Open Sauce - Get it while it's hot

Editor-in-Chief of Make: magazine, Keith Hammond went to Open Sauce last weekend at the Cow Palace, south of San Francisco. Here are some of the highlights of the cool people and amazing projects he found. - DD

Debra Ansell, aka Geek Mom Projects, writes lots of great DIY projects for the mag (showing off her LED Handbag and other projects from Make:)

Charlyn Gonda had an amazing booth showcasing her jewelry and electronics projects, including some she has published in the magazine.

Power Wheels Racing happened! That’s YouTuber Zack Freedman of Voidstar Lab in the driver’s seat.

Joe Spanier of LightBurn/MillMage showing off the cool edit-on-the-fly features in MillMage CNC software (coming soon!)

Adrienne Hunter, Bay Area Machine Knitters, writes for Make: too. She showed me the new AYAB board for upgrading vintage knitting machines; their new software is imminent too.

Matt Stultz was there with Cocoa Press, the 3D printer for chocolate. They’ve done lots of work to dial in the right consistency of chocolates for printing, the prints look amazing. Matt also reviews 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC tools for Make:.

Adam Savage was there as a presenter and dropped by the Friday evening party queue.

Adrian “Bunny” Liaw and team were there with the formidable Malice from BattleBots. Malice will be at Maker Faire Orange County.

Prusa/Printables was there, showing off multimaterial printing. Impressive wheel and tire printed in place, in multi colors of PETG, PLA, and TPU for the tire.

YouTuber Riley Ott of Excessive Overkill made this super scary real-life Airsoft Aim-Assist robot! Riley is also making open source boards for reclaiming old robot arms.

SwellCycle 3D printed surfboards from Santa Cruz. Patricio, Nathan, and Pol are 3D printing in PETG (soda bottle) and working with Precious Plastic for recycled material. Then the boards are fiberglassed and they look and feel excellent (guys I’m coming to test ride them soon!). Light-up versions for night surfing or just general awesomeness.

Pupper open source dog robot from Stanford. Impressive and relatively affordable, we’re seeing DIY kits of this design pop up in the wild …

DIYFly project. This eVTOL is a ridable electric drone. If you dare!

Also met Alex Stan showing his Aliptera model VTOL aircraft with this crazy-looking “lip wing” that makes perfect sense — provides lift in forward flight but acts as a semi duct for vertical. aliptera.com

Komodo crawler CNC (laser, plotter), sleek design — you don’t feed materials into it, it walks around on top of your material like a proper robot should. Will be on Kickstarter soon.

PCBWay created the excellent Open Sauce badges

SplitFlap by ScottBez1 is an open source hardware/software project on Github!

Powercore open source EDM cutter!  Rack Robotics has a really cool and affordable modification to a 3D printer to do EDM cutting — electrical discharge machining — extremely fine metal cutting.  Here Sacramento State engineering dept stuck it on Kuka-type robot arms: and demonstrated it underwater.

Micronics desktop SLS powder bed printer (nylon) is putting out fantastic quality nylon prints, smallest machine anyone’s seen? Digifab geeks were pretty impressed with this Kickstarter project.

Endiatx tiny medical submarine for inspecting human GI tract, great demo! Phone vibration motors for propulsion, lights, camera.  This version is off the shelf parts on flexy PCB; next versions with custom parts will get really tiny! Fantastic Voyage realized without humans inside.

Rubik’s Cube Art cubes – playable!! Or just a great conversation piece. Jake Berg. @itsjakeberg

Positron3D showed their upside-down 3D printer.

Giant 3D Prints by NathanBuildsRobots, YouTuber, nathanbuildsrobots.com Big fat layer lines make really nice diffusion/diffraction effects for lighting.

This guy rocking out!! We didn’t catch his name.

OpenScan showed off various DIY scanner models you can make. We should put one in the magazine as a project! They had a fun demo of quality degradation if you scan copies (of copies of copies) — like playing Telephone or trying to read that Xerox your school’s been recopying for years.

Delta Robotics makes artificial muscle from nitinol wire, a memory material that springs back to original form when voltage is applied.

Life-size Lego Costumes at the thebatbrick.com. Batman got a lot of love walking around the expo hall.

Ghostbusters car from Detroit, Cherryland Busters. Great props too: Proton Pack, Ghost Traps.

Big Mac is a giant Macintosh computer. People loved using it (remember MacDraw?!)

Community College of SF engineering club showed off a solar boat (paddleboard) entered in Sacramento’s SMUD Solar Regatta

Petoi – Bittle X dog robot, cool kit. They did the Nybble cat robot we put on the cover of Make: when it was still plywood — new plastic version of Nybble cat coming out soon …

Mind Controlled Shock Collar by James Hoffman. Brain-computer interfaces — people are gonna use them to do all kinds of crazy stuff!

M-Con game controller for phone, rad design. Coveted this one but I don’t have time for phone games!

Motorized Bunk Bed by YouTuber Garrick Woods!

Wooden Boom Boxes by Noel in Oakland. Look and sound great — they’ve got classes / open source DIY kits at boomboxcamp.com and https://makeboomboxes.com/ 

QR Code Dress by Carson Holgate with AYAB / Machine Knitters Guild of Bay Area

Trackstacker is an open source modular marble machine at trackstacker.net. Buy them or print your own.

Rizz Me Up, Plankton by Tommy Cao & Michelle Herrea.  You speak and AI will evaluate how much charisma you have and tell you in Plankton’s voice from Spongebob Squarepants!

Gigantic, functional 16-Foot Keyboard by Riley Parish.

Space Enterprise at Berkeley showed off their amazing test rig for static firing rocket engines. And of course 3D printed rocket engines!

Project KegRocket – YES! Building a rocket out of beer kegs!

SF-HAB.org is all about high altitude ballooning in Bay Area

Talking to Satellites with Garbage (tinfoil antenna) / TinyGS satellite tracking

3D Printable Telescopes from @designbydave, https://www.printables.com/@neatstranger/models 

Fiber Circuits by Cedric Honnet are incredibly small microcontroller/sensor strips, FiberCircuits.github.io.

LED Fabric from Rodney Trusty. Beautiful work.

How to Build a Railbike by Mikhail Stahlke. We need to build one of these for abandoned rail lines …

LED bling boat!

Tiny House in an Ambulance by Josh Sheldon

Transformers/Ghostbusters mashup Ecto-Bee by Jon Merker:

Bonus Content

The Cow Palace is the legendary venue of the Grand National Rodeo —  and of the greatest rock shows of the 1970s and 1980s. Within one week, I saw ZZ Top and AC/DC in this arena when I was 19, summer of 1986. Top that! SIGN OF THE GOAT!  Thank you Debra Ansell for indulging my dumb photo request!  [Typed with broken finger]