I bring the hardware.

I speak about manufacturing, open hardware and building products in India, and I bring printed parts for the audience to handle.

Book a talk See the work

Vijay Raghav Varada standing at the head of a workshop table, holding up a printed part while engineers listen, a Fracktal printer on the bench behind them.

Talks and workshops.

Pixel drawing of one large factory building on the left and, on the right, four small workshops, each with a row of boxy enclosed 3D printers, joined by dotted lines.

Many small factories, or one big one

When a network of small, local printers beats a large factory, when it loses, and how to tell which case you are in before spending money. A printed turbine rotor goes round the room at the end.

Keynote, 30 to 45 min

Pixel drawing of an open cardboard box with a circuit board, printed parts and loose sheets of design drawings spilling out of it.

What open hardware costs

What publishing hardware openly has cost me and what it has brought in, from ten years of Hackaday Prize entries and one Grand Prize.

Keynote or fireside

Pixel drawing of a small workshop bench with a half-assembled machine, wooden crates of parts stacked beside it.

Making physical products in India

Sourcing, hiring, pricing and customs, from thirteen years of making printers in India.

Keynote or panel

Pixel drawing of a pencil sketch of an eccentric cam on a sheet of paper, with the same cam, printed, sitting on the sheet beside the sketch.

Designing for cost from the first sketch

How the Braille module went from a piezoelectric actuator to a printed cam and a micromagnet, and what that teaches about designing for cost from the start.

Technical talk

Pixel drawing of a 3D printer nozzle laying down the last layers of a bracket with a lattice interior.

Designing for a machine that prints

A hands-on session for engineering teams. Bring parts you are struggling to make, and we redesign them for printing together.

Workshop, half day

Recordings.

A TEDx talk, and three clips from my two appearances on The Inventor Challenge.

Technology Changemaker

TEDxYouth@Hyderabad

On using one manufacturing technology for problems it was never marketed for. Also on TED.com.

Inventor in Focus

The Inventor Challenge

A short profile of the work, filmed with the hardware.

Idea in Focus: the Braille keypad

The Inventor Challenge

Tipo, explained for a general audience.

Helping People, the full episode

The Inventor Challenge, episode 5

The full episode, on inventions that help people.

An assembled Braille module on its circuit board, held between finger and thumb. — The Grand Prize Braille module. It usually goes round the room during a talk.

Practical details

I talk about hardware I have built and shipped, including what went wrong.

I have spoken at TEDxYouth@Hyderabad and at Embedded India in 2025, appeared on The Inventor Challenge twice, and spoken to rooms of engineers and to audiences who had never seen a 3D printed part.

Talks run 30 to 45 minutes, or half a day for a workshop. I travel from Bengaluru and can bring machines and printed parts.

For fees, dates and a speaker pack, write to me and say what the event is and who is in the room.

Tell me about the room.

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