With a fascination of making devices one uses everyday more secure, we take a look at what it takes to go beyond an iFixIt teardown image of a phone motherboard and completely reverse-engineering it with the help of relatively inexpensive services, modifying it to be (somewhat) more secure, and rebuilding a phone from scratch (in China). These techniques and practices can be applied to any device from phones, as discussed in this talk, to generic IOT devices or even the laptop you use on a daily basis.

Our team (ProtoCentral, based in India) won 2nd prize at the Hackaday Prize 2017 for the project “Connected Health: Open source IoT patient monitor”. This formed the basis for the HealthyPi series of products from ProtoCentral, still open source, but also used for applications with medical research-grade accuracy. This talk is about our journey from then till now, including some major shifts in technology, the intricacies involved in making a product to take to the market and mistakes made during the process.

Project Boondock Echo started as a conversation during a Hackaday Hack Chat. A few months later we found ourselves on stage at the supercon accepting a cash award. And now, we’ve got a working prototype in the hands of customers. Learn about the journey and the decisions we made along our journey.

To RTOS or not to RTOS? Szymon and Jakub will introduce obstacles they faced and decisions behind moving a closed-source single-threaded wearable health monitor to an RTOS, open-hardware based system with an AI model deployed using TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers.

Last year’s conference badge (affectionately dubbed the “Voja4”) was a wonder of low-level computing, implementing a working 4-bit computer with over 200 LEDs to show its internal state. In this talk I want to reignite your fascination with this little device by sharing with you how it works, what makes it a computer (given it’s lilliputian specifications), and a plethora of fun projects you can build with it once we’re done.

Do you sell products on Tindie or other marketplaces? If so, this talk is for you! Learn how you can spend less time fulfilling orders and more time working on an unfinished project from your shelf. Do you want lights and sirens to turn on every time you get an order? We’ll see how to do that too. :)

Hackers and aviation do mix. This talk would introduce Hackaday community to the world of designing and building own aircraft – and getting it certified in public airspace. Building on experiences as a pilot, avionics engineer, and hackerspace founder, Tom would make a case for the renaissance of general aviation, and its relevance to the hacker mentality.

FAA has had a long-standing policy of supporting innovative aircraft builds. These aircraft are inherently more hackable, and have served as a platform for further innovation – while at the same time creating a veritable platform for STEM education and giving engineers a new perspective. Literally.

At Bell Labs in 1987, a team of scientists created the first magneto-optical trap, an apparatus that enables the ‘cooling’ and trapping of atoms at temperatures bordering on absolute zero, leading to the first physical studies of atoms in isolation. Despite the apparent complexity of this phenomenon, the fundamental engineering principles behind the apparatus are quite simple and do not require deep, esoteric knowledge to understand. I am fabricating a primarily 3D-printable and fully open-source blueprint for a magneto-optical trap for rubidium atoms, with the aim of enabling a much larger audience of students & entrepreneurs to participate in engineering & research.