Day: January 22, 2018

Hackaday Belgrade Call For Proposals Now Open!

January 22, 2018 by 6 Comments

Prepare yourself for the return of Hackaday Belgrade! Our premier European conference — Hackaday Belgrade — is on 26 May and we want to hear what you’ve been working on. The Call for Proposals is now open. We seek talks and workshops exploring the most interesting uses of technology and the culture that goes along with it. This includes design, prototyping, research, manufacturing, and the stories of people and progress that move hardware hacking forward.

We’ve booked Dom Omladine for the event because it was perfect for our previous Belgrade conference in 2016. The sold-out conference became a living organism of excitement when the Hackaday community from across Europe came together. A spectacular slate of speakers presented topics like designing computing clusters for use in University research programs, combining projection mapping with high powered lasers, building hardware for advertising campaigns, uncovering forgotten projector technology called Eidophor, fully embracing Open Hardware during product development, and so much more. All of this while hundreds in attendance joined forces for some of the best hardware badge hacking we’ve ever seen.

Hackaday Belgrade is the rare kind of opportunity that is worth reorganizing your life to attend. Want to guarantee yourself a ticket? They’re not available yet, but you can hack your way into the conference: submit a proposal! In addition to the adoration of the Hackaday community, accepted speakers will receive free admission. Everyone who submits a quality talk proposal will be given priority when tickets do go on sale. This event will sell out!

For updates, keep an eye on the conference page and pop into the chat on the project page by clicking “Join this project’s team”. Do you know someone who should be a speaker at this conference? Reach out to them personally, share this CFP on social media, or let us know in the comments below so we can make it happen.

Quantum Computing Hardware Teardown

January 22, 2018 by 59 Comments

Although quantum computing is still in its infancy, enough progress is being made for it to look a little more promising than other “revolutionary” technologies, like fusion power or flying cars. IBM, Intel, and Google all either operate or are producing double-digit qubit computers right now, and there are plans for even larger quantum computers in the future. With this amount of inertia, our quantum computing revolution seems almost certain.

There’s still a lot of work to be done, though, before all of our encryption is rendered moot by these new devices. Since nothing is easy (or intuitive) at the quantum level, progress has been considerably slower than it was during the transistor revolution of the previous century. These computers work because of two phenomena: superposition and entanglement. A quantum bit, or qubit, works because unlike a transistor it can exist in multiple states at once, rather than just “zero” or “one”. These states are difficult to determine because in general a qubit is built using a single atom. Adding to the complexity, quantum computers must utilize quantum entanglement too, whereby a pair of particles are linked. This is the only way for any hardware to “observe” the state of the computer without affecting any qubits themselves. In fact, the observations often don’t yet have the highest accuracy themselves.

There are some other challenges with the hardware as well. All quantum computers that exist today must be cooled to a temperature very close to absolute zero in order to take advantage of superconductivity. Whether this is because of a reduction in thermal noise, as is the case with universal quantum computers based on ion traps or other technology, or because it is possible to take advantage of other interesting characteristics of superconductivity like the D-Wave computers do, all of them must be cooled to a critical temperature. A further challenge is that even at these low temperatures, the qubits still interact with each other and their read/write devices in unpredictable ways that get more unpredictable as the number of qubits scales up.

So, once the physics and the refrigeration are sorted out, let’s take a look at how a few of the quantum computing technologies actually manipulate these quantum curiosities to come up with working, programmable computers. Continue reading “Quantum Computing Hardware Teardown” →

How Low Can An ESP8266 Go?

January 22, 2018 by 40 Comments

We’ve been tuned into coin cell designs lately given the coin cell challenge, so we were interested in [CNLohr]’s latest video about pushing the ESP8266 into the lowest-possible battery drain with coin cells. The result is a series of hacks, based on a reverse-engineered library and depends on a modified router, but that gets the power consumption down by more than a factor of ten!

Although the ESP8266 has a deep sleep mode that draws only 20 microamps or so, that isn’t as rosy as it seems. If you could go to sleep for a while, wake up for just a moment, send your data, and then go back to sleep, that might be one thing. But when you use conventional techniques, the device wakes up and has to do about ten seconds of work (at high power) to connect to a nearby access point. Then it can do what you want and go back to sleep. That ten-second hit is a killer on small batteries.

Since that’s all you can do with the standard libraries, the next step was to find [pvvx] who has reverse engineered a great deal of the libraries and provides a library with no WiFi capability. That’s a two-edged sword. The pro is you get a 30 ms startup from a deep sleep. The downside is — well — you don’t have WiFi.

Continue reading “How Low Can An ESP8266 Go?” →

We Couldn’t Afford An Oculus, So We Built One

January 22, 2018 by 20 Comments

Like a lot of 16-year-olds, [Maxime Coutté] wanted an Oculus Rift. Unlike a lot of 16-year-olds, [Maxime] and friends [Gabriel] and [Jonas] built one themselves for about a hundred bucks and posted it on GitHub. We’ll admit that at 16 we weren’t throwing around words like quaternions and antiderivatives, so we were duly impressed.

Before you assume this is just a box to put a phone in like a Google Cardboard, take a look at the bill of materials: an Arduino Due, a 2K LCD screen, a Fresnel lens, and an accelerometer/gyro. The team notes that the screen is what will push the price unpredictably, but they got by for about a hundred euro. At the current exchange rate, if you add up all the parts, they went a little over $100, but they were still under $150 assuming you have a 3D printer to print the mechanical parts.

Continue reading “We Couldn’t Afford An Oculus, So We Built One” →