---
title: The OMG-What-If-I-Break-It Guide to Your First Open Source Hardware Project
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2016/program/proposals/147
beginning: '2016-11-11T13:00:00.000-08:00'
end: '2016-11-11T14:00:00.000-08:00'
presenters:
- name: Jaime
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/187
  gravatar_id: fcd921ea367396e1019a218b47a4bf95
---

So you never really thought of yourself as an engineer or a "Maker." And yet you find yourself skulking around the Sparkfun catalog, scrolling through Instructables on how to build a working sonic screwdriver and listening in when folks at you favorite user group describe their latest "toy." You *want* to take the dive but you don't how to start. And besides, **what if you break something**?

If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, this is the talk you've been waiting for. The same way you can learn to embrace error messages and dependency conflicts, you can learn to love the fun and frustrations of working with hardware. We'll talk about some easy (and not so easy) ways to start and I'll share with you everywhere I went wrong so you can head off to make your own mistakes.
