There were plenty of gems in the open source hardware keynote dialog between Limor Fried and Phil Torrone, but in the spirit of filtering down I’ll choose just one.

The crowd got pretty excited by a cigarette pack which was used as a housing for a cellphone jammer built by Limor. It’s like the cellphone jammer from the first Mission: Impossible movie, but in a cooler casing. It works within a ten - fifteen foot radius. Yes, this is technically illegal to build because it violates FCC rules, but no harm, no foul, right?

Limor, a MIT Media Lab alumnus that is currently a fellow at Eyebeam in NYC, releases the full technical specs for all her projects under a Creative Commons license. She sells kits to aggregate the materials necessary to implement her specs in a convenient fashion, but the kits are by no means necessary because people can just buy the materials directly from vendors online. Someone in the audience asked if she was able to make a sustainable business for herself using the model. Limor responded that she was doing quite well and supporting herself on selling kits alone.

Open source hardware, driven by the DIY culture rising tide, is an exciting area, and I look forward to seeing how it develops going forward.