The Genius Minds of the Open Hardware Summit

Wow! This conference had it all, and packed a goldmine of information from some of the biggest stars in the maker/hacker/hardware/OS/engineering world all into 12 hours. If you went, you were deeply satisfied, if you missed it, do your best to get video, audio and slides because it was fantastic.

Essentially geared towards those developing hardware inventions and releasing them open source, the Open Hardware Summit catered to business, legal, academic, engineering and hobbyist crowds. The event was kicked off with a great breakfast and a canvas bag of free swag, including a copy of Fashioning Technology and tickets to MakerFaire.

Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries, a Manhattan-based tutorial and hardware company, kicked things off with a powerful talk on why her company is so open-source. From there, three other all-star speakers gave presentations along the similar theme of "Why Do Open Hardware?" Gerald Coley of Texas Instruments and Beagle Boards, Bruce Parens of OSI and John Wilbanks of Creative Commons gave great talks on their experiences with OS from the top of the field. After, there were shorter sprint talks on fantastic organizations, including ARx, Manhattan-based hacker space EYEBEAM and even NASA's brand new Open Lab. They're using cell phones as the platform for systems tacked onto experimental rockets, dramatically lowering costs.

After lunch, some new speakers on panels covered the deep and gritty nuts-and-bolts of what they've done and how to replicate great ideas, and of course avoiding previous failures. Included was Chris Anderson, who's company DIYdrones is now doing over $1 million in sales per year, and Massimo Banzi, the rockstar developer of Arduino, the open microcontroller platform that DIYdrones main products are based on. Arduino has risen to the point of being used in open projects more often than not, so it was great to see a true living legend among the speakers.

Other panels covered scaling, manufacturing and even legal issues with releasing technology open source. While there was some overlap with the hacker conference crowd, this was a hardcore business section for several hours. This was incredibly well received by entrepreneurs, covering all the top points and answering questions before they were answered. Speakers included Nathal Seidle, co-founder of Sparkfun and Matt Peddicord of Manhattan-based Bug Labs.

After even more sprint talks, there were final closing lectures from the academic crowd, and just like entrepreneurs and engineers that took the stage, the top of their class. Notable were Leah Buechley of MIT Media Lab and Dan Steingart of New York's own CUNY.

For more information about the conference, visit their website here.