This episode features audio from the Open Hardware Lightning Talk at Open @ UNGA 81: A Conversation on Collaboration. It was recorded on September 21, 2026.
Open hardware can help make AI systems more inspectable, adaptable, repairable, and interoperable. This lightning talk situates open hardware as one layer of a broader sovereignty strategy: a tool for expanding technical choice and auditability, not a promise that every country or community can manufacture or operate an entire computing stack on its own. It clarifies what open hardware can realistically deliver, including greater technical choice, auditability, and resistance to vendor lock-in, and where its limits lie against the reality of concentrated chip and cloud supply chains.
Announcer 0:01
Welcome to Engelberg Center Live, a collection of audio from events held by the Engelberg Center on Innovation, Law, and Policy at NYU Law. This episode features audio from the Open Hardware Lightning Talk at Open at Unga 81, a conversation on collaboration. It was recorded on September 21st, 2026.
Michael Weinberg 0:24
All right, so I'm Michael Weinberg. I am both the executive director of the Engelberg Center here at NYU. So welcome again. Also, I will say that we do a lot of events, a lot of research around all different kinds of openness, and so if you are in New York, or you are always looking for a pretext to come to New York, keep your eye out. We're always giving you reasons to come back. I'm also the a longtime board member of Oshawa, the Open Source Hardware Association, and so this is kind of an this is kind of a talk, a quick talk that brings both those things together. So, what is open source hardware? Open source hardware is a lot like open source software, but with hardware, and that's it, right? And and you know, this is a room familiar with open source software, so I won't spend really any time on it at all. I will say most of the ideas of open source software port very well to open source hardware, with kind of one critical difference, which is that you know the reproduction, the distribution of hardware costs money, right? Michel was talking about open means open source means free. Atoms cost money, bits are free, and so there's another kind of layer of conceptualization and how the community works because of that fact. Oshawa does maintain a definition of open source hardware. It'll be very familiar to all of you, but that's where kind of some of the the changes come. I'll also say that open source hardware is an incredibly diverse community. If you come to open source hardware from the open source software world, you will often come in through electronics, and electronics are fun. Electronics are great. Microcontrollers, all sorts of servos, LEDs, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever you want. But if it has atoms and it is open and it is openly licensed, it is open hardware. And so we've got open camping equipment. We've got open perfume. We've got open jewelry. We've got all sorts of open things. And so if you're kind of like curious about this? We actually just rolled out at Oshawa a whole new project on open healthcare, and so like a whole universe of open medical devices, some of which are electronic, some of which are not. Why does open hardware matter? For many of the reasons, again, that open software matters, but different because we're in space, right? So it allows you to do that kind of rapid collaboration, that rapid improvement, that rapid localization. That localization is really different in hardware, right? So there is kind of traditional localization of translating into local languages and things like that. But when you think about hardware, hardware is built assuming one set of supply chains, and so if you move it somewhere else, that supply chain may not exist for you. So localization means how do I build this with things that are available in the country, in the region that I am existing. This is something that we saw a lot of during COVID, where people were building PPE, understanding how PPE can work, but then bringing it to new places and figuring out how do we actually build this in this place, like open source software. You know, helps avoid this proprietary vendor lock-in. This is also really important because you paid for the hardware, and so having hardware you paid for and cannot use because it is locked in is kind of sadder than having paid for open software because you can just see it. It's like sitting there looking at you. You can't use me. Also, when you have kind of open documented hardware, sometimes it incorporates proprietary elements, and that's totally fine. That's life in the big city. But if you have well documented open hardware, you might identify common proprietary components across pieces of hardware, and so you might say to yourself, "Oh, well, actually, if we start investing in finding an open alternative to this one proprietary piece, it can light up a whole universe of other things that are using that.
Michael Weinberg 4:17
And so that can be like incredibly empowering when you're thinking about where to invest and where to take your next steps, the other thing that it does is it does a really great job of standardizing the kind of everything else. Right, you're focused on building and on innovating in one space. You're relying on a bunch of other pieces, and the open hardware structure allows you to kind of standardize all those other pieces that bring your idea into the real world, while you focus on that kind of one part to worry about in terms of innovation, and then finally, you know, software. It's great. We all love software, but we are in the physical world, and so the hardware is kind of where software becomes reality. And so the open hardware is an incredibly important part of that for a range. Of things that you might be doing and might be caring about, a really critical concept in open hardware is this concept of like good enough hardware, right? There are all sorts of things, and I'll have an example or two in a second. There are all sorts of things where you need absolute bleeding edge hardware, which is often proprietary in order to do something, and that's great. There's also an incredible universe of things where the thing that matters is the idea and the execution, and frankly, the hardware components don't need to be absolutely cutting edge. You know, you need some standard things if you want to. You know, I saw something a couple a little while ago. Somebody had a six-axis robot arm that had a chainsaw on it that you could use to like carve wooden sculptures. That's super cool. None of that hardware is like new technology, but the idea is something that you need to be able to do something. You need to be able to put in place, and so you can bundle all that good enough hardware to do incredible things, and often that good enough hardware can be open hardware. So I want to talk about one or two examples as we get towards the end of this little lightning talk. This is a new a new a piece that Current AI put out pretty recently. It's a translation device, and it runs a local AI model. It has a proprietary piece in the middle of the stack, an NVIDIA card that is designed to kind of run local models. Super complicated, super bleeding edge. That is something you probably do need a proprietary piece of hardware for to be able to kind of do live translation on on the fly. But if you look at this stack, there's a lot of other stuff there, right? There's a 3D printable case. There are buttons. There are touchscreens. None of the their batteries. None of those are super cutting edge components. And so, first of all, you can identify instead of saying this is a piece of hardware, it's magic, the entire blob is proprietary. You can identify which parts of it are actually proprietary and which parts of it are either open or could be open, and if you want to modify it and localize it or improve it in some way, there's a huge piece of the stack that is essentially available for you to do whatever you want. And this is frankly true of most hardware, proprietary or open, but having open hardware makes it very easy to identify that and understand it, and so you can see, you know, it's like it's all on GitHub. You can just kind of download it, do whatever you want with it. It's openly licensed, and so this gives you that power to change it, implement it the way you need to do it for your situation. Another space that's really interesting right now with open hardware, open hardware and AI, ding, you know, AI is is in the robot space, and so there's all sorts of interesting robotics things going on.
Michael Weinberg 7:49
Again, some of those robotic things require like truly cutting edge hardware, and some of it is you know we got some sensors, we got some servos, we got some gears, and like we're gonna put it all together, and so we've got the robot operating system, which is a core set of open libraries to drive the robots themselves, and then also this this gazebo environment, which is a virtual environment that allows you to model where your robot will be operating, and so we've kind of standardized these software components so you can really drive robot innovation on the software side, but also we see a bunch of now reference models of open robots-the actual hardware that meshes with this software. So Hugging Face has put together this little robot. It's very cute. It's very cool. But again, it's it's like made of good enough hardware, and it's an open reference design that you can use to do your cutting edge AI robotics research. And the magic there is the idea. The magic there is the execution. The magic there is not the the like antenna ears, which look like they are antennas from a like a car phone in you know 1994 or something, right? It's not like the most cutting edge thing. Which I mean, an absolute with love, right? You do not need the proprietary pieces for this entire stack. Similarly, Steve Studio has, speaking of robot arms with chainsaws, has put out a robotic six-axis robot that this is a standard reference robotic arm that is open, that is modifiable, that you can understand and that you can you can link with a bunch of other open components to do amazing new robotic things, but the the technology itself is open and accessible, and you can modify it however you want. Built around a community that is really working together to improve the quality of this hardware component that can be used in any number of ranges, any any number of applications. I will say, like the like other open communities, the open source hardware community only exists because it is a community, and there are a bunch of different players and stakeholders. And so, when you're thinking about open hardware, if you're interested in doing. More open hardware. It's useful to understand the roles that all of those participants play because it is. It can be as simple as just sort of showing up and doing some hardware, but it'll be a richer experience if you can connect with the different parts of the communities that match your specific needs. Probably you have overlapping needs, which is great. That means you're doing something interesting and sophisticated, potentially, because we're all sophisticated, interesting people in this room. I will say that the last thing is that Oshawa has created an open hardware certification program to help it to make it easy to identify when hardware is open and to find it. We're currently in 70 plus countries on six out of seven continents, still waiting for Antarctica. If you know someone who's doing cool open hardware in Antarctica, we'd love to say seven out of seven continents, and it's a free certification program. It also Oswa maintains this directory that allows you to find new hardware and kind of explore it, sort it based on on research areas or other use areas. And so, if you're kind of wondering what's going on in open hardware, it's a great place to find it. That's it. I'm slightly over time. I apologize, but thank you all. I look a lot like this. I have three pieces of event organizer flair on my jacket. So if you want to talk more, I'm always happy to talk more about this. Thank you so much.
Announcer 11:26
The Engelberg Center Live Podcast is a production of the Engelberg Center on Innovation, Law, and Policy at NYU Law, and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Our theme music is by Jessica Batke and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.