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Open Sauce 2024 Recap: Makers, Creators, and Technology Innovators!
2024-06-25 | By Zach Hipps
I recently attended Open Sauce 2024 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. This is the second time they've even held the event. If you’ve never heard of Open Sauce, the main organizer, William Osmon, describes it as the greatest science fair in the world.
As I walked around the event, I was overwhelmed by all of the cool projects in the hundreds of different booths. I think what makes this event so successful is that there is something for everyone. There were so many things to see. There were projects that used lights and music. There were a ton of projects showcasing robotics as well as desktop manufacturing, and to top it all off, there were a lot of interesting vehicles that people had built, and a lot of the things that I saw there were just simply art for the sake of art.
This spoke to me personally because a lot of the things that I build, especially on my own channel, are kind of impractical and they don't really have a real-world application. I didn't see anybody asking the makers why they built something so impractical. It was just understood that each thing was built to scratch a creative itch. I think it would be awesome if more of us just built things because it's fun to design, it's fun to create, and it's fun to be impractical!
I couldn't possibly tell you about all of the projects that I saw there, but here are a few highlights.
- There were a lot of DIY electronics projects, including a Tesla coil.
- A ton of 3D printers doing a lot of cool and amazing things.
- There was a really cool drone.
- Some cool PCB art.
- A 3D printed rocket nozzle that has thrust vectoring.
- An Astrophotography setup that uses stepper motors to track the stars.
- Several motion control demonstrations, as well as some PID control loop demonstrations.
- An attention-grabbing booth showing acoustic levitation. There's an array of ultrasonic transducers that suspend these little bits of Styrofoam. What's even more impressive is that they're using a phased array to move the bits of Styrofoam around.
- A giant keyboard that actually worked; each button had a little micro switch under it.
- An automated Rubik's Cube solver. The current world record is 305 milliseconds, but this machine can solve the Rubik's Cube in about 250 milliseconds.
- A Kinetic Sculpture art piece that consists of some suspended metal balls. The simplicity of it is so beautiful and elegant.
The project that I was probably most excited to see and to ask about was a mini onewheel. I have a soft spot in my heart for onewheels because I built one from scratch myself, and this one blew mine out of the water! Not only did it look just like the original, but it was made to be half-scale, and all of the parts were designed and manufactured by the maker herself.
The event wasn't just about people exhibiting their projects. There were also dozens of science and engineering YouTube creators who gave talks and panel discussions on a variety of different topics.
While I was at Open Sauce 2024, I wanted to make sure that I visited the DigiKey booth. I got to interview David Sandys, the Senior Director of Technical Marketing and Content. We discussed their new collaboration product, the Experiential Robotics Platform (XRP), which is designed to introduce people to robotics. It's a partnership with DEKA, Raspberry Pi, SparkFun, STMicro, and DigiKey. They all got together and really created this amazing little robot. It reduces the barrier to entry for a First team. They are really low-cost environments that have distance sensors, line-following sensors, and accelerometers all on one easy-to-use platform. They are easy to assemble and can be programmed in Blockly. It's got a versatile rail system on it that can be expanded upon with 3D printing. David also showed me Adafruit’s circuit playground. The first one was set up as a drum machine, while another was set up to measure and display changes in sound, temperature, and physical orientation.
I had a blast attending the event, and I think it's because it's one of the few times that I get to interact with other people who think like me. Sometimes building electronics or working on things at home can feel a little bit isolating, but attending an event like this reminds me that there's a whole world full of people that think like me. I remember having a strong feeling that I was surrounded by “my people,” as I walked through the crowd, and I saw how excited people were to share their work.
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