Open Sauce 2026: Desktop UV Printers and Wild Custom Builds Take Over San Mateo

If you want to see the bleeding edge of 3D printing tech, you go to FormNext in Frankfurt. If you want the latest in consumer electronics, you go to CES in Las Vegas. If you want to microwave your own head or ride a 3D-printed speeder bike, you go to Open Sauce in San Mateo, California.

The maker festival marked its fourth year a few weeks ago, bringing together inventors, artists, cosplayers, YouTubers, and a small army of sponsors. Founded by science YouTuber William Osman, the event has become a must-see stop for anyone who builds weird things for a living. This year, the 3D printing contingent was larger than ever.

Three Companies Bringing UV Printing Home

UV printing is industrial technology just now landing on desktops. It uses UV-cured ink to print photographic color on nearly any material you can fit inside the machine, from flat stickers to 2.5D textures a few millimeters thick. Most machines are still at the prototype stage or lurching through Kickstarter, but three companies showed working units at Open Sauce: xTool, EufyMake, and Morpho.

xTool had the largest visible presence of any sponsor, with a huge hands-on display in front of the outdoor stage. The company's new O1 Omni is a four-in-one UV printer that can print on almost any material you stuff into its chamber. It starts at $1,699 for a single UV head and goes up to $3,969 for the fully loaded version. xTool has tremendous experience in adjacent categories, and the Omni looks ready for production.

EufyMake, formerly known as AnkerMake, was the first company to ship a desktop UV printer. Being first is not always best, and the company faced supply chain issues after its Kickstarter took off. The E1 we reviewed last November is a solid machine, and the team has had time to work out the kinks since then.

Morpho is the dark horse. The unknown startup took a modest booth in the main hall and brought its founder and CEO, Brett Wang, to personally demo the unit. Wang comes from DJI, where he was VP of R&D and founder of the camera division. If that career path sounds familiar, Bambu Lab's CEO also headed up consumer drones at DJI before launching his own printer company. Morpho's open-source UV printer is one of the best-looking machines we have seen, and we are looking forward to reviewing it as soon as production units are ready.

Flash-Cured Resin From UC Berkeley

Not all the resin news came from commercial booths. Students from UC Berkeley showed off OpenCAL, an experimental resin printer that uses video projection to flash-cure an entire model at once in just a few minutes. The project has been in development since 2017, and the specialized resin will soon be commercially available through Formlabs. The printer specs are published online for anyone who wants to push the science forward.

Custom Builds That Steal the Show

Open Sauce is not just about commercial products. The real draw is the projects. Among the highlights:

• Snapmaker brought a mostly 3D-printed, fan-made Star Wars speeder bike built on an electric scooter hidden underneath. The whole thing looks like it floats down the road. You can watch it in action on Instagram.
• Positron 3D showed its LDO Positron, an upside-down printer designed to fit inside a 1kg filament box. It folds down to 200 x 200 x 70 mm, making it easy to store or travel with.
• Prusa Research brought its new CORE One+ INDX toolchanger, an axe-wielding CORE One bot that printed while it zipped around the venue, and a giant cardboard CORE One+ photo booth with a working touchscreen.
• Elegoo displayed its Centauri Carbon 2 alongside a functional web harp and a battle bot built by the University of Washington Advanced Robotics team.
• Unlayered 3D demonstrated its non-planar 5-axis printer, which tilts the print head and rotates the bed to eliminate supports entirely. The result is stronger and smoother than traditional FDM layers.
• A maker known as @TheBasedDoge brought an array of mini printers, from an Encore Mini Core XY with a fully printed chassis to printers made from DVD drives and CD motors.

The Bigger Picture

The common thread across every Open Sauce exhibit is speed of iteration. Whether it is a startup demoing a production-ready UV printer or a hobbyist showing a printer built from old computer parts, the event rewards people who build fast and fail publicly. UV printing is still early, but the fact that three companies brought working desktop machines to a maker festival in California says the technology is finally leaving the lab.

If you missed Open Sauce this year, the projects are well documented across YouTube and Instagram. The next event will likely be even bigger.