Inspired by our experience at Hackaday's Supercon last November, Eric Klein suggested we also attend Crowd Supply's Teardown event, which he's enjoyed in past years. Teardown takes place in June in Portland, an easy trip for me, so here I am! Our Maker Hour colleague, Mike Gilmore, joined as well.

It's been a great weekend. Teardown offers a wonderful mixture of hands-on workshops, technical sessions, morning keynotes, vendor demonstrations, evening social activities, comfortable workspace, and lots of informal idea and project conversations among attendees. Eric masterminded an major update to our shared Air Quality Badge Project, shown here, putting in many hours the week before the event building updated versions for us to wear incuding 3D printing a custom enclosure. We had a steady stream of excellent questions from folks about the badge, from how we built it to what we've learned about understanding air quality.

I attended conference sessions that shared insights on designing trustable open source hardware, optimizing device power consumption, building covert mesh networks, dealing with the surprisngly complicated regulatory tangle associated with coin cell batteries, crafting mind-altering gadgets, and using the Zephyr real-time operating system. Hands-on workshops gave me a chance to learn more about Zephyr on the latest generation of Nordic Semiconductor's devices and how to make artistic yet functional printed circuit boards. A number of creators were on hand to showcase products they've brought to market with Crowd Supply's help, and it was great to see their handiwork and talk about that journey.

I was impressed with my initial Teardown experience. If I were to summarize the event in one word I'd say "sharing", as the entire weekend was full of both formal and impromptu examples of people relating lessons they've learned and ways to build from what they've accomplished. I expect I'll be back for Teardown 2026 and have already started chatting with Eric and Mike about how we might bring and share more of our Maker Hour endeavors. Thanks to Crowd Supply for organizing and hosting the event.