Hackaday Superconference 2023: Workshops Announced, Get Tickets Now!

October 12, 2023 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

Last week, we announced just half of our fantastic slate of talks for Supercon. This week, we’re opening up the workshops. The workshops are small, hands-on opportunities to build something or learn something, lead by an expert in the field. Workshops sell out fast, so register now if you’re interested.

And stay tuned for the next round of talk reveals next week! And maybe even the badge reveal?

Andy Geppert
Weave Your Own Core Memory – Core16!

This workshop provides you with the opportunity to weave your own core memory! Using 16 authentic ferrite core bits and 16 RGB LEDs, you can play tic-tac-toe, paint with a magnetic stylus, and create your own interactive experiences. Andy Geppert will guide you through the assembly of Core16. The Core16 kit is the little brother of the Core64 kit. The smaller Core16 kit reduces assembly time/cost, enabling more people to experience the challenge and satisfaction of creating their own core memory.

Travis Foss
Presented by DigiKey: Introduction and expansion of the XRP Robotics Platform

In this workshop you will be able to get your hands on the new XRP (Experiential Robotics Platform) and take the basics a step further with a few additional parts. Along with the base kit, participants will have the opportunity to install a RGB twist encoder, a LCD screen, and a buzzer to create a setup that will allow the user to choose a program onboard without being tethered to a computer.

Becky Button
How to Make a Custom Guitar Pedal

Musical effects are for everybody! Join this workshop and get hands-on experience assembling and programming your musical effects pedals. Walk away from this workshop with the capability of integrating multiple musical effects into 1 device and reprogramming the pedal with any effects you want!

Daniel Lindmark
From Zero to Git: 1 Hour Hardware Git Bootcamp

In this workshop, you will learn all about basic git operations, including how to download and install the client, setting up a repo, synching changes, and much more. Learn how to navigate common issues and take advantage of a live FAQ during the workshop.

Jazmin Hernandez
Solder and Learn How to Use Your Own Anti-Skimmer (HunterCat)

Have you ever been vulnerable to data theft? Do you fear using your bank card in ATMs or even in a restaurant? Protect your information from potential skimmers in this workshop while you learn to solder some components of your anti-skimmer/magnetic stripe clone detectors. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have a device to insert before using your bank card to check for potential issues.

Matt Venn
Tiny Tapeout – Demystifying Microchip Design and Manufacture

In this workshop, you can design and manufacture your own chip on an ASIC. You will learn the basics of digital logic, how semiconductors are made, the skills needed to use an online digital design tool for simulation, and how to create the GDS file for manufacturing. Participants will also have the option to submit their designs to be manufactured as part of the Tiny Tapeout project.

You can’t attend the workshops without attending Supercon, so get your tickets! (As we write, there are only ten more…)

Try It Out

October 7, 2023 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

It’s like Star Wars versus Star Trek at a SciFi convention, or asking creamy or chunky at the National Peanut Butter Appreciation Festival. (OK, we made that one up.) When Jenny reviewed the 1.0 version of LibrePCB, it opened the floodgates. Only on Hackaday!

Of course it makes sense that in a community of hardware hackers, folks who are not unfamiliar with the fine art and engineering of designing their own PCBs, have their favorite tools. Let’s face it, all PCB design software is idiosyncratic, and takes some learning. But the more fluent you are with your tool of choice, the more effort you have invested in mastering it, leading to something like the sunk-cost phenomenon: because you’ve put so much into it, you can’t think of leaving it.

The beauty of open-source software tools is that there’s almost nothing, aside from your own psychology, stopping you from picking up another PCB program, kicking the proverbial tires with a simple design, and seeing how it works for you. That’s what Jenny did here, and what she’s encouraged me to do. Whether it’s beginner-friendly Fritzing (also recently in version 1.0), upstarts LibrePCB or Horizon EDA, heavyweight champion KiCAD, or the loose-knit conglomeration of tools in coralEDA, you have enough choices that something is going to fit your PCB hand like a glove.

I certainly wouldn’t risk a swap up to a new tool on something super complicated, or something with a tight deadline, but why not start up a fun project to test it out? Maybe follow Tom Nardi’s lead and make a Simple Add-on, for a badge or just as a blinky to put on your desk? Don’t be afraid to try something new!

Hackaday Superconference 2023: First Round Of Speakers Announced!

October 5, 2023 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

Hackaday Supercon 2023 is almost upon us, and looking over the roster of fantastic talks gets us in the mood already. We hope that it has the same effect on you too.

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll announce the rest of the speakers, the workshops, and give you a peek at the badge over the next couple weeks. Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for the next round of reveals on Tuesday! Continue reading “Hackaday Superconference 2023: First Round Of Speakers Announced!” →

Horrendous Mess Of Wires

September 30, 2023 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

When do you post your projects? When they’re done? When they’re to the basic prototype stage? Or all along the way, from their very conception? All of these have their merits, and their champions.

In the post-all-along-the-way corner, we have Hackaday’s own [Arya Voronova], who outlines the many ways that you can start documenting your project before it’s even a fully fledged project. She calls these tidbits “breadcrumbs”, and it strikes me as being a lot like keeping a logbook, but doing it in public. The advantages? Instead of just you, everyone on the Internet can see what you’re up to. This means they can offer help, give you parts recommendations, and find that incorrect pinout that one pair of eyes would have missed. It takes a lot of courage to post your unfinished business for all to see, but ironically, that’s the stage of the project where you stand to gain the most from the exposure.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the folks who document their projects at the very end. We see a ton of these on Hackaday.io and in people’s personal blogs. It’s a great service to the community, frankly, because at that point, you’re already done with the project. This is the point where the reward, for you, is at its minimum, but it’s also the point where you feel least inhibited about sharing if you’re one of those people who are afraid of showing your work off half-done. The risk here, if you’re like me, is that you’re already on to the next project when one is “done”, and going back over it to make notes seems superfluous. Those of you who do it regardless, we salute you!

And then there’s the middle ground. When you’re about one third of the way done, you realize that you might have something half workable, and you start taking a photo or two, or maybe even typing words into a computer. Your git logs start to contain more than just “fixed more stuff” for each check-in, because what if someone else actually reads this? Maybe you’re to the point where you’ve just made the nice box to put it in, and you’re not sure if you’ll ever go back and untangle that rat’s nest, so you take a couple of pictures of the innards before you hot glue it down.

I’m a little ashamed I’m probably on the “post only when it’s done” end of things than is healthy, mostly because I don’t have the aforementioned strength of will to go back. What about you?

A Raspberry Pi 5 Is Better Than Two Pi 4s

September 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 192 Comments

What’s as fast as two Raspberry Pi 4s? The brand-new Raspberry Pi 5, that’s what. And for only a $5 upcharge (with an asterisk), it’s going to the new go-to board from the British House of Fruity Single-Board Computers. But aside from the brute speed, it also has a number of cool features that will make using the board easier for a number of projects, and it’s going to be on sale in October. Raspberry Pi sent us one for review, and if you were just about to pick up a Pi 4 for a project that needs the speed, we’d say that you might wait a couple weeks until the Raspberry Pi 5 goes on sale.

Twice as Nice

On essentially every benchmark, the Raspberry Pi 5 comes in two to three times faster than the Pi 4. This is thanks to the new Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip (SOC) that runs four ARM A76s at 2.4 GHz instead of the Pi 4’s ARM A72s at 1.8 GHz. This gives the CPUs a roughly 2x – 3x advantage over the Pi 4. (Although the Pi 4 was eminently overclockable in the CM4 package.)

The DRAM runs at double the clock speed. The video core is more efficient and pushes pixels about twice as fast. The new WiFi controller in the SOC allows about twice as much throughput to the same radio. Even the SD card interface is capable of running twice as fast, speeding up boot times to easily under 10 sec – maybe closer to 8 sec, but who’s counting?

Heck, while we’re on factors of two, there are now two MIPI camera/display lines, so you can do stereo imaging straight off the board, or run a camera and external display simultaneously. And it’s capable of driving two 4k HDMI displays at 60 Hz.

There are only two exceptions to the overall factor-of-two improvements. First, the Gigabyte Ethernet remains Gigabyte Ethernet, so that’s a one-ex. (We’re not sure who is running up against that constraint, but if it’s you, you’ll want an external network adapter.) But second, the new Broadcom SOC finally supports the ARM cryptography extensions, which make it 45x faster at AES, for instance. With TLS almost everywhere, this keeps crypto performance from becoming the bottleneck. Nice.

All in all, most everything performance-related has been doubled or halved appropriately, and completely in line with the only formal benchmarks we’ve seen so far, it feels about twice as fast all around in our informal tests. Compared with a Pi 400 that I use frequently in the basement workshop, the Pi 5 is a lot snappier.

Continue reading “A Raspberry Pi 5 Is Better Than Two Pi 4s” →

Hackaday Links: September 24, 2023

September 24, 2023 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

Modern video games are almost always written on the backs of a game engine platform, and the two most popular are definitely Unreal Engine and Unity. Some bean counter at Unity decided they essentially wanted a bigger piece of the pie and rolled out new terms of use that would have game development houses paying per Unity install. This was a horrible blow to small indie game development houses, where the fees would end up eating up something like 15% of revenue in an industry that’s already squeezed between the Apple Store and Steam. It caused an absolutely gigantic uproar in the game dev community, and now Unity is walking it back.

We noticed the change first because tons of “migrate from Unity to Godot” tutorials popped up in our YouTube stream. Godot is a free and open-source game engine, and while we’re no game devs, it looks to be at about the level of Blender five years ago – not quite as easy to use or polished as its closed-source equivalents, but just about poised to make the transition to full usability. While we’re sure Unreal Engine is happy enough to see Unity kick some more business their way, we’re crossing our fingers for the open-source underdog.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing allows independent authors to self-publish. And it’s apparently been awash in prose written by large language models. While it was fun for a while to look through self-published books for the shibboleth phrase “As an AI language model,” Amazon caught on pretty quickly. Of course, that only gets the lowest-hanging fruit. Books like the AI-written guidebook to mushrooms that recommends eating the Death Cap still manage to sneak through, as we mentioned two weeks ago.

Amazon’s solution? Limiting self-published books to three per day. I wrote a book once, and it took me the better part of a year, and Amazon is letting through three per day. If this limit is going to help limit the size of the problem, then we vastly underestimate the problem.

And it’s good news, bad news from space. The good news is that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to return a sample from the asteroid Bennu successfully landed just a few hours ago. As we write this, they’ve sent a team driving around the Utah desert to pick up the capsule. The effort reminds us of retrieving high-altitude balloon capsules after a flight: you know roughly where it is, but you still have to get out there to fetch it. Only NASA has a helicopter to go out looking for the capsule and a lot more science to do before they can throw it in the back of their car.

On the bad news side, India’s Vikram and Pragyan lunar lander/rover pair wasn’t really expected to make it through the long lunar night and had successfully executed all of its planned mission goals before going into deep sleep mode two weeks ago. But you’ve got to try to wake it up anyway, right? Well, the sun came up on Vikram on Friday, and the Indian space agency tweeted a stoic, “Efforts have been made to establish communication with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to ascertain their wake-up condition. As of now, no signals have been received from them. Efforts to establish contact will continue.” We’ve still got our fingers crossed, but at this point it would just be extra icing on the cake.

Confluence Of Nerdery

September 23, 2023 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

You might find yourself, dear Hackaday reader, attracted to some pretty strange corners of the tech world. Who knows when that knowledge of stenography, ancient retrocomputing, and floppy disk internals will all combine to get someone falsely accused out of jail? Go read this story and come on back, but the short version is that [Bloop Museum] helped recover some 40+ year old court evidence off of some floppies to right an old wrong.

If you looked at the combination of extremely geeky topics, you’d say it’s unlikely to find anyone well versed in any one of them, and you’d say that the chances of anyone knowing enough in each these fringe domains to be helpful is exceedingly low. But I’m absolutely sure that the folks at [Bloop Museum] had some more to throw into the mix if they were called for. Or better yet, they might know exactly the right geeks to call in.

And that’s the other heartwarming part of the story. When [Bloop Museum] didn’t know everything about old stenography formats, they knew the right people to reach out to – the Plover open stenography project. Who is going to know more? Nobody! Together, the nerd community is an unstoppable resource.

So remember, when you’re hanging out with your geek friends, to keep a running catalog of everyone’s interests. Because you never know when you’re going to need an expert in re-gilding frames, or relocating bee hives, or restoring 1930’s radio sets. Or decoding obscure data formats to get someone out of jail.

Hackaday Halloween

We’re running the 2023 Halloween Hackfest and it’s your chance to document your Halloween projects, and win fame, fortune, or at least one of three $150 DigiKey gift certificates, plus some Arduino schwag courtesy of the contest’s sponsors! You’ve got until the end of October, so get on it!