The 2024 Hackaday Supercon is on in Pasadena, but if you couldn’t make it to sunny California this year, don’t worry. We’ve got a live streams of the main stage talks, and all of the second track talks are being recorded and will be put up on the YouTube channel after the con.
If you’re watching from home and want to join the conversation, today might be a good time to join the official Hackaday Discord server.
Out of curiosity, I redrew the Supercon Vectorscope badge schematics in KiCad last year. As you might suspect, going from PCB to schematic is opposite to the normal design flow of KiCad and most other PCB design tools. As a result, the schematics and PCB of the Vectorscope project were not really linked. I decided to try it again this year, but with the added goal of making a complete KiCad project. As usual, [Voja] provided a well drawn schematic diagram in PDF and CorelDRAW formats, and a PCB design using Altium’s Circuit Maker format (CSPcbDoc file). And for reference, this year I’m using KiCad v8 versus v7 last year.
This went smoothly. KiCad imports Altium files, as I discovered last year. Converting the graphic lines to traces was easier than before, since the graphical lines are deleted in the conversion process. There was a file organizational quirk, however. I made a new, empty project and imported the Circuit Maker PCB file. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the importing action didn’t make use the new project I had just made. Instead, it created a completely new project in the directory holding the imported Circuit Maker file. This caused a lot of head scratching when I was editing the symbol and footprint library table files, and couldn’t figure out why my edits weren’t being seen by KiCad. I’m not sure what the logic of this is, was an easy fix once you know what’s going on. I simply copied everything from the imported project and pasted it in my new, empty project. Continue reading “Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing In KiCad”
Even in the advanced world of 2024, robots are still better in science fiction than in reality. Star Trek gave us the erudite and refined Data, Rogue One gave us the fierce yet funny K-2SO, and Big Hero 6 gave us the caring charmer named Baymax. All these robots had smarts, capability, and agency. More than that, though—they were faithful(ish) companions to humans, fulfilling what that role entails.
The thing is, we’re not gonna get robots like that unless somebody builds them. [Angela Sheehan] is a artist and an educator, and a maker—and she’s trying to create exactly that. She came down to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon to tell us all about her efforts to create cuddly companion bots for real.
If you’re hear a rushing noise, don’t be alarmed — that’s just the rapidly approaching 2024 Hackaday Supercon. As hard as it is to believe, a whole year has gone by, and we’re now just a few days away from kicking off our annual hardware hacking extravaganza in Pasadena. Tickets just sold out over the weekend — thank you procrastinators!
For those of you who have tickets to join us this weekend, we’ve got a few last minute announcements and bits of information we wanted to get out to you. As a reminder, you can find the full schedule for all three days on the official Supercon site.
The Vectrex was a unique console from the early 1980s. Developed by a company you’ve probably never heard of—Smith Engineering—it was put into production by General Consumer Electronics, and later sold by Milton Bradley. It was an outright commercial failure, but it’s remembered for its sharp vector display and oddball form factor.
The Vectrex was intended for tabletop use in a home environment. However, [Jeroen Domburg], also known as [Sprite_tm], decided to set about building a portable version. This wasn’t easy, but that just makes the development process a more interesting story. Thankfully for us, [Sprite_tm] was kind enough to tell the tale at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.
Continue reading “Supercon 2023: Building A Portable Vectrex, The Right Way”
We’ve been hinting at it for a few months now, running a series of articles on SAOs, then a Supercon Add-On Challenge. We even let on that the badge would have space for multiple SAOs this year, but would you believe six?
Way back in 2017ish, Hackaday’s own [Brian Benchoff] and the [AND!XOR] crew thought it would be funny and useful to create a “standard” for adding small custom PCB art-badges onto bigger conference badges. The idea was to keep it quick and dirty, uncomplicated and hacky, and the “Shitty” Add On was born. The badge community took to this like wildfire. While the community has moved on from the fecal humor, whether you call these little badgelets “SAOs”, “Simple Add-Ons”, or even “Supercon-8 Add Ons”, there’s something here for everyone. So if you’ve already got some SAOs in a drawer, bring them to this year’s Supercon and show them off!
Continue reading “The 2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Badge Reveal”
The third and final round of the 2024 Supercon talks announcements brings us to the end, and the full schedule is now up on Hackaday.io.
With Supercon just a couple weeks away, we hope you have your tickets already! Stay tuned tomorrow for a badge reveal.
Continue reading “2024 Supercon: Third Round Of Super Speakers”
