Sunday: Breakfast At DEF CON

August 8, 2018 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Nurse your hangover by having Breakfast at DEF CON this Sunday. You’re invited to this yearly ritual with Hackaday and Tindie. We’re celebrating the beginning of the end with coffee and pastries beginning at 10:30 am in the Hardware Hacking Village.

Head over to the Breakfast at DEF CON event page and hit the “follow event” button to keep on any new info about the event.

Extra internet points go to those who bring some hardware to show off… and especially for anyone who is making this the end of their Saturday rather than the beginning of Sunday. We had tons of great hacks show up last year and want to outdo ourselves this time around.

Come hang out with too many Hackaday and Tindie folks to list here. Also don’t forget to check out the SMD Challenge throughout the weekend.

Unofficial Badges Get Official Recognition At DEF CON: Badge Life Contest

August 3, 2018 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Badge·Life (noun): the art of spending too much time, energy, money, and creativity to design and produce amazing custom electronics and get them into the hands of those who appreciate incredible craftsmanship.

Brand new to DEF CON 26 is the Badge Life Contest to celebrate the creativity and ingenuity that gets poured into a custom badge.

For years, #BadgeLife has been flying under the radar at DEF CON. A growing movement of creative designers have put in late nights, emptied pocket books, and agonized over production, shipping, lanyards, boxes, batteries, programming woes, and every other kind of problem you can image to bring hundreds of unofficial badges to the conference. These aren’t a secret, the whole point is to wear blinky badges, often loaded with cryptographic puzzles and wireless interactivity, around your neck. For many, acquiring an awesome badge is a must-do to make their con a successful one. But DEF CON hasn’t officially recognized BadgeLife, until now.

If you’re a badge creator, you should show off your badge as part of the contest. It’s an opportunity to let more people see all the details that make each badge a work of art. During the con, most people will only see badges as they walk past them in the hallway. For the contest, all badges will be on display in the Hardware Hacking Village during the weekend to provide a close look for everyone.

The judging panel for this is an incredible slate of talented and well-known people from the hardware community. It doesn’t look like those names have been made public yet, but I’m honored and humbled to be among them. Help kick this inaugural year of the Badge Life Contest off right. You can submit your badge information now and deliver one badge (which will be returned to you) for display by 5 pm PDT on Friday 8/10.

SMD Soldering Challenge Lands At DEF CON

August 2, 2018 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

Strap on the jeweler’s loupe and lay off the caffeine for a few days. You’ll need to be at your peak for the SMD Soldering Challenge at this year’s DEF CON (number 26 for those counting).

It’s exciting to see that a Soldering Skills Village has been added to the conference this year. It will be in the same room as the Hardware Hacking Village. After all, who doesn’t want to solder at a conference? This soldering challenge is a great way to ring in the new village, and will take place in eight heats of six people for a total of 48 contestants. If you want to compete, make sure you get to the village right away and sign up for a slot!

A familiar board is being used for the contest. It’s the SMD Challenge board which MakersBox developed. You can check out the Hackaday.io project page and even order one from their Tindie store if you like. The contest will be scored based on time, completion, functionality, precise orientation, and quality of the joints.

The SOIC ATtiny85 is a snap to place on the board, but things get harder with each step. To successfully complete it you need to solder both a resistor and an LED in 1206, 0805, 0603, 0402, and 0201 packages. Those oh-two-oh-ones are basically grains of sand… good luck with that! We’re really excited that MakersBox rolled some custom Hackaday and Tindie boards (pictured above) for this contest which we’re honored to sponsor. It sounds as if the winners will be announced during Hackaday and Tindie’s traditional Breakfast at DEF CON which is happening at 10:30am on Sunday in the HHV.

We plan to spectate during some of the heats and if you’re at the con you should too! For those participating, here’s our advice. Practice soldering the smallest of parts ahead of time (watch some videos on it at the very least). Bring a multimeter to test the diode polarity because you won’t be able to see the symbols on the smallest parts. You may even consider bringing some custom tools; this surface mount “clamp” comes to mind, you’ll just need a much smaller version.

If you have advice of your own, we’d love to hear it in the comments below!

Video Review: AND!XOR DEF CON 26 Badge

July 30, 2018 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

The AND!XOR team have somehow managed to outdo themselves once again this year. Their newest unofficial hardware badge for DEF CON 26 just arrived. It’s a delightful creation in hardware, software, and the interactive challenges built into both.

They call this the “Wild West of IoT”, a name that draws from the aesthetic as well as the badge-to-badge communications features. Built on the ESP32-WROVER module which brings both WiFi and Bluetooth to the party, the badges are designed to form a wireless botnet at the conference. Anyone with a badge can work to advance their level and take more and more control of the botnet as they do.

Check out the video overview and then join me below for a deeper dive into all this badge has to offer.

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Working On A Startup? New Fund Is Building Portfolio From Hard Technology

July 26, 2018 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

Root Ventures just announced it has raised a second fund and is in search of startups to invest the $76,726,900 they now have burning a hole on their balance sheet. Their first fund of $31,415,926.53 went to some very cool hardware companies like Shaper, Particle, Plethora, and Prynt. For those keeping score, the first fund is Pi and the second is the speed of sound — it’s a geeky engineer thing.

This is a seed fund, and founding partner Avidan Ross described their role in your company as being the world’s “greatest sherpa to take you on a really tumultuous path”. That path is one of building a product around which a great company can arise. Repeatedly during the conference call with Hackaday, Avidan stressed that what makes Root Ventures stand out is that the partners in the firm are themselves engineers and have hardware backgrounds. For instance, Avidan spoke at the 2016 Hackaday Superconference about his 45-second pizza oven and other food/automation hacks. Partner Chrissy Meyer was an engineering manager at Apple and led hardware programs at Square, before founding a vehicle technology startup. Their point is that if you’re going to entrust part of your company to someone, it’s nice if they have the background to understand it.

Whether or not you have a startup in the works, it’s interesting to know what the keepers of the cash are looking for. Avidan described this as a engineering-heavy seed fund, but stopped short of calling it a hardware seed fund, using the more coy term “hard-tech fund” although more than half of the portfolio companies already on board are building new, original hardware. It’s impossible to nail down exactly what the fund is seeking — they’ll know it when they see it — but we had a nice conversation of some of the future trends he has in mind.

While economies of scale in the smartphone industry delivered low cost sensors such as accelerometers, GPS, and cameras, along with connectivity, the next wave may be from the self-driving industry. Avidan foresees rising availability of ASICs, specialized GPUs, and the sensing hardware currently under heavy R&D in the automotive industry. His take is that not only will this be a hardware boon for startups, but the machine learning aspects of it will produce both talent and opportunity for new companies.

Pull together those proofs of concept and get your presentation decks ready. That $76 million is just waiting for a great idea to come along. If you make it big, Hackaday still wants an early look at your awesome new hardware!

HOPE XII: Make Your Own Holograms

July 23, 2018 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

Prior to this weekend I had assumed making holograms to be beyond the average hacker’s reach, either in skill or treasure. I was proven wrong by a Club-Mate box full of electronics, and an acrylic jig perched atop an automotive inner tube. At the Hope Conference, Tommy Johnson was sharing his hacker holography in a workshop that let a few lucky attendees make their own holograms on site!

The technique used here depends on interference patterns rather than beam splitting. A diffused laser beam is projected through holographic film onto the subject of the hologram — say a bouquet of flowers like in the video below. Photons from that beam reflect from the bouquet and pass back through the film a second time. Since light is a form of electromagnetic radiation that travels as a wave, anywhere that two peaks (one from the beam the other from the reflected light) align on the film, exposure occurs. With just a 1/2 second exposure the film is ready to be developed, and if everything went right you have created a hologram.

Simple, right? In theory, at least. In practice Tommy’s been doing this for nearly 30 years and has picked up numerous tips along the way. Let’s take a look at the hardware he brought for the workshop.

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HOPE XII: Chelsea Manning

July 22, 2018 by Mike Szczys 96 Comments

Saturday’s talk schedule at the HOPE conference was centered around one thing: the on-stage interview with Chelsea Manning. Not only was a two-hour session blocked out (almost every other talk has been one hour) but all three stages were reserved with live telecast between the three rooms.

I was lucky enough to get a seat very close to the stage in the main hall. The room was packed front to back. Even the standing room — mapped out on the carpet in tape and closely policed by conference “fire marshals” — was packed with people standing shoulder to shoulder. The audience was alive with energy, and I think everyone lucky enough to be here today shares my feeling that moments like these tie our community together and help us all focus on what is important in life, as individuals and as a society.

Chelsea was very recently released from prison. So recently, that the last time this conference was held back in 2016, she and her close circle of friends were under the impression that she was very far from the end of her sentence. One such friend, Yan Zhu, joined Chelsea on stage in a comfortable armchair-setting to guide the interview.

Chelsea Manning was sentenced to serve 35 years in Leavenworth maximum-security prison, having been convicted in 2013 of violating the Espionage Act. This talk (and the article I’m writing now) was not about the events leading up to that conviction, but rather about Chelsea’s life since being released, with a bit of background on the experience of being incarcerated. Her early release came as the result of a commutation of sentence by President Barack Obama that returned her freedom just over one year ago.

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