coincided with the creation of these open technologies, and it has become clear that the need to build, maintain, and connect these different communities is critical to sustaining the global OScH movement. This talk will discuss the importance of engaging OScH communities spanning many disciplines and geographic regions by delving into three key OScH communities: the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) Community, the Africa Open Science and Hardware (AfricaOSH) Community, and the Red Latino-Americana de Tecnologías Libres (reGOSH). These cases demonstrate how communities have formed around democratizing access to scientific equipment, addressing some of their community engagement achievements as well as the challenges to supporting the development of open source scientific equipment globally and appropriately. | 12:00-1:00 |
| Future Organisms. Pedro Galvao Cesar de Oliveira | Open-Source Resilience | A discussion on the concept of “openness” in scenarios with constrained access and limited resources. Centering around an appreciation for open source hardware and planetary ecology through alternative, non-eurocentric ways of knowing, and design praxis of the Global South. | 10:30-11:30 |
| More to come and to be decided day-of! |
Discussion Space
TBA
Asynchronous Talks
| Name | Talk Title | Description | Link |
| Steph Piper | Skill Trees: Gamify the Hard Things | Learning new things can be hard. The open source Skill Trees project can help, making it easy to get started with a new hobby or skill. It includes a repository of pathway templates to levelling up your skills across a huge variety of areas, from Metalworking to Arduino, Cooking to Finance and beyond. Born from a desire to help people do hard things, this project continues to grow and aims to create 60+ skill trees in different areas. | Watch Here |
| Maurice Haedo Sanabria | 3D-printing “a lo Cubano”: How a Havana hackerspace used open-source hardware and design to turn plastic bottles into 3D printer filament | In this talk, I will share how the Copincha collective, a hackerspace in Havana, used open-source construction practices and DIY fabrication and documentation processes to build extrusion machines that convert plastic waste into filaments to feed 3D printers. It created a new wave of local-level plastic recycling in Cuba and sparked the development and prototyping of new hardware designs, as well as fostering new community networks around plastic recycling and addressing material needs that arise from Cuba’s economic isolation and extreme resource scarcity. Finally, I will relate my experience of sharing this project with a hackerspace in New York City whose context is very different from Cuba, but whose members have also embraced the link between plastic recycling and 3D printing. | Watch Here |
| MORAKANA [Sebastian Morales & Tiri Kananuruk] | Networked Hardware- a Tool for Tangible Networked Interactions | Networked Hardware is an open source tool equipped with sensors, actuators, and wifi enabled microcontroller. It was designed with artists, performers, teachers and students in mind. How can we make the Internet more tangible? How can performers and audiences connect in meaningful ways across distances? How can we make the process more accessible? How can our bodies gain back their presence in digital performance? | |
| Ethan Li | Forklift: making an open-source microscope’s operating system simpler to extend, modify, and recombine over time | A reasonably modular architecture which makes your hardware+software device easy for others to customize/extend/recompose at the initial release might not be able to maintain those qualities in its software if it needs to evolve over time; and then your open-source project starts feeling more like “free as in puppy”. I’ll share how this problem manifested in the Raspberry Pi-based operating system for the PlanktoScope, and the solution I’ve been developing for that project – which may also be useful for other Linux-based open hardware projects. | Watch Here |
| Hong Hua | Auto Wave Machine MASTER | Auto Wave Machine is a tremolo guitar effect pedal that adjusts real-time values based on posture detection, which creates a medium to enhance the dynamic of the music performance. When we are talking about AI in music, people tend to talk about how AI can compose music or how AI can speed up the process of music production. But we tend to underrate other parts of the music, such as the development of the instruments and the dynamics of live performance. Especially for live performances, the combination of visual and audio brings an immersive experience which takes the music itself to another level. The body posture of the musicians in a live performance is often iconic, such as the duck walk in Chuck Berry or the head banging in heavy metal. These postures are also closely tied to the timbres of these different genres. Auto Wave Machine creates such a connection: it uses a Raspberry Pi to run Tensorflow’s MoveNet model to detect the body posture of the performer, while translating this value to the width and depth of the tremolo effect. Unlike traditional guitar effects that use knobs or expression pedals to control tone, musicians can create different patterns by simply swinging their bodies. And this dynamic does not need to be intentional, it is meant to create a more improvisational process. The development of this project utilized a variety of open source hardware technologies such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi. It was also created using techniques such as parametric design, 3D printing. | Watch Here |