Crowd Supply, the leading product development platform connecting hardware creators with early adopters and enthusiastic backers, announces The Teardown Sessions, an informative new series of livestreamed interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff and special guests.

Crowd Supply’s Teardown Sessions go live on YouTube every Friday at noon Pacific Standard Time. Join in to ask questions of guests and get a chance to win a weekly prize box of mystery hardware and cool swag. Find all the upcoming Teardown Sessions on the Crowd Supply YouTube channel, or catch up on recent episodes on the Teardown Sessions playlist. Previous episodes cover topics such as small-scale electronics manufacturing, open source community building and management and the open hardware movement.

- Helen Leigh Teardown Sessions

Join host Helen Leigh at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, December 15, 2021, for a special episode of the Teardown Sessions to discuss the Precursor project with its creators, Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Sean “xobs” Cross. Precursor is a unique mobile computing device designed from the ground up with security and privacy in mind. At its heart is a low-power Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA that runs a RISC-V core.

It’s been about a year since bunnie’s and xobs’ Crowd Supply campaign concluded successfully, and they are hard at work preparing for delivery. However, they’re taking a quick break to chat with Crowd Supply’s Helen Leigh about the latest and greatest Precursor developments. We’ll also be giving away a free Precursor to one lucky winner! To learn more, visit https://www.crowdsupply.com/xilinx/fpga-playground

Andrew “bunnie” Huang is an engineer, designer, author, and hacker. He’s the founder of bunnie studios and Sutajio Kosaqi, and the former lead hardware engineer at Chumby. bunnie holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has contributed to many open source hardware projects as well as authoring numerous books, including The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen and The Hardware Hacker.

Frequent collaborator Sean “xobs” Cross is a hardware/software designer and developer who specializes in firmware hacking. A former firmware engineer at Chumby, he has worked with bunnie on a long list of successfully launched open source projects.

Upcoming Teardown Sessions include Alvaro Prieto from the Reverse Engineering Podcast, Darian Johnson from the Newt campaign, and Lixie Labs from the Pixie Chroma campaign.

Recent stream highlights:

Helen sits down with Ben Hencke, LED wizard and creator of the much beloved LED controller, Pixelblaze. Much blinkenlight mayhem ensues.

Helen talks open source hardware with Alicia Gibb, open hardware advocate, and Javier Serrano, who leads a team at CERN. They discuss open hardware movements, best practices, and the importance of open hardware for science and engineering.

Helen chats with Lukas F. Hartmann, CEO of MNT Research and lead designer of the open source hardware laptop, MNT Reform.

Catch up on all the past episodes on the Teardown Sessions playlist.