Comingle is more than just an open-source sex toy company. We are working to create a sex-positive community of hackers and techno-sex enthusiasts. We support the growth of this community through the principles of open-source, which enable us to easily and quickly innovate in the areas of stimulation, interaction, and doing it yourself.

Open-source Sex Tech

Sex and DIY have always gone hand-in-hand. We want to maintain that relationship as technology begins to play a greater role in the bedroom. The open-source software and hardware movements have provided excellent examples of how to make great, accessible, and customizable programs and products that encourage exploration. By applying the principles and practices of open-source to sex tech, we can encourage hackers to explore sexuality and people interested in sexuality to explore technology. We enact the principles of open-source in three main ways:

Documentation - We don’t just provide circuit diagrams and source code. We go out of our way to clearly document, with photos and instructions, our production processes, design specifications, tips and tricks, and even our materials and suppliers. We want to make sure that everyone has all the information needed to make one of our products.

Access - A key issue in the typical open-source and the DIY tech community is that it’s only accessible to relatively wealthy and well-educated people. We build and document projects that don’t require tons of space, tools, materials, prior knowledge, or start-up capital to do. We know that some of our projects are out of reach for lots of people and we look for workarounds to decrease the barriers to entry for DIY sex-tech.

Community Engagement - It’s not enough just to post a bunch of information if it’s not easy or useful for the community to understand. We conduct workshops which use our projects to teach software, hardware, and sex-positive ideals. We are also constructing an online space for the community to share and find information about projects, ideas, and sex-tech in general.