after two years of building back the hardware community post pandemic, we’re getting 300+ rsvps per monthly demo night. my biggest surprise is there’s not more hardware in the bay area.
hardware, like semiconductors, may have given silicon valley its name, but it’s hard to come by in the 2020s. the physical tech stack of asic circuits, sensors, and physical products is abstracted away in the age of generative ai. ironically, gen ai requires new kinds of physical infrastructure to run compute at scale.
while there’s a gap in what gets funded and what community focuses on, we’ve been hosting monthly demo nights and hardware hacks for the last two years supporting 5,000+ people across 150+ events. to bridge that gap, we’ve realized that it can’t be promoted as a “hardware event,” otherwise people would ignore it. it needs to be themed to an industry specific application to catch the zeitgest: ex. “scaling climate infrastructure,” “open source humanoids,” or “lab automation.”
if you’re curious to see the start, here’s last year’s recap. as with any sophomore year of doing anything, this year’s events got better. from trying out brand new hardware, like the apple vision pro, to exlporing the edge of what’s possible in automating biological workflows in labs, there were better collabs and more ambitious hardware hacks this year.
as a recap, studio 45 is a professional hardware space for startups and builders building robotics and physical things. the group has now expanded to the second location in soma, studio 55, which has a more product design, loft like vibe versus the community garage of studio 45.
and none of this would be possible without an active hardware group that cares so much about the community. shout-out to nate and the team there, as they also help house the sf hardware meetup for the largest demo nights in the bay.
this last year we hosted monthly ai + hardware demo nights, hardware hacks, and other gatherings to bring the sf bay area community together. this is the highlight reel.
this weekend we had more apple vision pros in one place than the apple store. for what could be an isolating experience of using a face computer, it was fascinating to see how interactive the pass through feature was with teams building in real time with each other.
this was run with pulsejet studios, a startup founded by an ex-pm of the vision pro, who’s building 360 native media pipelines for music and art based experiences.
the top projects that got built:
what impressed me most about the apple vision pro was the hand and eye tracking for controls. it felt like a natural augmentation of using the body as a controller.