Things are getting real now. Check the list below for the last round of confirmed speakers to the 2017 Hackaday Superconference. This brings our slate of speakers to 32, but we’re not done yet.

Hackaday is adding an extra day to the Superconference by starting the festivities on Friday. Again this year we have an excellent custom hardware badge in development. It’s hard to pull yourself away during the Supercon for badge hacking so this year you can check in on Friday and let the hacking begin. Since you’ll be in town early, we’re also throwing a party at Supplyframe office (minutes walk from the main venue) for all Supercon speakers and attendees.

But we’re still not done. 32 talks, an epic hardware badge, and an extra day of festivities, what else could there be you ask? Two things: workshops and the Hackaday Prize party. Supercon will play host to eight hardware workshops this year. We’ll announce workshop presenters and topics next week but I can tell you they’re superb this year!

Superconference Talks

We present the full slate of 32 talks at the 2017 Hackaday Superconference. Below you will find presenters, their bios and talk title. There is also more information on each talk topic available.

• Syd Mead // Keynote: The Future is Now

  Syd Mead is an American “visual futurist”, industrial designer and a neo-futuristic concept artist. You know his work well if you’ve even loosely followed Sci-Fi movies over the past several decades like Blade Runner, Alien, Tron, Elysium, and many more. Syd’s work is especially interesting to us because it is future technology that actually gets build in the sets and practical effects that went into each and every film.

• Scotty Allen // How I Built My Own iPhone and Other Adventures in the Cell Phone Repair Markets of Shenzhen

  Scotty Allen is a nomadic hacker, engineer, entrepreneur, adventurer, and storyteller, who orbits around San Francisco and Shenzhen, China. He makes videos at the intersection of adventure, travel, and technology for his popular YouTube channel Strange Parts. In a previous life, he was a full stack software engineer at companies such as Google, Ooyala, and Shopkick.

• AND!XOR // Applied Engineering for More Than Just Fun and Bling

  The AND!XOR crew has made a name for themselves over the last several years by producing unofficial hardware badges that are beyond compare. The team are experts at hardware design and manufacture, puzzle design and implementation, and building a community (some would say mythos) around the #badgelife culture.

• Danielle Applestone // How to Beckon a Robotic Workforce

  Danielle Applestone is CEO of Bantam Tools (formerly known as Other Machine Co.), a Berkeley-based, manufacturer of desktop CNC milling machines. Danielle’s team took technology developed for DARPA and launched that company, which was then acquired by former MakerBot CEO and co-founder, Bre Pettis. Danielle has a B.S. in chemical engineering from MIT and a PhD in materials science and engineering from the UT Austin. She is a member of the 2016 Class of Henry Crown Fellows. Her talk of Founding a Hardware Startup was a hit at the 2015 Supercon and this year she discussing making it easier for non-technical people to learn how to design, build, and run robots, without formal education.

• Kipp Bradford // Devices For Controlling Climates

  Kipp Bradford is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. His work focuses on reinventing how we heat and cool things. He also researches innovation, manufacturing, and programming languages. His background spans biomechanical and electrical engineering, design, entrepreneurship, and HVAC+R. He is a founder of start-ups in the fields of HVAC+R, transportation, consumer products, and medical devices, and holds numerous patents for his inventions.

• Sprite_TM // Small Fruit: Miniturizing the MacPlus

  Sprite_TM, aka Jeroen Domburg, has always been interested in anything that goes on in the place where hardware meets software. He is an incredibly skilled hardware hacker, able to reverse engineer circuits and code quickly and despite almost any level of obfuscation. He shares this incredible work on his well-known website: spritesmods.com.

• Erika Earl // Manufacturing Hacks: Mistakes Will Move You Forward

  Erika is a self-taught Audio Engineer with a decade of experience in designing, servicing, and maintaining audio electronics for professional recording studios. Her career highlights include Director of Hardware Engineering at Slate Digital, Head of Technology / Sr. Technical Engineer at LA’s legendary The Village Recording Studios, a position on The Advisory Council for the Producers & Engineering Wing of The Recording Academy, and a volunteer Hardware Engineer for the Mind Makers Project.

• Bradley Gawthrop // Wiring Boot Camp

  Bradley Gawthrop is a general purpose electronics geek and tinker who spent the last decade designing, building and installing electric pipe organs, and the control systems which make them work. He eventually came to his senses. Benefit from his ten years of experience wiring large and elaborate installations by learning the tools, materials, and skills you need to do cables right (even for prototypes!).

• Christal Gordon // Sensor Fusion

  Dr. Christal Gordon is an engineer and educator. She received a dual Electrical and Computer Engineering B.S. from Polytechnic University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (minor in Neuroscience) from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her specialties include designing, prototyping, and programming. She has designed bio-inspired and bio-interfacing systems, high-speed electronics, and models of complex systems.

• Cory Grosser // Innovation Aesthetics: Understanding the Power of Emotional Design

  Cory Grosser is an American product designer, interior architect and educator. In 2002 he founded his studio in Los Angeles. Since then, he has gone on to become one of America’s top independent designers. His career balances design work for high end European design brands, strategic consulting for large corporations and teaching the next generation as an Associate Professor at Art Center College of Design. Cory holds an Architecture degree from SUNY Buffalo and a degree in Design from Art Center.

• Mike Harrison // Flying Liquid Crystal Displays

  Also known as mikeselectricstuff, Mike Harrison is best known for epic tear downs of insane equipment on YouTube. His day job is designing custom electronics for art and architectural installations. This work is often under time constraints impossible for mere mortals and calls for solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. His talk will dive into one such example from his recent adventures. Mike stunned the audience at the Hackaday | Belgrade conference with his Eidophor live projection technology which has been all but lost to history.

• Samy Kamkar // Creating Vehicle Reconnaissance & Attack Tools

  Samy Kamkar is a security researcher, best known for creating The MySpace Worm, one of the fastest spreading viruses of all time. He (attempts to) illustrate terrifying vulnerabilities with playfulness, and his exploits have been branded “Controversial” and “Horrific” by The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. His open source software, hardware and research highlights the insecurities and privacy implications of everyday technologies.

• Joe Kim // The Balance of Art and Technology

  Joe Kim is currently the art director at Hackaday.com and has been a working illustrator for the past 12 years. He was born in South Korea and moved to the United States when he was two where he was given stacks of white paper and pencils to reinterpret everything around him. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design and CSULB. He currently draws, paints, and lives in Los Angeles.

• Ara Kourchians & Steve Collins // Extraterrestrial Autonomous Landing Systems

  Ara Kourchians is a Robotics Engineer at JPL with an extensive background in high altitude ballooning, DeLorean time machines, self-balancing robots, omnidirectional drive systems, flight controllers, UAV’s, and Mars watches. Steve Collins is an Attitude Control Engineer at JPL who drives spacecraft around the solar system and last year shared some of what can go wrong. The two will cover what goes into building smart and robust landing systems capable of localizing and avoiding hazards including various lander technologies, specifically JPL’s COBALT project and the many adventures of field-testing with VTOL rockets.

• Andy E. Lin // Understanding Disability within the Context of Engineering: A View from the Frontline

  Andy E. Lin is the director of the Emerging Tech Lab at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, one of the top facilities in the world for those with spinal cord and other traumatic injuries. He has over 20+ years of intimate experience in crafting and customizing solutions for people with disabilities. Andy also serves as a visiting instructor at the California Institute of Technology, mentoring students in assistive tech design projects in a course he has co-taught the past 3 years.

• Salvador Mendoza // A Cross-Platform Magstripe Payment Method: BlueSpoof

  Salvador Mendoza is a security researcher focusing in tokenization processes, magnetic stripe information and embedded prototypes. He has presented on tokenization flaws and digital payment methods at Black Hat USA, DEF CON, DerbyCon, Ekoparty, BugCON, and Troopers. Salvador designed different tools to pentest magstripe info and tokenization processes. In his designed toolset includes MagSpoofPI, JamSpay, TokenGet and lately SamyKam.

• Rose Meyers // Internet of Robots

  Rose is a robotics enthusiast and software engineer who would love to have as many robots on the web as there are webpages. She finds the easiest path to this goal is to combine the use of ubiquitous tools: Raspberry Pi, Johny-five, socket.io, Node, Javascript, and HTML.

• Natalia Mykhaylova // Hacking Your Home Air

  Natalia Mykhaylova has a background in arts, engineering, chemistry and design with PhD work that involved the development of novel devices and adaptable wireless networks for air pollution monitoring. Her research work has been recognized by UofT Magazine, Phys.org, UofT News, Metro News, CTV News. She enjoys coming up with elegant solutions to big problems, transforming current systems and our future in the process.

• Ariane Nazemi // CTRL+HACK+DELETE: Designing and Building a Custom Mechanical Keyboard

  Ariane Nazemi is an electrical engineering student located in San Diego and the founder of Atom Computer. He loves designing and building electronics, and has created several products at Atom including an RGB LED programmable bow tie that was designed to help new electrical engineers, makers, and programmers get familiar with through-hole and SMD soldering and programming in a fun setting. Ariane has been an avid enthusiast of electronics and robotics from a young age.

• Michael Ossmann and Dominic Spill // Aye, ARRR! pIRates!

  Michael Ossmann is a wireless security researcher who makes hardware
  for hackers. Best known for the open source HackRF, Ubertooth, and
  GreatFET projects, he founded Great Scott Gadgets in an effort to put
  exciting, new tools into the hands of innovative people.

  Dominic Spill is a senior security researcher at Great Scott Gadgets
  where he writes software and firmware for open source hardware. His
  primary focus is sniffing and modifying communication protocols.

• Kristin Paget // IoT Security: A Study of Failure.

  Kristin’s job title has been “Hacker Princess” for her last 4 jobs, which should tell you most of what you need to know. She likes to live at the intersection of the things you don’t know you need and the things you didn’t think were possible, with particular specialties in building fake cell towers 1000x cheaper than the NSA and cloning almost every RFID tag she encounters. She loves to teach so feel free to ask away; her favourite language is C and she’s a sucker for anything pink :)

• Nadya Peek // Can the Laplace Transform Help with my Music Video?

  Nadya works in the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, a group at the intersection of the physical and the digital, and just finished teaching the MIT class MAS.865.

• Sarah Petkus // The Imperfect Probe: Personally Expressive Machines and Why Nonsense Matters

  A kinetic artist, roboticist, writer, and illustrator from Las Vegas, Sarah Petkus produces mechanical sculptures that execute nonsensical functions inspired by human qualities. She also illustrates a web comic about a post-human world, in which the machines and technology humans have created are left speculating about what “art” was. Sarah was an artist in residence at European Space Agency’s technical facility this summer where she produced appendages which are caricatures of the scientific instruments used in space exploration.

• Natalya Staritskaya // Applying Acceptance Tests to Hardware

  Natalya Staritskaya is a Product Manager with five years of experience specializing in the intersection of hardware and software. In the software realm acceptance tests are well established, but not to the same extent when it comes to hardware. Learning how to design to the test in hardware, and how to create better partnerships between hardware and software teams is a clear path to a more reliable development method.

• Shah Selbe // Wild Hardware: Adventures with Ecological IoT and National Geographic

  Shah Selbe is an engineer and conservation technologist who works to identify and deploy technologies that can help with our greatest conservation challenges. His projects have integrated crowdsourcing, smartphone apps, drones, satellite data, and sensors to address conservation issues, including illegal poaching and the monitoring of protected areas. He founded the first solely conservation technology makerspace and prototyping lab called Conservify in Los Angeles.

• Mathieu Stephan // The Making of a Secure Open Source Hardware Password Keeper

  Mathieu Stephan is an electronics engineer who’s actively involved in the open source movement. He specializes in designing products from scratch and alternate between full-time positions and contracting jobs in very different sectors – from quantum physics to formula E cars. He’s been a writer for Hackaday, has a personal blog full of projects and a small shop on Tindie.

• Christine Sunu // Biomimicry and the Machine: Using Psych and Bio to Bring Robots to Life

  Christine Sunu is a tech mercenary who left medicine to work at the intersection of life and machine. She builds rapid prototypes, aligns tech strategies, and creates trending content for companies. She has a partial medical degree, a writing degree, a GE fellowship, and a lot of experience building evocative, effective interfaces. Christine lives in a castle in Los Angeles, where she works on internet connected things, odd storytelling interfaces, and biomimicry by machine.

• Mike Szczys // State of the Hackaday

  Mike Szczys is Editor in Chief of Hackaday. As an Orchestra Musician by night and a writer by day, his entrance into electronics started with BEAM robot builds but quickly moved into the realm of embedded systems. He spends his waking hours chasing down new tricks performed through clever application of existing hardware. This has suited him well since joining Hackaday in 2009. He has an unquenchable thirst for seeing future technology become reality before his eyes — a drive perfectly suited for the hardware hacking universe.

• Ashwin K Whitchurch // Are We Ready for Open Source Healthcare and Medical Devices?

  Ashwin K Whitchurch is a hacker at heart. Since the beginning of his research in college, Ashwin realized how medical devices can benefit from open source and has continued that passion ever since. He holds an M.Sc. in Software Engineering from Bharathiar University, India and an M.S. in Microelectronic-Photonics from University of Arkansas. His research while at Penn State and Arkansas included nanotech, biotech and medical devices. Ashwin is currently involved with building open source medical devices at ProtoCentral, a small company based in India.

• Elliot Williams // Nexus Technologies, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WiFi

  Elliot Williams is Managing Editor of Hackaday. He’s the kind of guy who uses a 1990’s 5″ hard drive platter as a scroll wheel. The kind of guy whose oscilloscope cost just a tiny bit less than his last two cars combined. He’s the kind of guy who stays up late debugging home-brew PCBs or figuring out why that interrupt routine isn’t firing. He takes immense pleasure is minimalist hacks or complete overkill. In short, he loves Hackaday because he lives Hackaday, and that’s why he’s here.

• Anouk Wipprecht // Robotic Dresses and Intuitive Interfaces

  Anouk Wipprecht is a Dutch Tech-Minded Fashion Designer combining the latest in science and technology to make Fashion an experience. With garments that augment everyday interactions, using sensors, machine learning, and robotics her designs move, breath, and react to the environment around them.

• Alan Yates // Getting Started with Vacuum Technology

  Alan Yates’ day job is making VR tracking systems, but he tries to put aside a bit of time on the weekends for other geeky projects. At the 2016 Hackaday Superconference he wowed the audience with the complexity of both the problems and solutions used by Valve’s Lighthouse tracking technology. This year he returns to discuss the lesson he learned while teaching himself some basic glass blowing and experimenting with vacuum electrical devices. Gas discharge tubes, incandescent light bulbs, vacuum diodes and triodes are all accessible to the maker with only some basic equipment.

Get your ticket now!