The Supercon 2025 Badge Is Built To Be Customized

October 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

For anyone who’s joined us for previous years, you’ll know that badge hacking and modification are core to the Hackaday Supercon experience. While you’re of course free to leave the badge completely stock, we encourage attendees to tear it apart, learn how it works, and (hopefully) rebuild it into something unique. There are even prizes for the best hacks.

As such, every decision about the badge’s hardware and software is made with hackability in mind. It’s why we always try to add an expansion port to the badge and, in recent years, have leaned into MicroPython to make it easier for attendees to modify the code.

But one thing that’s been largely missing in previous badges is aesthetic customization. Sure, you could strip out the firmware and write something entirely new, or hang some oddball peripheral off the side of the thing, but ultimately it still looked like the badge we gave you at the door. That’s because, at the end of the day, the badges are just PCBs. Short of designing your own enclosure (which has certainly been done), every badge looks the same. That is, until now.

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Get Ready For Supercon

October 25, 2025 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

It’s just about all we can think about over here: the week leading up to the 2025 Superconference. From what we hear, it’s all-hands-on over in Pasadena right now, as everyone is putting the finishing touches on preparations for Hackaday’s annual US gathering.

We’ve been heads-down in the badge for a little while, and between that and all of the logistics, it’s easy to get lost in the work. And then we saw this video that [InstantArcade] shot, just casually walking through the event a couple years back. It’s not particularly a highlights reel, but seeing so many of the people I recognized, and remembering the many fantastic conversations we’d had. So much energy, interest, and simple excitement in sharing stories, what they’re working on, or just what they’ve seen lately that blew their mind.

There is no substitute for being there in person, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try! We’ll be putting the talks up on our YouTube channel next Saturday, and as always, you’re invited to join in the discussion on our Discord server both during the event and whenever. If you’re not going to be there in the alley, join us virtually!

We’ll be meeting up Thursday night at 7:00 pm at King’s Row for an informal pre-meetup. Bring a hack if you’ve got something to share! Then things start for real on Friday morning over at Supplyframe HQ. We’ll talk badges, get to know each other, and just nerd out and chill. (I love Fridays!) Halloween / sci-fi costume party Friday night, get some sleep, and head on over to the LACM and Design Lab for two tracks of talks and a full day on Saturday going late into the night. And as usual, the change back to standard time gets you an extra hour of sleep so that you’re rested and ready for Sunday.

There is still a lot to do behind the scenes, but seeing you all there makes it more than worth it! See you at Supercon.

(Oh, and no newsletter next week, but you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday watching the talks. That makes up for it, right?)

Announcing The 2025 Hackaday Superconference Communicator Badge

October 23, 2025 by Elliot Williams 44 Comments

It’s the moment you hard-core hardware nerds have been waiting for: the reveal of the 2025 Hackaday Supercon Communicator Badge. And this year, we’ve outdone ourselves, but that’s thanks to help from stellar collaboration with folks from the community, and help from sponsors. This badge is bigger than the sum of its parts, and we’ve planned for it to be useful for you to hack on in the afterlife. Indeed, as always, you are going to be the final collaborator, so we can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it.

We’re going out – wide out – on a limb and trying to create a dense mesh network of badges talking to each other at Supercon. It’s going to be like a badge-hosted collection of chat rooms, as connected as we can make them without talking over each other.

You look up a topic, say Retro Computing or SAO trading, punch in the channel number on the numpad, and your badge starts listening to everything going on around that topic. But they also listen to everything else, and repeat anything they hear on to their neighbors. Like IRC, but LoRa.

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2025 Hackaday Supercon: Two New Workshops, Costume Party, Lightning Talks, And A New-Space Panel

October 21, 2025 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

So much news, so little time left until Supercon! We hope you all have your tickets. If not: Workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now. We’re getting down to the last slightly-more-than-two-handfuls, so if you’re thinking of coming, the time for procrastination has passed.

First up, we have two late-addition workshops, and tickets were just made available. Maybe you noticed that Arduino was bought by Qualcomm, and they kicked off the union with a brand-new board? You can get yourself one, and learn how to use it. And not to be outdone, the CEO of Framework, makers of modular laptop computers, is coming with a grab-bag of parts for you to play with.

Leonardo Cavagnis & Tyler Wojciechowicz

Arduino x DigiKey Presents – From Blink to Think: Discover Arduino Uno Q

Explore the power of Arduino Uno Q, the new board combining a microcontroller and a microprocessor. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to get started with Uno Q and unlock its dual-core capabilities for intelligent and connected projects.

Nirav Patel
Framework Mystery Boxes: Swap & Build

This workshop is hosted by Framework’s Founder and CEO, Nirav Patel. You’ll receive a box of assorted returned/refurbished Framework Laptop parts at the start of the workshop. You can then trade parts with other attendees and work together to try to build a functioning computer of some kind. You’ll pick up some tips and tricks on debugging and repair along the way.

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Three Years In, JawnCon Continues To Grow And Impress

October 16, 2025 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Make no mistake, just getting a hacker con off the ground is a considerable challenge. But the really hard part comes after. To be more than a one-off success story, you’ve got to expand the event year after year in a manageable way. Go too slow, and attendees might lose interest. Move too fast, and you run the risk of going broke if your ticket sales don’t keep up with your ambitions.

Luckily for hackers living in the Philadelphia area, the folks behind JawnCon have once again demonstrated they’re able to thread the needle. While the ticket price remained the same as in 2024, this year an additional track of talks was introduced as well as expanded activities throughout the con. Even though it only wrapped this past weekend, there’s already buzz about what the event will look like in 2026.

Until then, let’s take a look at some of the projects that were on display at this year’s JawnCon. If it’s the talks you’re after, they’ll be edited and uploaded to the event’s YouTube page in the near future. In the meantime, the Friday and Saturday live streams are still available.

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2025 Hackaday Supercon: Crafting The Final Frontier Keynote Event

October 15, 2025 by Tom Nardi No comments

In the history of entertainment, few properties have made the sort of indelible mark on popular culture as Star Trek has. In 950 episodes across the twelve television series that have carried the name, the franchise has made a spectacle not of explosions and machismo, but of competent professionals working together to solve complex problems. In the world of Star Trek, the coolest people in the room are the scientists, engineers, physicists, and doctors — is it any wonder so many in the sciences credit the show for putting them on their career path?

Hardware hacker, maker, and Trekkie Andrew [MakeItHackin] will lead the panel.

To celebrate the impact of Star Trek, we’re proud to announce our keynote event for the 2025 Hackaday Supercon: Crafting the Final Frontier. This round-table discussion led by Andrew [MakeItHackin] will bring together some of the artists that have helped cultivate the look and feel of the final frontier since Star Trek: The Next Generation and all the way into the modern era with Star Trek: Picard.

While the art direction of the original Star Trek series from 1966 was remarkably ahead of its time, these are some of the key individuals who were brought in to refine those early rough-hewn ideas into cultural touchstones. Their work ended up becoming more than simple entertainment, and ultimately helped inspire some of the real-world technology we use on a daily basis. The iconic LCARS computer interface predicted the rise of the touch screen, while its impossible to look at props such as the PADD and Tricorder and not see the parallels with modern tablets and smartphones.

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JawnCon Returns This Weekend

October 7, 2025 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

For those local to the Philadelphia area, a “jawn” can be nearly anything or anyone — and at least for this weekend, it can even be a hacker con building up steam as it enters its third year. Kicking off this Friday at Arcadia University, JawnCon0x2 promises to be another can’t-miss event for anyone with a curious mind that lives within a reasonable distance of the Liberty Bell.

The slate of talks leans slightly towards the infosec crowd, but there’s really something for everyone on the schedule. Presentations such as Nothing is Safe: An Introduction to Hardware (In)Security and Making the GameTank – A New, Real 8-Bit Game Machine will certainly appeal to those of us who keep a hot soldering iron within arm’s reach, while Rolling Recon & Tire Prints: Perimeter Intrusion Detection and Remote Shenanigans via Rogue Tire Stem RF and Get More Radio Frequency Curious will certainly appeal to the radio enthusiasts.

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