The 2022 Open Hardware Summit Summary
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:
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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.