Author: Elliot Williams

1440 Articles

Thor does battle with a man shooting lasers from his hands

Hackaday Berlin: In Praise Of Lightning Talks

February 11, 2023 by 9 Comments

We’re in full-on prep mode for our first event in Europe in four years: Hackaday Berlin. And while we’ve got a great slate of speakers lined up, and to be announced soon, I’m personally most excited for the lightning talks.

Why? Because the lightning talks give you all, the attendees, the chance to get up and let everyone know what you’re up to. They’re longer than an elevator pitch, so you have time to at least start to explain the most interesting detail or two, but they’re not long enough that you can cover every aspect of a project. And that’s the trick!

By being short enough that you couldn’t possibly cover everything, you don’t need to worry about covering everything. Just go for the highlights. And because you left a lot of the interesting details back, everyone in the audience is going to want to bend your ear about it for the rest of the conference. It’s like the ultimate icebreaker.

For the audience? Lightning talks, when they’re good, are like a fountain of non-stop great ideas and inspiration. And if you happen on that just doesn’t tickle your hacker-bone, it’s probably over in another five minutes, so no worries.

We didn’t have time to run a full-on call for proposals for Berlin, but we’re hoping that you’ll ride the lightning. We’d all love to hear what you’ve got to say!

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Come Join Us For Hackaday Berlin!

February 7, 2023 by 54 Comments

It’s been far too long since we’ve had an event in Europe, and we’re going to fix that right now. Hackaday Berlin 2023 will be a day-long conference full of great talks, badge hacking, music, art, madness, and gathering with your favorite hackers on Saturday, March 25.

But it doesn’t stop there. We’ll have a pre-event party Friday night, and then a bring-a-hack brunch on Sunday with further opportunities to show off whatever projects you’re bringing along, hack some more on the badge, wind down, and/or play together. So if your travel plans allow it, come in Friday mid-day and don’t schedule your return ticket until Sunday evening.

Cutting to the chase: early bird tickets are on sale right now, so go get one! But even if you miss out on those, and they’ll go like hotcakes, the regular tickets are well worth it. Everything is fully catered, the badge and the swag are phenomenal, and the talks will be first-rate.

Last time we were in Europe, the party went on until 2 AM!

Saturday’s main events will include a handful of fantastic invited guest talks, but also a few hours of Lightning Talks given by you – yes, you! If you’ve never attended a lightning talk, you get seven minutes to run through one of your favorite projects. We want to know what’s on your workbench right now, what new skills you’ve been teaching yourself, or the groundwork you’ve been laying for the next big project. It’s your chance to inspire everyone in the room – grab it.

Everyone asked us to do a second run of the 2022 Hackaday Supercon badge, and now we’ve got the perfect excuse! Designed by Voja Antonic, the badge is a standalone retrocomputer in the style of an Altair or similar, but it’s much more. Between blinking LEDs that display everything going on, down to the gates in the ALU, and a trimmed-down machine language, it’s an invitation to get deeply in touch with the machine. If you felt left out because you couldn’t travel to Pasadena last November, here’s your second chance.

And then there’s the crowd. Hackaday really is a global community of hackers, and Hackaday events tend to bring out the best. Even if you’re not planning to give a lightning talk (and you should!) be prepared to talk about what you’re doing, because everyone else there is just as interested in cool projects as you are. Hackaday Berlin will be a great opportunity to connect and reconnect with new and old friends alike. Come join us!

We’ll be following up with a speaker announcement next week, but if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below. Otherwise, we’ll see you in Berlin.

Copyright Data, But Do It Right

February 4, 2023 by 33 Comments

Copyright law is a triple-edged sword. Historically, it has been used to make sure that authors and rock musicians get their due, but it’s also been extended to the breaking point by firms like Disney. Strangely, a concept that protected creative arts got pressed into duty in the 1980s to protect the writing down of computer instructions, ironically a comparatively few bytes of BIOS code. But as long as we’re going down this strange road where assembly language is creative art, copyright law could also be used to protect the openness of software as well. And doing so has given tremendous legal backbone to the open and free software movements.

So let’s muddy the waters further. Looking at cases like the CDDB fiasco, or the most recent sale of ADSB Exchange, what I see is a community of people providing data to an open resource, in the belief that they are building something for the greater good. And then someone comes along, closes up the database, and sells it. What prevents this from happening in the open-software world? Copyright law. What is the equivalent of copyright for datasets? Strangely enough, that same copyright law.

Data, being facts, can’t be copyrighted. But datasets are purposeful collections of data. And just like computer programs, datasets can be licensed with a restrictive copyright or a permissive copyleft. Indeed, they must, because the same presumption of restrictive copyright is the default.

I scoured all over the ADSB Exchange website to find any notice of the copyright / copyleft status of their dataset taken as a whole, and couldn’t find any. My read is that this means that the dataset is the exclusive property of its owner. The folks who were contributing to ADSB Exchange were, as far as I can tell, contributing to a dataset that they couldn’t modify or redistribute. To be a free and open dataset, to be shared freely, copied, and remixed, it would need a copyleft license like Creative Commons or the Open Data Commons license.

So I’ll admit that I’m surprised to have not seen permissive licenses used around community-based open data projects, especially projects like ADSB Exchange, where all of the software that drives it is open source. Is this just because we don’t know enough about them? Maybe it’s time for that to change, because copyright on datasets is the law of the land, no matter how absurd it may sound on the face, and the closed version is the default. If you want your data contributions to be free, make sure that the project has a free data license.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Speak To The Machine

January 28, 2023 by 16 Comments

If you own a 3D printer, CNC router, or basically anything else that makes coordinated movements with a bunch of stepper motors, chances are good that it speaks G-code. Do you?

If you were a CNC machinist back in the 1980’s, chances are very good that you’d be fluent in the language, and maybe even a couple different machines’ specialized dialects. But higher level abstractions pretty quickly took over the CAM landscape, and knowing how to navigate GUIs and do CAD became more relevant than knowing how to move the machine around by typing.

a Reprap Darwin
Reprap Darwin: it was horrible, but it was awesome.

Strangely enough, I learned G-code in 2010, as the RepRap Darwin that my hackerspace needed some human wranglers. If you want to print out a 3D design today, you have a wealth of convenient slicers that’ll turn abstract geometry into G-code, but back in the day, all we had was a mess of Python scripts. Given the state of things, it was worth learning a little G-code, because even if you just wanted to print something out, it was far from plug-and-play.

For instance, it was far easier to just edit the M104 value than to change the temperature and re-slice the whole thing, which could take an appreciable amount of time back then. Honestly, we were all working on the printers as much as we were printing. Knowing how to whip up some quick bed-levelling test scripts and/or demo objects in G-code was just plain handy. And of course the people writing or tweaking the slicers had to know how to talk directly to the machine.

Even today, I think it’s useful to be able to speak to the machine in its native language. Case in point: the el-quicko pen-plotter I whipped together two weekends ago was actually to play around with Logo, the turtle language, with my son. It didn’t take me more than an hour or so to whip up a trivial Logo-alike (in Python) for the CNC: pen-up, pen-down, forward, turn, repeat, and subroutine definitions. Translating this all to machine moves was actually super simple, and we had a great time live-drawing with the machine.

So if you want to code for your machine, you’ll need to speak its language. A slicer is great for the one thing it does – turning an STL into G-code, but if you want to do anything a little more bespoke, you should learn G-code. And if you’ve got a 3D printer kicking around, certainly if it runs Marlin or similar firmware, you’ve got the ideal platform for exploration.

Does anyone else still play with G-code?

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge Begins Today

January 24, 2023 by 23 Comments

How low can you go? The 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge is about doing the most with the least juice – bang for the power-budget buck, if you get our drift. And with three $150 gift certificates from Digi-Key on the line, you’ll be able to keep your projects going forever. The Challenge runs until March 21st, but with low-power, the devil is often in the details, so get started today!

More and more projects need to run on their own power, and more often than not, that means getting by without access to a wall plug. This contest is to encourage your designs that run on solar, small batteries, and generally energy harvested from wherever you can get it. But the power generation mechanism is taking the back seat here – we want to see what you can do with a few good electrons. Surprise us with your maximum minimalism!

Continue reading “Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge Begins Today” →

Irreproducible, Accumulative Hacks

January 21, 2023 by 29 Comments

Last weekend, I made an incredibly accurate CNC pen-plotter bot in just 20 minutes, for a total expenditure of $0. How did I pull this off? Hacks accumulate.

In particular, the main ingredients were a CNC router, some 3D-printed mounts that I’d designed and built for it, and a sweet used linear rail that I picked up on eBay as part of a set a few years back because it was just too good of a deal. If you had to replicate this build exactly, it would probably take a month or two of labor and cost maybe $2,000 on top of that. Heck, just tuning up the Chinese 6040 CNC machine alone took me four good weekends and involved replacing the stepper motors. Continue reading “Irreproducible, Accumulative Hacks” →

2022 FPV Contest: Congratulations To The Winners!

January 16, 2023 by 6 Comments

We wanted to see what the Hackaday crowd was up to in first-person view tech, and you didn’t disappoint! Commercial FPV quads have become cheap enough these days that everyone and their mom got one for Christmas, so it was fantastic to see the DIY spirit in these projects. Thanks to everyone who entered.

The Winners

None of the entries do the DIY quite as thoroughly as [JP Gleyzes]’s “poor man’s FPV journey”. This is actually three hacks in one, with DIY FPV goggles made from cheap optics and 3D printed additions, a USB joystick to PPM adapter to use arbitrary controllers with an RC transmitter, and even a fully DIY Bluetooth-based controller for a popular flight simulator. [JP] has done everything but build his own drone, and all the files are there for you to use, whether you’re goal is to do it on the cheap, or to do something new.

If you want to build your own drone from scratch, though, ESP32 Drone project has you covered. At least, mostly. This build isn’t entirely finished yet, and it’s definitely got some crash-testing still in its future, but the scope and accessibility of the project is what caught our eyes. The goal is to make a lightweight indoor quad around parts we can all get easily and cheaply, completely scratch-built. This drone is meant to be controlled by a smartphone, and the coolest parts for us are the ESP_Drone and ESPStream software that run on the drone and your phone respectively. Congrats to [Jon VB]! Now get that thing in the air.

And if you’re looking for a tidy little build, [Tobias]’s Mini FPV Speed Tank doesn’t disappoint. It’s a palm-sized mini tank, but this thing hauls, and looks like a ton of fun to drive around. It uses an absolutely tiny RP2040 module, an equally tiny receiver, and a nano FPV camera and transmitter to keep it compact. The 3D-printed frame and tracks are so nice that we’re not even complaining that the FPV rig is simply rubber-banded on top of the battery. This looks like a super fun build.

Each of these three projects have won a $150 Digi-Key shopping spree to help out with parts in this, or your next project. Thanks again to Digi-Key for sponsoring!

Continue reading “2022 FPV Contest: Congratulations To The Winners!” →