Hackaday Berlin Was Bonkers

March 27, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

In celebration of the tenth running of the Hackaday Prize, we had a fantastic weekend event in Berlin. This was a great opportunity for all of the European Hackaday community to get together for a few days of great talks, fun show-and-tells, and above all good old fashioned sitting together and brainstorming. Of course there was the badge, and the location – a gigantic hackerspace in Berlin called MotionLab – even had a monstrous laser-eye octopus suspended from a gantry overhead. Everyone who came brought something to share or to show. You couldn’t ask for more.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the talks, so we’ll run down the highlights for you here. [Jenny List] is writing up a bunch of the badge hacks as we speak, so we’ll skip that for now. For the full experience, you just had to be there, but we’ll share with you what pictures we got. Enjoy!

Continue reading “Hackaday Berlin Was Bonkers” →

Study Hacker History, And Update It

March 18, 2023 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

Looking through past hacks is a great source of inspiration. This week, we saw [Russ Maschmeyer] re-visiting a classic hack by [Jonny Lee] that made use of a Wiimote’s IR camera to fake 3D, or at least provide a compelling parallax effect that’ll fool your brain, without any expensive custom hardware.

[Lee]’s original demo was stunning, and that alone is reason to revisit it. Using the Wiimote as the webcam was inspired back in 2007, because it meant that there was no hard computer vision work to be done in estimating the viewer’s position – the camera only sees IR LEDs anyway. The tradeoff is that you had to wear two IR LEDs on your head, calibrate it just right, and that only the person with the headset on gets the illusion just right.

This is why re-visiting the past can be fruitful. As [Russ] discovered, computing power is so plentiful these days that you could do face/eye position estimation with a normal webcam easier than you could source an old Wiimote. Indeed, he’s getting the positioning so accurate that he’s worried about to which eye he’s projecting the illusion. Clearly, it’s time for a revamp.

So here’s the formula: find a brilliant old hack, and notice if it was hampered by the state of technology back when it was done. Update this using modern conveniences, and voila! You might just find that you can take the idea further, simply because you have more tools in your toolbox. Nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants.

But beware! Time isn’t sitting still for you either. As soon as you make your killer 3D vision hack, VR goggles will become cheap and ubiquitous. So get it done today, before your hack becomes inspiration for the future.

Hackaday Berlin: Final Schedule, Last Call For Tickets, And More

March 16, 2023 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

Hackaday Berlin is just about a week away, and we’ve just put the finishing touches on our preparations. And that includes a snazzy landing page, the full schedule, details on the Friday night meetup, and more.

We’ll be meeting up Friday the 24th at 19:00 at DogTap / Brew Dog, Im Marienpark 23 for an ice breaker. This is a great time to unwind from your travels, catch up with old friends, and start getting into gear for the days ahead.

Saturday the 25th starts off at 9:30, you’ll get your badge and schwag bag, and have some breakfast. Then it’s talks, workshops, lightning talks, badge hacking, food and music until the wee hours.

Sunday morning starts up again at 11:00, but it’ll feel like 10:00 due to Daylight Savings time. We’ll have brunch, show off whatever cool hacks you’ve brought along, and just generally chill out into the afternoon. Some people are planning to go sightseeing around Berlin afterwards, so if that’s your thing, you’re in good company.

For any chat related to Hackaday Berlin, we have a not-so-cryptically named #Berlin channel over on the Hackaday Discord server.

There are still a few tickets left, so you procrastinators, now’s your time to snap them up. All the rest of you, put those finishing touches on whatever you’re bringing with you, and we’ll see you next week!

(Oh, and press the play button on the landing page.)

Hackaday Berlin: The Badge, Workshops, And Lightning Talks

March 14, 2023 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Hackaday Berlin is just under two weeks away, and we’ve got news times three! If you don’t already have tickets, there are still a few left, so grab them while they’re hot. We’ll be rolling out the final full schedule soon, but definitely plan on attending a pre-party Friday night the 24th, followed by a solid 14-hour day of hacking, talks, and music on Saturday the 25th, and then a mellow Bring-a-Hack brunch with impromptu demos, workshops, and whatever else on Sunday from 10:30 until 14:00.

The Badge Round Two

Many Europeans weren’t able to make the flight to Supercon, so here’s your chance to get hands on Voja Antonic’s superb down-to-the-metal computer trainer-slash-retrocomputer on this side of the Atlantic. It’s been re-skinned for Berlin, with a couple hardware tweaks because nobody can leave a board revision alone, but it’s 100% compatible with the badge that took Supercon 2022 by storm.

If you want to read more about it, you should. We loved it, and so did the crowd. One of the coolest badge hardware hacks was a “punchcard” reader, but there was also a lot of work on the software side as well, and we got pull requests for most of the cool demos. If you’re coming, and if you’d like to start your badge hacking a bit early, you could start your research now.

We’ll have a Badge Hacking Ceremony Saturday night, so you can show off whatever you made. It’s lots of fun. Continue reading “Hackaday Berlin: The Badge, Workshops, And Lightning Talks” →

Computers For Fun

March 11, 2023 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

The last couple years have seen an incredible flourishing of the cyberdeck scene, and probably for about as many reasons as there are individual ’deck designs. Some people get really into the prop-making, some into scrapping old tech or reusing a particularly appealing case, and others simply into the customization possibilities. That’s awesome, and they’re all different motivations for making a computer that’s truly your own.

But I really like the motivation and sentiment behind [Andreas Eriksen]’s PotatoP. (Assuming that his real motivation isn’t all the bad potato puns.) This is a small microcomputer that’s built on a commonly available microcontroller, so it’s not a particularly powerful beast – hence the “potato”. But what makes up for that in my mind is that it’s running a rudimentary bare-metal OS of his own writing. It’s like he’s taken the cyberdeck’s DIY aesthetic into the software as well.

What I like most about the spirit of the project is the idea of a long-term project that’s also a constant companion. Once you get past a terminal and an interpreter – [Andreas] is using LISP for both – everything else consists of small projects that you can check off one by one, that maybe don’t take forever, and that are limited in complexity by the hardware you’re working on. A simple text editor, some graphics primitives, maybe a sound subsystem. A way to read and write files in flash. I don’t love LISP personally, but I love that it brings interactivity and independence from an external compiler, making the it possible to develop the system on the system, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps.

Pretty soon, you could have something capable, and completely DIY. But it doesn’t need to be done all at once either. With a light enough computer, and a good basic foundation, you could keep it in your backpack and play “OS development” whenever you’ve got the free time. A DIY play OS for a sandbox computing platform: what more could a nerd want?

New Raspberry Pi Camera With Global Shutter

March 9, 2023 by Elliot Williams 37 Comments

Raspberry Pi has just introduced a new camera module in the high-quality camera format. For the same $50 price you would shell out for the HQ camera, you get roughly eight times fewer pixels. But this is a global shutter camera, and if you need a global shutter, there’s just no substitute. That’s a big deal for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.

Global vs Rolling

Most cameras out there today use CMOS sensors in rolling shutter mode. That means that the sensor starts in the upper left corner and rasters along, reading out exposure values from each row before moving down to the next row, and then starting up at the top again. The benefit is simpler CMOS design, but the downside is that none of the pixels are exposed or read at the same instant.

Continue reading “New Raspberry Pi Camera With Global Shutter” →

Hackaday Berlin: First Round Of Talks

March 7, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

We’re super excited to announce the first round of speakers for Hackaday Berlin! We’re set to convene on Friday night, March 24th for an evening warm up before the main show on Saturday, March 25. Featuring the triumphant return of Voja’s 4-bit badge, a crew of awesome speakers, lightning talks, workshops, music, food, badge hacking, and all the best of the Hackaday community, this will be a day to remember. And then we’ll chill out Sunday morning with a Bring-a-Hack brunch.

So without further ado: the first round of speakers!

Jiska Classen
Hacking Closed-Source: Reverse Engineering Real-World Products

Closed-source software is prevalent in our everyday lives, limiting our ability to understand how it works, which privacy implication it poses to the processed data, and addressing potential issues in time. Despite the growth of open-source movements, users often have no choice but to rely on closed-source solutions, e.g., for medical devices and IoT products. We’ll discuss key techniques to help you get started with reverse engineering. Hacking your own devices can be challenging, bricking a device is not uncommon, but so is celebrating the moments of a revived and modified device.

James Bruton
Being a Full-Time YouTuber

YouTube is my full-time job and has been for four years. I create STEM education content using everything from 3D printing, CNC, Welding, to Microcontrollers and Coding. Find out how I got started, how I make money, what goes on in the background, and what my future plans are. I’ll tell you how you can do it too!

Trammell Hudson
Hacking your dishwasher for cloudless appliances

Why does your dishwasher, laundry or coffee-pot need to talk to the cloud? In this presentation, Trammell Hudson shows how he reverse engineered the encrypted connections between Home Connect appliances and the Bosch-Siemens Cloud servers, and how you can control your own appliances with your self-hosted MQTT home automation system by extracting the devices’ authentication keys and connecting to their local websocket ports. No cloud required!

Bleeptrack
Oops, my project ended up in a museum

Parameterized design allows for the adaption of projects to different needs but can also change the aesthetic to a persons liking. Bleeptrack will walk you through the creation process and tools of her generative projects, talk about her experience manufacturing unique pieces and explains how to cope when your freshly finished project gets locked up in an art exhibition for a few months.

Ali Shtarbanov
Creating Hardware Development Platforms for Real-World Impact: FlowIO Platform

What does it really take do create and deploy a development platform for real-world impact? Why do we need development platforms and how can they democratize emerging fields and accelerate innovation? Why do most platform attempts fail and only very few succeed in terms of impact? I will discuss the key characteristics that any platform technology must have in order for it to be able to useful for diverse users. FlowIO was the winner of the 2021 Hackaday Grand Prize as well as over a dozen other engineering, research, and design awards.

Come join us!