Inside Open Sauce, a science festival for makers, with over 500 projects on display

Open Sauce is a California festival that brings together crazy inventors, makers of every sort, and 150 nerdy YouTubers for a weekend of hands-on exhibits, live demos, and community connection. Founded by YouTuber William Osman, the event is like a science fair for grown-ups, with over 500 projects on display, from combat robotics to 3D printed musical instruments.

The YouTube element sets Open Sauce apart from other festivals. YouTube creators were invited to host panels and presentations on a number of topics, like 3D printing, science education, animation, prototyping inventions, rocketry, and much more. They also shared strategies for becoming a successful YouTuber. When they weren’t on the stage, fan favorite creators could be spotted touring the exhibits and giving autographs. Presentations were live-streamed for a Virtual Open Sauce experience and recorded for on-demand playback through Sauce+, a streaming service dedicated to Open Sauce creators.

I had a chance to sit down with founder William Osman, a well known YouTuber and engineer to ask him why he started the festival. “I did it for the community," he said, “YouTube in the early days was a bunch of people who had a weird hobby, who would get together and collaborate making videos.”

He told me he wanted to bring back that earlier sense of community, and give nerds like himself a place where everyone could show up, hang out, and share their projects and “unhinged inventions.” He also said that Open Sauce is a place for makers to go crazy with their projects without worrying about how polished and professional the results might be. Osman feels that Open Source shows people, especially kids, that science and engineering are accessible and fun.

“It turns out that most people aren't actually really good at science and engineering,” he said. “They're pretty bad at it, and you just keep making mistakes over and over again until you make something more. And so when people come to Open Sauce, what I want them to see is that process, the real engineering process. I want them to look at what people have done and feel like I could do that myself, and come to the realization that it's not about being perfect, but it's about trying things until it works.”

Osman said that YouTube is an important element for the maker community as an outlet for sharing their creations. In the real world, many people do not have access to a community of like-minded creators like what they can find online.

“YouTube is a very important part of inspiring the next generation of engineers because it's the easiest place to show off fun, interesting engineering. And that's why we have 150 YouTubers at the Open Sauce to just communicate STEM and science and creativity out loud, online.”

I spent the whole weekend seeking out 3D printing makers and the projects they brought to Open Sauce. Several well-known 3D printing YouTubers were at the event, such as CNC Kitchen’s Stefan Hermann, Made with Layer’s Thomas Sanladerer and Joel Telling, the 3D Printing Nerd. I found Telling at the Elegoo booth checking out a set of mechanical cosplay wings printed in PETG by fellow creator Willow Creative. Willow was unable to attend the show, but she lent her wings, made on a Centauri Carbon and Orange Storm Giga, to Elegoo to show off. The amazing wings are lit with addressable 3 mm LED strips and powered by batteries worn on a backpack.

Elegoo also brought several 3D printed games for visitor to play, as well as tiny open source dancing robots, based on the OTTO robot design and run on ESP32-S3 chips. The shells were printed on the Centauri Carbon.

Elegoo also brought its latest 3D printers to the show, such as the Centauri Carbon and the yet to be released Jupiter 2, a 16K resin printer with a 14-inch LCD screen.

Disclaimer

Full disclosure: Elegoo sponsored my travel to San Francisco.

Some projects were so well done, you couldn’t even tell right away that they included 3D printing, like this “world's largest laptop” by No Bitrate’s Alex Corea. The laptop is a massive 500% copy of a 16-inch Alienware X16 gaming laptop, with a fully functional trackpad, wireless mouse, and 77-inch screen. The light-up keys are each four inches wide, and the not-so-portable device weighs in at 370 pounds. It's about the size of a dining room table.

Some 3D printed projects were literal works of art, like this dragon skeleton made by YouTuber Bobby Duke Arts using a hand held 3D pen then sanded down with a Dremel tool. The dragon was on display in the Creator Museum, along with other projects created by featured YouTubers.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum was Rob Cockerham’s project, titled “3D print your name in 38 seconds”. I have to admit, my eyes lit up when I saw he was using my first 3D printer, a stock 2016 Creality CR10. Cockerham used a special script to print any name in, you guessed it, about 38 seconds. I gave him my twitter handle, which took more like 46 seconds. Cockerham said he chose to bring this project because demonstrating 3D printing normally takes way too long.

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I’ve seen 3D printed guitars, violins and drums, but this was the first time I’ve seen a 3D printed “brass” instrument. Ben Heath and his dad brought several bugles, a natural horn (the precursor of the French horn) and a trombone for people to experience. Visitors to the booth could play one of the 3D printed buisines (a long straight horn from medieval times) using a printed mouthpiece they could keep. The horns were all printed in segments on a Creality Ender 3 using PLA, then glued together and sealed with epoxy to make them airtight. They actually sounded very good, especially when Heath demonstrated them using a standard metal mouthpiece.

One of the most intriguing booths was run by a local branch of the non-profit Precious Plastic, a worldwide, open source community of plastic recyclers. The group showed how plastic can be shredded, melted down and injection molded into products that could be sold. They demonstrated their technique by making Open Sauce coasters, using a mold that was carved with a CNC machine. Though the booth was recycling bottle caps, the method could be used to recycle 3D printer scraps, like PLA poop from multicolor machines.

Several of the exhibitors were showing off projects to launch businesses, like Andrew Swaim with his Kit of Plants Kickstarter. His faux plants are a mix of handcrafted fire-resistant paper and 3D printed parts. He originally made the plants to decorate his camper (also on display as a mobile maker studio).

If you want to see more Open Sauce goodness from an awesome electronics nerd, then check out my friend Jeff Geerling’s vlog on his second channel, Level 2 Jeff.