OpenSauce 2024 Retrospective
OpenSauce 2024 was amazing! And, oh boy, was it exhausting. It took our team a little time to recover before we had the energy to write up this recap of the incredible event and the awesome community interest in Meshtastic.
What is OpenSauce? Well, if names like Mark Rober, Colin Furze, The Hacksmith, and Wren from Corridor Digital ring a bell, then you might already get the vibe. It’s a gathering of makers, artists, hackers, DIY’ers, and creatives in general. Think of it like the old-school Maker Faire, but with a YouTube twist. This year’s two-day event took place on June 15th and 16th at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, boasting nearly 500 exhibitors and over 20,000 attendees.
Thanks to the hard work of our amazing community, Meshtastic had a booth at OpenSauce, right near the second stage. The booth team, consisting of McHamster, RCGV_, and ShakataGaNai, spent the two days chatting with fans, interested folks, and total newbies looking to learn more. We discussed tons of interesting use cases and potentially brought thousands of new users into the mesh network. It was also a blast “putting names to faces” for existing community members and meeting people who have used Meshtastic in unique and personal ways. We even had some “big names” stop by, including Josef Prusa of Prusa 3D Printers and Jeff Geerling, the Open Source/Raspberry Pi guru.
A fun experiment we conducted onsite involved getting as many active users as possible on a special Fast/Medium configured mesh, including several demo devices. It worked surprisingly well, demonstrating the power of the mesh even in the steel-and-concrete confines of the Cow Palace. We also had devices like T-Decks and a “Cyberdeck” available for anyone to type their own messages as a demo, giving them a first taste of mesh-powered communications.
Overall, OpenSauce 2024 was a huge success for spreading the word about Meshtastic. We hope to repeat this experience at more events in the near future. If you have suggestions for where Meshtastic should appear (anywhere in the world), hop onto the official Meshtastic Discord in the #events channel and drop a note.
Finally, A few more pictures from the event along with an amazing youtube short overview.
The Meshtastic Bay Area Team