Thanks to everyone who came to the Hackaday Prize Make Munich Meetup and Bring-a-Hack last night! We had a great time, and there were a bunch of cool projects on display, some of which we even got pictures of. Frankly, we were enjoying chatting too much to be peering through a camera lens.
Around 30 people made it over to the Munich CCC, including some familiar faces from the last time we had a party in Munich. Although it was a mostly local crowd, we also had visitors from Switzerland, Austria, and even the US of A: TV-B-Gone inventor, HaD Prize judge, and mad hacker [Mitch Altmann] was in the house.
After we got a little food and drink, we opened up the floor for the projects, lightning-talk style. The largest projects were probably a tie between an own-design CoreXY 3D printer and a boombox with some serious sound output. One guest’s automated bacterial culture apparatus probably wouldn’t have fit on the table, so it’s OK that it got left in the lab. The smallest hack? Probably [Alex]‘s super-mini USB LED clock gizmo, complete with hand-soldered 0402 LEDs, and “even smaller stuff on the backside”.
Everyone seemed wowed by the woodwork on the all-transistor shortwave radio build, and probably half of the party stepped (unwisely?) onto the electric skateboard that featured an ESC with variable torque, controlled by Wii nunchuck. Cheers erupted as the lights began blinking on the FPGA PGP-8e, which was coded up in Verilog from the original schematics. They don’t make owner’s manuals like they used to!
In short, it was a Hackaday crowd: warm, open, interested, and involved. And it was a good reminder to us that we need to get out more with our fellow hardware fanatics.
Thanks to the Munich CCC for hosting, and to the Hackaday Prize sponsors for the food and drink. Enjoy Make Munich over the weekend, and we’ll do this again next year!
Would love to know more about the PDP-8/FPGA build. Anyone know if there’s a project page for this somewhere?
I found this: https://github.com/lisper/cpus-pdp8
http://www.heeltoe.com/download/pdp8/README.html
Not sure if either are related though.
Looks like a great time was had by all. :)
It wasn’t any of these, but rather a cleanroom design by [Andreas Bombe] that he presented at the VCFE. He did the whole board by himself, with an FPGA, offboard memory, and a ton of peripherals. He didn’t want to go the devboard route b/c they didn’t have enough I/O pins for a wire-for-wire replica.
I couldn’t find it written up anywhere, yet. I think it’s pretty fresh, and he said that he didn’t have code for all of the peripherals working yet.
Might be fun to play with Google translate anyways. FPGA in German must be a mouthful of syllables!
I know I should have had something written up to pass around when I started showing off my project, but, well, getting it to work somewhat for VCFe was a bit of a rush job already. So hey, now I’ve got something and can reply with it to old comments!
First, the Hackaday article has a minor error, it’s VHDL not Verilog. And yes, it is not related to other earlier projects other than my previous go at it a few years ago with a software emulation in a microcontroller instead of an FPGA. That is where the front panel board comes from, and it fits nicely since I designed it with a rather generic interface (just 3.3V SPI for the buttons and switch lights and a whole lot of individually exported LEDs in common anode configuration without resistors).
Anyways, here’s the first blog post on this subject:
https://activelow.net/post/pdp8e-replicated-introduction/
It’s just a general overview of my motivation and why I’m doing it exactly this way, a look at the actual hardware will be in a follow up post.
AAARRGHH!!! Who let those bloody hipsters in…
The irony is that hipsters have appropriated nerdy clothing/glasses/style to appear less cool and thus more cool.
I promise you, everyone in attendance was legit, and cool.
As our hacker ethics say, we try to judge people by their actions, not by looks and similar stuff.
Hmmm…
I’m going to take this at face value and put it down to a lack of familiarity with the subtleties of the English language / British Humour.
It was, as Elliot obviously spotted, a tongue-in-cheek sort of comment on the way hipsters have appropriated ‘nerdish’ styling to appear cool.
The ~150 quid beard styling and the holier-than-thou attitude usually gives it away though…