Supercon Ten Tickets On Sale Now

August 13, 2026 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

Hackers, start your engines! We’re opening up ticket sales for our tenth, the 2026 Hackaday Supercon, to take place Nov 6-8 in Pasadena, CA. As always, because we haven’t announced the full slate of talks yet, we’d like to give the Hackaday True Believers out there a bonus: early bird tickets for $150 instead of the regular price of $296 (plus fees). If you know you want to attend (and you know that you want to attend) do not delay and order your tickets now!

As we mentioned before, there are a few exciting changes coming to this year’s Supercon. First off, we are moving to a larger venue on Saturday and Sunday: a few blocks south at the ArtCenter South Campus. We’re looking forward to two larger stages, more room for attendees, and more space to spread out and hack. No longer crammed into a cozy alley, we’ll sprawl out in a luxurious courtyard.

We have more tickets available than ever this year, which is great because Supercons past have all sold out. But we’re not expanding so much that we’ll lose the killer signal-to-noise ratio and friendly hacker atmosphere that makes Supercon our favorite con.

But do get your tickets soon! Whether you get in at the True Believer rate or not, Supercon is a bargain. Two and a half days of fully catered hacking and entertainment, plus the great talks, make it a bargain. Then we throw in sweet hackable badge over the top. But it’s truly the assembled crowd that makes it a priceless experience.

If you’re a Hackaday Supercon regular, we look forward to seeing you again soon! If you’ve always wanted to attend, but never pulled the trigger, the nice round number of Supercon Ten is a great excuse.

Of course, the best way to attend any convention is as a presenter, and our call for proposals just got extended for another two weeks. If you have something you’d like to say: let us know soon!

Procrastineers Rejoice! 2026 Supercon Call For Participation Extended

August 12, 2026 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

A few weeks ago, we put out the call for participation for this year’s 2026 Hackaday Supercon, taking place in Pasadena, CA this November. Today was going to be the deadline, but like you, we often let things pile up and put things off, so we’re extending another two weeks until August 26th.

Which is not to say that we haven’t heard from a ton of you! We’re psyched to see so many familiar Supercon regulars on the list, but we also love to see first-timers give talks. We try to make sure that new folks get their time to shine, so if you’ve never given a Supercon talk before, or if it’s been a few years, take this as your cue to present in front of the friendliest audience of like-minded hackers around.

This year is Hackaday’s tenth in-person Superconference, and to celebrate we’ve gotten a larger venue, so more folks can watch the talks live. We’ll be running two tracks as always, and you have your choice of a 20-minute or 40-minute slot. Presenters get in free, and we’ll get you an early-bird ticket rate the submission, so don’t delay and register for your slot today! Or at least before August 26th, because we won’t extend the deadline twice.

Oh, and if you’re interested in tickets, swing by Hackaday about this time tomorrow — we’ll have some news for you.

Congratulations To The Frikkin Laser Winners!

August 3, 2026 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

Apparently you all love lasers just as much as we do. We put out a challenge to use, build, or otherwise abuse our favorite coherent light sources, and you responded. Some of the projects had been in the works for quite a while and were ridiculously polished, some were whipped together on the fly just for the contest, and we truly enjoyed both.

We only have three $150 DigiKey gift certificates to give out, though, so without further ado, we present to you…

Continue reading “Congratulations To The Frikkin Laser Winners!” →

Commercialization And Innovation

August 1, 2026 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

The last year or two has seen relatively affordable multi-material printers hit the market, and the question that [Tom Nardi] and I were kicking around when he was writing up the 2025 year-in-review article was what it was going to mean for our folks. I don’t think he got it wrong per se, but his heading for that section “Grandma is 3D-Printing in Color” only tells half the story.

He did get that part right, though. We’ve certainly seen a flourishing of multi-material designs out there that take advantage of the availability of (usually) four colors. The ability to print in color has given life to the purely decorative models, of course. Think full-color Pokemon desktop toys, for instance. But even functional prints have benefited from contrasting color labels printed right into the box, not to even mention the multi-material supports that pull off easier and cleaner than ever before.

Since most of these multi-filament machines are pretty much locked down as far as hardware tinkering goes, our sights were firmly locked on what the end-user would do with the new capability. But we overlooked the third axis of 3D printering: the software hackers. And it’s precisely in this area of slicer and path-planning that we’ve seen some of the coolest developments this year. Why? Because people have the hardware in their hands that they need to test out the algorithms.

FullSpectrum and the more recent ImageMap are two techniques to get the missing in-between colors out of a four-filament printer, and in particular ImageMap tries to get the job done faster, and with fewer purges. We are amazed to see two different approaches to color blending popping up in just a few months of each other, and we have no doubt that work on this is going to continue.

At the end of the day, this really is just “put new tools in the hands of creative hackers, and they’ll find new ways to use them”, so we shouldn’t have been surprised at all. But if this is what comes out of the commercialization of the multi-material printer, what’s going to come when some of the more esoteric machine designs go mainstream? We can’t wait to find out!

Sharkfin Bites Attack Shark

July 28, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

The Attack Shark is a modern keyboard with fancy magnetic keyswitches, macros, configurable blinky LEDs, and more. The problem is that the configuration software only works on Windows, so [JR Lanteigne] set out to fix that. Along the way, he completely worked out the configuration protocol that this keyboard needs, and wrote the comfortable sharkfin web-app so that you can flash yours too.

Don’t have an Attack Shark? Well, you might have one of the 522 other boards that are made on the same ROYUAN hardware, but are re-branded under 100 different names. Want to find out if yours is supported? Look it up in the list here, or just plug it in and find out.

[RJ]’s path to reverse engineering the config protocol wasn’t entirely straightforward, but since the “Windows only” application was actually an Electron app under the hood, he patched it to run on Linux and logged a few configuration sessions. Of course there are gotchas like two different firmware generations and the fact that writing to flash too fast put the keyboard into a boot loop, but after these problems were surmounted, it just remained to map all of the bytes out, and wrap it all up in a user-friendly application.

We don’t have one of these fancy-schmancy keyboards, but if we did, we’d certainly be glad to have the configuration protocol documented. Nothing is worse than finding out that the company that made your keyboard has gone belly-up, and you’re left with a backlight setup that doesn’t match your new deskpad. If you’re a keyboard-head and you don’t already follow [Kristina]’s series, well you should.

Add Sensors To Everything!

July 25, 2026 by Elliot Williams 25 Comments

“You can’t control what you can’t measure” goes the old chestnut. But that’s a little bit negative, in my opinion. Instead, think of the benefits of sprinkling sensors around everywhere: you gain insight where you simply didn’t have it beforehand.

We were thinking about this in the context of the recent video on pressure advance in 3D printers. Essentially, the unmelted filament acts as a springy piston, and that springiness means that the pressure built up in the melted plastic lags the feedrate of new filament. We usually calibrate this out with a guesstimate constant, but it can be different for every different filament. Measuring that pressure directly with a strain gauge in the hot end makes more sense.

But then there are knock-on benefits of having a sensor in the hot end. You can use the strain gauge as Prusa does to run the nozzle gently into the bed and set the z-axis height. Or you can use over-pressure as a sign that the nozzle is clogged. It’s quite possible that you can use it to signal other things that can go wrong as well, but you can’t tell until you put the sensor on in the first place.

Of course, you don’t want to put a pressure sensor where you want to know the temperature, or vice-versa. But as a general rule, the more you can measure, the more you can discover about the way your system is running. How many strain gauges are too many?

Simple Games From A Simpler Time

July 18, 2026 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

Modern video games are nothing short of amazing. My son and I were playing through the one of the latest Zeldas, which involve a mix of combat and puzzle-solving that’s pretty much the hallmark of the franchise. But the most recent open-world Zelda is simply massive. Made by around 1,000 people at a development expense of $150,000,000, it takes probably 60-80 hours to play through if you’re not rushing, and more if you’re taking it easy. It has layers of game mechanics, and worlds in the sky, on land, and underground. It’s big in every way.

Contrast the games of my youth, which were a lot smaller. Written by a pair of people or maybe a handful, with playtimes in the single-digit hours, and of course fitting in the limited computing resources of the time. But the low-stakes nature of the early phases of the industry meant that software developers could take risks, and many of the games were consequently kinda idiosyncratic in this more innocent time.

I think there’s something to be said for small games. They don’t require a lifestyle commitment just to get through. They can still be fun, without taking all of your time. And honestly, when you’re done with a game quickly, you have more time for other stuff. Granted, some of this spirit lives on in the small indie games of today, but even so, game developers have the big studios’ products in the backs of their minds when they are working on their smaller oeuvres.

We were talking about preserving old games for posterity around Hackaday and on the podcast, and our conversations reminded me of a couple of educational games that, despite their rudimentary graphics, are still pretty good today. Both were electronics related, and both are still playable today thanks to efforts on emulation and software preservation. To get a feel for the 1980’s, give Rocky’s Boots a try. (I like the TRS-80 Color Computer version the best, but that may just be nostalgia.) Most of you grownups out there will get through it in an hour or so.

And if you want a challenge, try Rocky’s harder sequel: Robot Odyssey. If you already have a background in digital circuits, you’ll find it doable. Younger me hit a wall about two-thirds of the way through.

Both of these games stick with me because they taught me something, but also because they were simply quirky in a way that a game can only be when it’s written by a small team of folks who are just having fun programming it. If you pitched “a puzzle game about a raccoon who builds logic circuits to activate robot boots”, the boardroom would look at you like you’re out of your mind. But it’s just exactly the quirkiness and individuality of some of these early games that I cherish the most.

If you find yourself knee-deep in an endless modern game, take a side-quest off into a more naive time, and you’ll appreciate why people are putting efforts into archiving them.