2013 Open Hardware Summit

After attending the annual Open Hardware Summit in both 2011 and 2012, I returned again this year to revel in the excitement that surrounds the open source hardware community. Every year, the summit continues to grow, with over 500 people attending this year’s summit. Held on the MIT campus, this year’s summit did not disappoint – the speaker lineup was nothing short of fantastic, and I really enjoyed hearing first-hand updates on some of the world’s most compelling open source hardware projects.

One of the highlights of this year’s summit was the ePaper conference badge, developed by the folks at Wyloum, RePaper, and Seeed Studio. In typical OHS fashion, the badge itself is comprised of completely open source hardware and software, and is readily hackable. Naturally, I’ve already started hacking mine to turn it into a weather station for my apartment (I’ll have a blog post detailing this hack when I’m totally done with it).

In my typical fashion, I actually had several reasons for attending this year’s summit: I wanted to catch-up with my fellow open hardware enthusiasts from around the web (whom I generally only get to see in person about once per year), I wanted to attend all the talks given by individuals whom I really admire, and I wanted promote my book among a highly targeted demographic. [...]