My Experience at Open Sauce 2026

I've been dreaming of going to Open Sauce ever since I discovered the event.

What is that, you may ask? Open Sauce is a giant two-day STEM festival for makers and creators. There are over 100 creators and over 500 exhibits showcasing crazy projects people have made and creator panels covering a wide range of topics. So join me on my journey through Open Sauce 2026!

B&H Creators threw an awesome kickoff party the night before the event. It was held in an amazing venue: a large aviation museum showcasing classic airplanes and interesting exhibits. Some of my highlights were winning a prize for solving a Rubik's Cube in under 90 seconds and messing around in a giant 747 cockpit. I also got to meet some awesome people, including Robert Wolff and Moheeb Zara from the devEco, Travis Tessmer from CrunchLabs, and Kevin and Mark from Delta Robotics. We've had a lot of discussion inside the portalNetwork so it was great to finally meet them all in person.

The day of the event finally arrived. When I walked into the main building, I was immediately immersed in a forest of exhibits of all categories and complexities. Battlebots, rockets, robotics teams, arduino projects, 3d printers... The list goes on and on. Some of my favorite exhibits included taser knife fighting, an electric hot dog derby, a vending machine that pays in pain, and a driving couch.

In addition to hundreds of exhibits, Open Sauce also includes many panels and talks with creators. My favorite panel was called the Art of Electronics, and the creators it featured included Sean Hodgins, Becky Stern, and Jeff Geerling. I learned a lot of neat tips and tricks from that one.

On the last day of Open Sauce the entire devEco crew met up and went through a booth crawl that included Sean defeating Ana in a dance competition, Whitney Knitter interrogating an AI PCB router booth called tscircuit, and a fun soldering competition (spoiler alert: Sean dominated). It was an awesome feeling to be a part of this amazing group of developers and makers. One of my favorite parts was meeting and talking to Michael Welling, an engineer I've talked with a ton in the devEco Discord server, and hacking the RGBLED badge he gave me.

While I was there I got to hang out a lot with the folks from Delta Robotics. It was such a fun experience working at their booth, and they are such great people. They were exhibiting their artificial muscle and AI hardware validation systems while I demonstrated the site you're reading this on, devEco.io.

If for some reason you don't know, devEco.io is a open source software and hardware showcasing platform where anyone can create projects and blog posts to share with other makers. I had a great time showing off my first project on the site and introducing others to this incredible platform.

Open Sauce 2026 was such an amazing and inspiring experience for me. I loved every minute of it. Many thanks to Robert Wolff for being awesome, and HUGE thanks to my Dad who went on this journey alongside me (and footed the bills =P). I highly recommend visiting a future Open Sauce event if you can. You will not regret it.