Electric Catan at Opensauce 2026: In Which We Print a PCB and Then Some (By Which We Mean 59 More)

We'll be exhibiting our project at OpenSauce 2026 and hope you'll find us the weekend of July 18-19!

What is OpenSauce?

OpenSauce is an annual maker faire that is held in the SF Bay Area. It was started in 2023 by YouTuber William Osman as a way of bringing back the sense of community he remembered from early YouTube, giving makers a place to share their projects and "unhinged inventions" without worrying about how polished their results are. A bunch of the science-and-engineering-edutainment YouTubers (Mark Rober, Michael Reeves, NileRed) have been / will be there.

I found out about it I want to say sometime in 2024 and had been meaning to attend and maybe exhibit.

Our Project

We're recreating the Settlers of Catan board game in the form of custom hexagonal PCBs. In short, each tile is a PCB with a microcontroller, capable of detecting which game pieces are placed on it and displaying game state via an LED screen and lights.

Individually, each tile looks harmless until you have 60 of them, and then you have questions like how do we keep everything within budget? Also, debugging becomes rather crazy-making once you take that wee little protocol you tested on two tiles and roll it out to all 60 of them.

Not to mention the question of how do we reliably detect events, from dice rolls to piece placement, and centralize all of that into a single source of truth.

My teammates Eliot, Jake, and Kevin made some pretty clever decisions in the PCB design and 3D modeling portion, I do encourage you to look out for their writeups when they ever get around to posting them.

For now I'll save the rest of the details for after we've exhibited.