One of the great things about this city, is that it oozes passion. Passionate people often flock together, and today I took the day off and walked to MIT to attend the Open Hardware Summit. Basically 500 people from around the world came together to talk about hardware whose design is freely shared. Schematics, design specs, and documentation are all open and you are encouraged to tinker, extend, enhance, and put back in the community. Pretty much the opposite of today's culture.
The badge of course was a piece of open source hardware, and I was one of the few who did not have my badge hacked by the time I picked it up.
Examples:
A low cost piece of hardware that hangs in fruit trees to detect when the fruit is ready, of course it could alert the robot pickers to come to this tree. For now it just blinks lights so us humans can pick.
Next Up a drone that can deliver medicine to unreachable places. Much like the gift baskets in the Hunger Games. The cool thing is that it was printed on a 3D printer. You don't order the drone, you order the instructions for your printer to print one. The gal said it took 5 hours to print.
An amphibious robot snake that swims, climbs walls. Not sure the purpose, but a winner of a solution looking for a problem. It was a student design, and she had poster of how the hardware mimicked the spine of a snake. Perhaps it could do remote water sampling at Sodus.
My personal favorite was a low cost (< $1.00) RDID tag that you get when you enter a party. It encodes your name and the music you like. As people come and go the Robot DJ plays music that will please the current audience, and can personalize each song. "..And here goes an oldie for Fred"..
Too many home gadgets to name, but for sure lots of bright people are dreaming big.
Oh did I mention free lunch, sitting on the lawn at MIT on a spectacular day? Yes I bet I was the oldest in attendance.
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