OSHWA's Open Hardware Summit 2026: Hottest Hardware Event of the Year?

Every year, the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) convenes with several hundred hardware hackers, academics, and enthusiasts at a carefully-selected international destination for the Open Hardware Summit. A collection of talks, workshops, exhibits, and satellite activities, OHS provides an annual appraisal of the state of open source hardware, while sharing a glimpse at what’s next.

This year’s event was held at the magnificent brutalist campus of Technische Universität Berlin, during a record-breaking heat wave, but the speakers, attendees, and other associated activities were unbelievably cool and refreshing!

Recently, the organizers have split talks and workshops into separate days, removing the vicious choice between listening to talks live vs. watching the recordings after the event in order to take advantage of the in-person-only workshops. A single track means that participants can enjoy every talk, with plenty of built-in breaks for exploring tables, grabbing snacks, and meeting with old friends and making new ones. Here’s a taste of the nearly dozen and a half talks that attendees experienced, which are also available to watch online:

• Maker Emergency Kits: During the early months of the pandemic, makers around the world rallied to produce personal protective equipment for their communities; this talk proposes a standardized Maker Resilience Kit (MaRK) preparedness-in-a-box solution that enables repair, knowledge sharing, and mesh replication of content between networked makerspaces.

• Building Open Source Batteries: You wouldn’t download a battery; but you may soon be able to fabricate one at home thanks to the Flow Battery Research Collective, whose research aims to democratize access to reproducible, sustainable, stationary flow batteries.

• The Domestic Machine: Open source hardware didn’t begin with electronics and PCBs, it has long existed in spirit in the knitting machine community, where enthusiasts share hacks, reverse engineer commercial devices, and exchange knowledge to keep machines that were abandoned by their manufacturers alive. And now the incredible story of this passionate community is being shared as a feature film.

• 50,000 Devices Later: Making your designs available for anyone in the world to replicate may seem like commercial suicide at first, but openness can actually accelerate innovation, reduce cost, and exponentially increase real-world impact.

• Where Goes Open Hardware?: The godfather of making, Mitch Altman, scrutinizes the future of open source hardware in a world where tech giant Qualcomm now owns open source heroes Arduino, and Prusa is making up its own “we love open source…but not like that!” licenses.

• DIY DNA sequencing: In the last few decades we’ve seen technologies like 3d printing go from unobtainable to ubiquitous, but cost and protective business practices have made hobbyist DNA analysis impractical – until now, thanks to cheap electronics combined with the “obsolete” original sequencing method from half a century ago.

• Agile Methods in Open Hardware: Hardware methodologies can feel decades out of date to software folks on the cutting edge, but maybe software best practices like modular design, version control with Git, and continuous integration can be implemented with hardware tools like KiCad.

Sunday brought a full day of workshops and breakouts, with up to six simultaneous tracks and limited spots making it hard to experience even a fraction of all of the wonderful offerings. Workshops included:

• Solar Powered Protest Laser: Maya Williams walked participants through the creation of covert laser-powered protest projectors, and the Afro-now-ist practice that motivated their innovation.
• Open Footwear: Professional designer and running enthusiast Juraj Šuška attempts to democratize access to footwear using open source, digitally fabricated, marathon-proven designs.
• Butterfly-Shaped Wearable: This brilliant hands-on workshop walked participants through various exciting exercises using CircuitPython to program a custom butterfly-shaped wearable PCB, culminating in an infrared-connected swarm where boards “transmitted” their colours to each other. With everything freely available on the project’s GitHub repo, you can recreate this fantastic workshop at home!
• Sound City: How do the sounds we hear affect our emotions? And how can we represent those feelings through electronic sound modules and sensors? The answer comes as a shared symphony of participants’ own experiences.

In addition to talks and workshops, table exhibits and an art gallery gave even more to experience during breaks or downtime. Examples include:

• Seeed Studio presented an extensive collection of in-house and community projects, from the new reBot robot arm to the ever-expanding XIAO microcontroller ecosystem. Excited to share his latest innovation was Paul Stefaan Mooji, creator of the PMSG Seeed XIAO-powered smart glasses platform, "the single-board computer you wear on your face."

• Threadboards are the brainchild of Alanna Okun, exploring how textiles and electronics intersect, using conductive thread and wool to accurately recreate a breadboard’s columns and rows.

• Chiptune goddess and maker extraordinaire Tina Belmont was effervescing with excitement as she shared her open source stylus-driven Stylish trucker belt analog synthesizer, as well as her Rhythm Core Alpha music software for Nintendo 3DS, and some really great laser-cut acrylic LED earrings. She also gave really excellent in-depth tours of the xHain hack+makespace in Friedrichshain.

In addition to Helen Leigh’s annual Hardware Happy Hour before the event, and Open Source Open Mic at the c-base hackerspace, the weekend’s festivities culminated in Sunday night’s “Moth Rave” with drinks, DJs, dancing, and of course, improvised moth costumes!

Every year, the Open Hardware Summit lavishes us with opportunities to learn, share, and have fun, and if you’ve not had the pleasure of experiencing it yet, keep an eye on oshwa.org for information on 2027’s event, then grab tickets ASAP. In the meantime, you can get a feel for folks’ experiences via the #OHS2026 hashtag, and this and prior years’ talks are available on OHS’ YouTube channel.