Supercon 2024: Repurposing ESP32 Based Commercial Products

June 10, 2025 by 4 Comments

It’s easy to think of commercial products as black boxes, built with proprietary hardware that’s locked down from the factory. However, that’s not always the case. A great many companies are now turning out commercial products that rely on the very same microcontrollers that hackers and makers use on the regular, making them far more accessible for the end user to peek inside and poke around a bit.

Jim Scarletta has been doing just that with a wide variety of off-the-shelf gear. He came down to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to tell us all about how you can repurpose ESP32-based commercial products.

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Supercon 2024: From Consultant To Prototyper On A Shoestring Budget

June 5, 2025 by 10 Comments

Many engineers graduate from their studies and head out into the workforce, seeking a paycheck and a project at some existing company or other. Often, it’s not long before an experienced engineer begins to contemplate striking out on their own, working as a skilled gun-for-hire that makes their own money and their own hours.

It’s a daunting leap, but with the promise of rich rewards for those that stick the landing. That very leap is one that our own Dave Rowntree made. He came to Supercon 2024 to tell us what the journey was like, and how he wound up working on some very special shoes.

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Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions

June 3, 2025 by 10 Comments

You turn the dial on your radio, and hear a powerful source of interference crackle in over the baseline noise. You’re interested as to where it might be coming from. You’re receiving it well, and the signal strength is strong, but is that because it’s close or just particularly powerful? What could it be? How would you even go about tracking it down?

When it comes to hunting down radio transmissions, Justin McAllister and Nick Foster have a great deal of experience in this regard. They came down to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to show us how it’s done.

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Supercon 2024: Using An Oscilloscope To Peek Below The Noise Floor

May 28, 2025 by 7 Comments

When you’re hunting for a signal with your oscilloscope, the stronger it is, the better. If it’s weak, you might struggle to tease it out from other interference, or even from the noise floor itself. You might wish that you were looking for something more obvious rather than the electromagnetic equivalent of a needle in a haystack.

Finding hidden signals below the noise floor may be a challenge, but it needn’t be an insurmountable one. James Rowley and Mark Omo came to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to tell us how to achieve this with the magic of lock-in amplifiers.

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Hackaday Supercon 2025 Call For Participation: We Want You!

May 22, 2025 by 12 Comments

We’re tremendously excited to be able to announce that the Hackaday Supercon is on for 2025, and will be taking place October 31st through November 2nd in Pasadena, California.

Supercon is about bringing the Hackaday community together to share our great ideas, big and small. So get to brainstorming, because we’d like to hear what you’ve been up to! Like last year, we’ll be featuring both longer and shorter talks, and hope to get a great mix of both first-time presenters and Hackaday luminaries. If you know someone you think should give a talk, point them here.

The Call for Participation form is online now, and you’ve got until July 3rd 10th to get yourself signed up.

Honestly, just the people that Supercon brings together is reason enough to attend, but then you throw in the talks, the badge-hacking, the food, and the miscellaneous shenanigans … it’s an event you really don’t want to miss. And as always, presenters get in for free, get their moment in the sun, and get warm vibes from the Hackaday audience. Get yourself signed up now!

We’ll have more news forthcoming in the next few weeks, including the start of ticket sales, so be sure to keep your eyes on Hackaday.

Supercon 2024: An Immersive Motion Rehabilitation Device

May 9, 2025 by 1 Comment

When you’ve had some kind of injury, rehabilitation can be challenging. You often need to be careful about how you’re using the affected parts of your body, as well as pursue careful exercises for repair and restoration of function. It can be tedious and tiring work, for patients and treating practitioners alike.

Juan Diego Zambrano, Abdelrahman Farag, and Ivan Hernandez have been working on new technology to aid those going through this challenging process. Their talk at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon covers an innovative motion monitoring device intended to aid rehabilitation goals in a medical context.

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Superconductivity News: What Makes Floquet Majorana Fermions Special For Quantum Computing?

May 7, 2025 by 13 Comments

Researchers from the USA and India have proposed that Floquet Majorana fermions may improve quantum computing by controlling superconducting currents, potentially reducing errors and increasing stability.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters that was co-authored by [Babak Seradjeh], a Professor of Physics at Indiana University Bloomington, and theoretical physicists [Rekha Kumari] and [Arijit Kundu], from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, the scientists validate their theory using numerical simulations.

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