The Teardown Sessions

Conversations with people who make open source hardware

Oct 29, 2021

Teardown Session 10: LED blinkenlights wizard Ben Hencke talks Pixelblaze

This week, Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh sits down with Ben Hencke, LED wizard and creator of the much beloved LED controller, Pixelblaze. Pixelblaze is a Wi-Fi-enabled, live-codable LED controller with a web-based development environment. Ben and Helen discuss wide-ranging topics, from manufacturing and design to live-coding with the Pixelblaze IDE. Read the full update.


Oct 22, 2021

Teardown Session 9: community building with Straithe from Great Scott Gadgets

Join Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh as she chats with Straithe, open source technical community manager at Great Scott Gadgets. They discuss the difficulties (and possibilities) of running a business centered around open source hardware, plus they look at the ways Great Scott Gadgets has built a loyal community around their range of devices. Straithe will be sharing knowledge about technical documentation, pull request etiquette, social media engagement, and building community in open hardware. Read the full update.


Oct 15, 2021

Teardown Session 8: open hardware best practices with OSHWA and CERN

Helen Leigh chats with Alicia Gibb, hardware hacker and open source hardware advocate at OSHWA, and Javier Serrano, who leads a team of electronics designers and Linux kernel developers at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Join them as they discuss open hardware best practices, open source hardware movements around the world, and the importance of open hardware for open science and indeed, science and engineering generally. Read the full update.


Oct 08, 2021

Teardown Session 7: CE certification and product design with Timon Skerutsch

Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh chats with Timon Skerutsch (a.k.a. Timonsku), the engineer who made the Piunora. Join them as they discuss hardware design, open source hardware, manufacturing issues, and figuring out how to deal with CE certification as an independent hardware designer. We'll also hear about some of Timon's other awesome projects, including A Damn Linux Tablet, which won "Best Design" in 2019's Hackaday Prize contest. Read the full update.


Sep 10, 2021

Teardown Session 6: Designing an open source laptop with Lukas F. Hartmann

In this episode of the Teardown Sessions, Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh chats with Lukas F. Hartmann, CEO of MNT Research and lead designer of the open source hardware laptop, MNT Reform. Listen in as they discuss DIY computers, beautiful documentation, the FOSS community in Berlin, and how to deliver a large, complex crowdfunding campaign. Read the full update.


Jun 18, 2021

Teardown Session 5: E-paper and recycled Kindles with e-Radionica's David Zovko

Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh chats with David Zovko of e-Radionica and takes a tour of their production space -- a hacker's paradise! Join them as they discuss e-paper, DIY displays, reverse engineering, e-waste, DIY PCB manufacture, and building a company with open source hardware. Read the full update.


Jun 04, 2021

Teardown Session 4: E-paper and smart watches with Wailun from Watchy

In this episode of the Teardown Sessions, Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh unboxes and assembles a Watchy while chatting with Wailun of SQFMI. Join them as they discuss smart watches, e-paper, DIY displays, PCB design and how he successfully raised $220,000+ by crowdfunding his open source hardware designs. Read the full update.


May 21, 2021

Teardown Session 3: Hardware puzzles and #badgelife with Uri Shaked

In this episode of the Teardown Sessions we talk with with Uri Shaked from Wokwi about hardware capture the flag puzzles, artistic PCBs and #badgelife. Uri Is the creator of The Skull, a Capture the Flag (CTF) riddle that invites you to explore the internals of the AVR architecture. Read the full update.


May 07, 2021

Teardown Session 2: Chip shortages & supply chain issues with Piotr Esden

The chip shortage and supply chain issues are affecting engineers, makers and hackers all over the world. In this episode of the Teardown Sessions, Piotr Esden from 1BitSquared and Helen Leigh from Crowd Supply talk about how how we got here, what’s likely to happen next and what we can do about it. Read the full update.


Apr 23, 2021

Teardown Session 1: Leon Anavi's open source fume extractor

In this episode of The Teardown Sessions from Crowd Supply, we unboxed and built Leon Anavi's open source fume extractor, which was successfully funded on Crowd Supply. Read the full update.

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