Open-Source Hardware: Copy & Paste Empowerment

Last week I was privileged enough to speak at the Open Hardware Summit. It was a wonderful experience, and I hope to return again in the years to come.

During my time making cool projects for Hackaday, I regularly experienced that fantastic feeling that came with the realization that people really enjoyed the things I made. I had a few that turned out to be fairly popular. This Portal Gun that levitates a companion cube, for example, has more than 1.6 million views. The Thor's Hammer with embedded Tesla coil showed up on TV screens in subways in China.

Even though I felt really good about them, there are other projects that feel even better. Those projects are simple gaming controllers for people who have physical disabilities that make it difficult for them to operate standard, off-the-shelf controllers.