Sprite Lights are 1.5 mm thick LED body art, think a light up temporary tattoo. Join Katherine “Smalls” Connell to hear about the 6-year journey to create the impossible as a self taught maker. From hundreds of rapid prototypes, and smelting metal in her driveway to reflowing home made flexible circuits on a griddle, Sprite Lights is a testament that when you’re willing to try anything, you can create everything.

In this talk, we will explore the DSP magic that allows lock-in amplifiers to detect signals hidden below the noise floor. By making a change to the measurement setup, these devices can isolate and measure faint signals amidst noise a hundred dB higher. Lock-in amplifiers are used in various applications, from sensitive photonics research to next-generation battery research and quantum computing.
We’ll also show you how to use your oscilloscope as a lock-in amplifier, enabling a low-cost entry point to these niche instruments.

When someone says analog design – what do you think of? If I had to guess I would say you don’t associate it with modern technology. And yet – analog circuits and the designers that build them play a critical role in every modern electronic device, especially the digital ones. In this talk I will provide an overview of the incredible analog circuits in our pockets, and often already in our projects. Once you’re convinced – I’ll show that analog design isn’t as hard as you think and how a few simple concepts can significantly improve your next project, while providing examples with some of mine.

In a world increasingly reliant on wireless communication, the ability to track down and understand the sources of radio transmissions has never been more critical. From identifying interference in urban environments to the enigmatic world of numbers stations, “Finding Beamo” will take the audience on a journey through the fascinating and often mysterious world of locating radio transmissions.

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is used in cars, trains, buses, planes, and spacecraft – but it’s useful for all sorts of cases where systems need to communicate. I’ll talk about how you can use this technology to transfer data between microcontrollers and larger computers, and will present an example application that you can use as a starting point.

This talk will give you an overview of all the technical challenges to solve to get a sub-250g UAV to autonomously return to home after releasing from a stratospheric balloon at 100,000 ft altitude.

We all must strive to minimize iteration time. Designing and testing an idea in a single sitting spawns great things! It’s why we visit fab labs and love laser cutters and push the 3D printers in the corners of our apartments to the absolute limit. But circuit tools haven’t kept up; once you’re done mashing together breakout boards, your choices of milling, conductive-pasting, or home etching all leave a bit to be desired; they’re often messy, delicate, and lack the precision to reach the funnest parts in the catalog. Ugh, I need to go smaller than SOICs, and I don’t want to wait a week for commercial boards!

Here, I present and freely share significant progress on a novel method I’ve been poking at over the last few years which demonstrates the feasibility of fabricating 4/4 PCBs at home!

Tech constantly takes us out of the present moment and beckons us into the internet wormhole, but can we use technology to explore our emotions and root us in the now or even our physical bodies? At supercon, I would love to talk about my Body of Work series and how I used technology to interrogate my own embodiment.

My Body of Work is a series of tech-powered body part sculptures that relate to my own relationship with my body and come together to make an unconventional self-portrait.

Artists, craftspeople, and scientists are highly skilled makers. Yet, software for making physical things often overlooks existing skill sets, forcing practitioners to work against built-in assumptions to accomplish their goals. Using examples from digital art, ceramics, and plant biology, this talk will consider how creative practices can guide the development of digital fabrication systems and communities.

A bit of our journey deploying embedded Linux systems, and integrating drivers on the Linux kernels, from the hardware, to the kernel.