Key highlights from Ultralytics at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025

With our team just back from an exciting weekend at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025, the start of this week has been especially inspiring. On November 15 and 16, the event brought together makers, engineers, students, and innovators from around the world to explore this year’s theme, "AI for Everything," and learn how AI is being used in practical ways.

Organized by Chaihuo Maker Space and hosted at the Nanshan Vanke Cloud Design Commune, Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025 was two days of hands-on demos, thoughtful conversations, and meaningful moments with the global maker and Vision AI community. After attending Maker Faire Shenzhen in 2024, it was great to return this year and see how much the community and conversations around AI have grown.

From seeing how teams are applying AI at the edge to connecting with students and families curious about computer vision, the event offered something for everyone. It reminded us why Maker Faire Shenzhen continues to be such a unique and energizing space for innovation.

In this recap, we’ll share the moments and insights that made Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025 such a memorable weekend. Let’s get started!

How Maker Faire Shenzhen became a global innovation hub

Maker Faire Shenzhen has grown into one of the most influential maker events in the world. Since launching in 2012, it has played a major role in connecting Shenzhen’s fast-moving hardware ecosystem with global tech communities, giving makers, engineers, and creators a place to share ideas, test projects, and collaborate.

Over the years, the event has welcomed participants from nearly 100 countries and has become known for showcasing cutting-edge prototypes, creative engineering, and practical, bottom-up innovation. It’s also become a meeting point for traditional industries and emerging technologies, highlighting how makers are driving new approaches through cross-disciplinary projects and real-world applications.

A key factor that makes Maker Faire Shenzhen special is its openness. Anyone from students to startups to established companies can participate, and that spirit of collaboration is a big part of the event. 

Looking back at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2024

Before we dive into this year's highlights, let's take a look back at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2024. Last year's theme, "Enchant Everything With AI," highlighted the growing role of artificial intelligence in creative projects and real-world problem-solving.

For Ultralytics, the event was an amazing chance to showcase Ultralytics YOLO11 in action and connect with makers using Vision AI across education, research, and various other industries. Our real-time demos drew a lot of interest, and our keynote on sustainable applications of computer vision sparked meaningful conversations about how AI can support real-world challenges.

We also enjoyed meeting many long-time Ultralytics YOLO model users who shared their projects and insights. The energy and curiosity from the community made 2024 a solid foundation for an even more exciting return to the event this year.

An overview of Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025

Building on the momentum from last year, Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025 brought together about 30,000 attendees for two days of innovation, hands-on experimentation, and cross-industry collaboration. Across the venue, visitors explored interactive installations, new AI-ready hardware, student-led prototypes, and industry showcases. 

The atmosphere felt both familiar and fresh, with a strong sense of curiosity driving conversations in every corner. This year, our team on-site included Zinnia Pourdad, our Global Events Manager; Ziyue (Olivia) Wang, our Marketing Associate; Jin Xu, our Staff Backend Developer; and our Machine Learning Engineers, Mason Liu, Rick Hou, and Shuai (Louis) Lyu. 

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Day one: Hands-on innovation at Booth B07

Day one began with plenty of activity at Booth B07, where we introduced visitors to Ultralytics YOLO11 through live object detection and pose estimation demos. YOLO11 is one of our latest computer vision models, and many attendees were interested in seeing how it performs. 

We also showcased the Seeed Studio reCamera, an open-source AI camera built for real-time vision tasks and designed to run Ultralytics YOLO models out of the box. Its compact, customizable design sparked conversations about how developers can bring Vision AI directly to edge devices.

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Throughout the day, our team spoke with students, researchers, and industry professionals exploring how Ultralytics YOLO models are being used in academia, enterprise, and research. Many discussions centered on edge AI, healthcare, government applications, and robotics, giving us great insights into the problems teams are solving with computer vision.

Later in the afternoon, we joined Seeed Studio at Chaihuo Makerspace for a workshop focused on the reCamera. The session drew an enthusiastic crowd, and Jin Xu introduced attendees to Ultralytics YOLO and our upcoming Ultralytics platform. The workshop was highly interactive, with plenty of questions and hands-on exploration as participants learned how to integrate Vision AI into their projects.

A closer look at the reCamera workshop

The workshop was an interesting opportunity for attendees to explore real use cases and ask practical questions while trying the reCamera firsthand. For instance, one participant worked with a Rock Paper Scissors model and saw how the angle of training images can influence recognition accuracy. 

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Another attendee wanted to detect and classify different toys in the same scene and learned that using a simple two-step approach, starting with object detection and then running classification on each item, can lead to more reliable results. Students were also curious about training workflows and how the Ultralytics platform could be used in the classroom. 

These conversations created a productive mix of hands-on troubleshooting and real-world examples. They gave attendees a clearer understanding of how to build effective Vision AI applications with the reCamera.

Day two: A celebration of community and creativity

Day two brought an even wider range of visitors, from families and students to professionals exploring new ideas in Vision AI. It was wonderful to see so many young attendees stop by the booth, try the demos, and share their curiosity about how AI models work. 

The energy around the space made the morning feel especially lively, with conversations happening in every direction. Our Ultralytics tote bags also became quite popular, and by midday, they were visible all around the venue.

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In addition to this, we enjoyed reconnecting with companies that joined us at our recent YOLO Vision events in London and Shenzhen. Exhibitors such as M5Stack, D-Robotics, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, ARM, and Raspberry Pi were all present, creating a remarkable sense of community across the Vision AI and hardware ecosystem.

What we learned from the community

Democratizing Vision AI is a core part of our mission. Simply put, we want to make computer vision easier for anyone and everyone to learn and use. Seeing kids experiment with our models, students ask thoughtful questions, and professionals explore new applications reinforced why accessibility matters.

Thanks to everyone who visited our booth and helped make the event such a collaborative and inspiring space. We truly enjoy meeting you at events like Maker Faire Shenzhen and learning from your ideas and projects.

Key takeaways

We left Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025 feeling encouraged by how many people are ready to build with Vision AI. As we continue to push the boundaries of computer vision, it’s clear that progress happens fastest when the community is learning, experimenting, and creating alongside us.

Looking ahead, we're excited to keep supporting developers and teams with tools that make it easier to turn ideas into real-world Vision AI applications. We can’t wait to see what the community creates next!

Check out our GitHub repository, and join our community to connect with other AI enthusiasts. Learn more about AI in manufacturing and computer vision in retail on our solutions pages. To start building with computer vision today, check out our licensing options.