Shall We Play A Game?

November 1, 2021 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

A game show just for hackers like you is coming to the Hackaday Remoticon for the first time this year. Everyone is invited to take part in Hacker Trivia on Friday November 19th at 5 pm Pacific time.

Think of this as a very specialized type of bar trivia. You’re welcome to grab some friends and form a team, or play as a solo act. The biggest difference here is that all of the questions have been drawn up by the wonderful people who write the articles you read every day on Hackaday. To say there is a geeky flair to this is a gross understatement.

Game show host and his producer asking geeky questions — Lewin and Justin during last week’s Hacker Trivia test run with the writing crew as contestants.

Your host for Hacker Trivia is Lewin Day. A staff writer for Hackaday, Lewin has for years dreamed of wearing powder-blue velvet suits, holding note cards full of esoteric questions, while speaking into an oddly-shaped microphone.

We managed to convince him to update the look to that of a modern game show host, and he didn’t disappoint with plans to broadcast from a secret location in Adelaide, Australia along with his producer, Justin McArthur. We’ve made it through a practice run, and I assure you, the game is delightful!

You can tune in live to Hacker Trivia to play along, but we want to make sure that you don’t forget. Sign up for a free ticket to Hackaday Remoticon and we’ll send you a reminder, along with information on how to take part in the online Bring-a-Hack social hour that follows the game show. Beyond these social events, Remoticon also has three keynote speakers, sixteen talk presenters, the Hackaday Prize ceremony, and a Saturday evening party. There’s even a conference ticket purchase option that includes a T-shirt.

Hackaday Podcast 142: 65 Days Of Airtime, Racecars Staring At The Ceiling, A Pushy White Cane, And Soapy Water Rockets

October 29, 2021 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys flap their gums about all the great hacks of the week. Something as simple as a wheel can be totally revolutionary, as we saw with a white cane mod for the visually impaired which adds an omniwheel that knows where it’s going. We enjoyed the collection of great hacks from all over the community that went into a multi-two-liter water rocket build. You’ll hear Elliot and Mike’s great debate about the origin of comments in computer code. And we spend plenty of time joking around about the worlds longest airplane flight (it was in a tiny Cessna and lasted over two months!)

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (55 MB)

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This Really Really Is Your Last Chance To Enter The 2021 Hackaday Prize (Really!)

October 26, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Oh, walnuts! How can we already be at the end of the last round? 2021 has been a time warp and now we are staring down the final day to enter the Reactivate Wildcard challenge of the Hackaday Prize. You must enter by 7 AM Pacific time on Wednesday or it’s too late!

Of course the good news is that the topic is wide-open. Wildcard is for all the things that didn’t fit in the first four entry challenges. If it’s a good idea, if it’s a build that really matters, it should be entered!

The ten winning projects from this round will each get $500 cash prizes, and be shuttled on to the final round. All 50 finalists will have until November 7th to hone their offerings, at which point our slate of expert judges will pick the most interesting and impactful for the $25,000 grand prize and four other top prizes.

And how, you ask, will you find out who won? The Hackaday Prize Ceremony will be held online on November 20th during the Hackaday Remoticion. So your assignment today is to warm up that keyboard, mouse, and smartphone camera to get your project entered right away! Step two is to grab your ticket to Remoticon for a weekend of wonderful talks, great people, and an inspiring lineup of hardware builds that made this year’s Hackaday Prize truly shine.

Wondering what kind of stuff makes a great Wildcard entry? Majenta Strongheart has you covered in her latest video roundup below.

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Mastering Memory For Microcontrollers: Elecia White To Deliver Remoticon Keynote

October 25, 2021 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

I’m excited to share the news that Elecia White will deliver a keynote talk at the Hackaday Remoticon in just a few short weeks. Get your free ticket now!

Elecia is well-known throughout the embedded engineering world. She literally wrote the book on it — or at least a book on it, one I have had in my bedside table for reference for years: O’Reilly’s Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software. She hosts the weekly Embedded podcast which has published 390 episodes thus far. And of course Elecia is a principal embedded software engineer at Logical Elegance, Inc working on large autonomous off-road vehicles and deep sea science platforms.

Map of a mythical land used as a metaphor for microcontroller memory — Map metaphor used to help visualize microcontroller memory. [Source: embedded.fm]

For her keynote, Elecia plans to unwrap the secrets often overlooked in the memory map file generated when compiling a program for a microcontroller. Anyone who has written code for these mighty little chips has seen the .map files, but how many of us have dared to really dive in?

Elecia will use a nifty metaphor for turning the wall of text and numbers into a true map of the code. That metaphor makes the topic approachable for everyone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of how embedded systems work, and even the grizzliest veteran will walk away with tips that help when optimizing for RAM usage and/or code space, updating firmware (with or without a bootloader), and debugging difficult crash bugs.

This autumn is a busy time for Elecia. She’s been hard at work turning her book into a ten-part massive open online course (MOOC). Over the years she’s been a strong supporter of Hackaday, more than once as a judge for the Hackaday prize (here’s her tell-all following the final round judging of the 2014 Prize). She even took Hackaday on a tour of Xerox Parc.

Final Talk Announcements This Week and Next!

The Call for Proposals closed a few days ago. So far we’ve made two announcements about the accepted talks and we’ll make two more, this Thursday and next. But there’s no reason to wait. With Elecia White, Jeremy Fielding, and Keith Thorne presenting keynotes, and some superb social activities soon to be unveiled, this is an event not to be missed!

Remoticon is free to all, just head over and grab a ticket! If you want something tangible to remember the weekend by you can grab one of the $25 tickets that scores you a shirt, but either option gets you all the info you need to be at every virtual minute of the conference.

Hackaday Podcast 141: LowFER Badges, Outrun Clocks, Dichroic Lamps, And Piano Action

October 22, 2021 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Mike and Elliot Williams catch up on a week’s worth of hacks. It turns out there are several strange radio bands that don’t require a license, and we discuss this weekend’s broadcast where you can listen in. It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen the website check-box abused quite like this: it’s the display for playing Doom! Just when you thought you’d seen all the ESP32’s tricks it gets turned into a clock styled after Out Run. Mike geeks out over how pianos work, we’re both excited to have Jeremy Fielding giving a Keynote talk at Remoticon, and we wrap things up with a chat about traffic rules in space.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (50 MB)

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Hackaday Podcast 140: Aqua Battery, IBM Cheese Cutter, Waiting For USB-C, And Digging ADCs

October 15, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chew the fat over the coolest of hacks. It’s hard to beat two fascinating old-tech demonstraters; one is a mechanical IBM computer for accurate cheese apportionment, the other an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) built from logic chips. We gawk two very different uses of propeller-based vehicles; one a flying-walker, the other a ground-effect coaster. Big news shared at the top of the show is that Keith Thorne of LIGO is going to present a keynote at Hackaday Remoticon. And we wrap the episode talking about brighter skies from a glut of satellites and what the world would look like if one charging cable truly ruled all smartphones.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (55 MB)

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 140: Aqua Battery, IBM Cheese Cutter, Waiting For USB-C, And Digging ADCs” →

Keith Thorne, Engineer At LIGO, To Deliver Remoticon Keynote

October 11, 2021 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

It is my pleasure to announce that Keith Thorne has graciously agreed to deliver a keynote take at Hackaday Remoticon 2. Get your ticket now!

Keith is an astrophysicist and has worked on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) since 2008, literally looking for ripples in space-time that you know as gravitational waves. The effects of the phenomena are so subtle that detecting an event requires planet-scale sensors in the form of 4 km long interferometers placed in different parts of the United States whose readings can be compared against one another. A laser beam inside these interferometers bounces back and forth 300 times for a total travel distance of 1,200 km in which any interaction with gravitational waves will ever-so-slightly alter how the photons from the beam register.

The challenges of building, operating, and interpreting such a device are manifold. These interferometers are the highest precision devices ever devised, able to detect motion 1/10,000 of the diameter of a proton! To get there, the mirrors need to be cooled to 77 nano-Kelvins. Getting the most out of it is what Keith and the rest of the team specialize in. This has included things like hacking the Linux kernel to achieve a sufficient level of real-time digital control, and using “squeezed light” to improve detection sensitivity in frequencies where quantum mechanics is getting in the way. While the detectors were first run in 2015 & 2016, successfully observing three events, the work to better understand this phenomenon is ongoing and may include a third site in India, and a space-based detector in the future.

In getting to know Keith he mentioned that he is excited to speak to a conference packed with people who want to hear the gory technical details of this fantastic piece of hardware. I’m sure we’re all giddy to learn what he has to say. But if you’re someone who wants to work on a project like this, he tipped us off that there’s an active EE job posting for LIGO right now. Maybe you’ll end up doing the keynote at a future Hackaday conference.

Call for Proposals is Still Open!

We’re still on the hunt for great talks about hardware creation. True creativity is fed by a steady stream of inspiration. Be that inspiration by giving a talk about the kinds of things you’ve been working on!