Lithium-Ion Batteries: WHY They Demand Respect

November 4, 2025 by Arya Voronova 59 Comments

This summer, we saw the WHY (What Hackers Yearn) event happen in Netherlands, of course, with a badge to match. Many badges these days embrace the QWERTY computer aesthetic, which I’m personally genuinely happy about. This one used 18650 batteries for power, in a dual parallel cell configuration… Oh snap, that’s my favourite LiIon cell in my favourite configuration, too! Surely, nothing bad could happen?

Whoops. That one almost caught me by surprise, I have to shamefully admit. I just genuinely love 18650 cells, in all glory they bring to hardware hacking, and my excitement must’ve blindsided me. They’re the closest possible entity to a “LiIon battery module”, surprisingly easy to find in most corners of this planet, cheap to acquire in large quantities, easy to interface to your projects, and packing a huge amount of power. It’s a perfect cell for many applications I and many other hackers hold dear.

Sadly, the 18650 cells were a bad choice for the WHY badge, for multiple reasons at once. If you’re considering building a 18650-based project, or even a product, let me show you what exactly made these cells a bad fit, and how you might be able to work around those limitations on your own journey. There’s plenty of technical factors, but I will tell you about the social factors, because these create the real dealbreaker here. Continue reading “Lithium-Ion Batteries: WHY They Demand Respect” →

Supercon 2025: Streaming Live

November 1, 2025 by Tom Nardi No comments

While we’d love to have you all join us in Pasadena, the next best thing is to connect up to the festivities through the magic of the Internet. As always, the main stage talks will be streamed live to our YouTube channel, while the talks taking place in the DesignLab will be recorded and posted afterwards.

Though it’s not quite as immersive as being in the alleyway and listening to the dogs bark (if you know, you know), you can also join the #supercon-chat channel in the official Hackaday Discord server if you want to virtually rub shoulders with some of our favorite people in the world.

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The Supercon 2025 Badge Is Built To Be Customized

October 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

For anyone who’s joined us for previous years, you’ll know that badge hacking and modification are core to the Hackaday Supercon experience. While you’re of course free to leave the badge completely stock, we encourage attendees to tear it apart, learn how it works, and (hopefully) rebuild it into something unique. There are even prizes for the best hacks.

As such, every decision about the badge’s hardware and software is made with hackability in mind. It’s why we always try to add an expansion port to the badge and, in recent years, have leaned into MicroPython to make it easier for attendees to modify the code.

But one thing that’s been largely missing in previous badges is aesthetic customization. Sure, you could strip out the firmware and write something entirely new, or hang some oddball peripheral off the side of the thing, but ultimately it still looked like the badge we gave you at the door. That’s because, at the end of the day, the badges are just PCBs. Short of designing your own enclosure (which has certainly been done), every badge looks the same. That is, until now.

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Get Ready For Supercon

October 25, 2025 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

It’s just about all we can think about over here: the week leading up to the 2025 Superconference. From what we hear, it’s all-hands-on over in Pasadena right now, as everyone is putting the finishing touches on preparations for Hackaday’s annual US gathering.

We’ve been heads-down in the badge for a little while, and between that and all of the logistics, it’s easy to get lost in the work. And then we saw this video that [InstantArcade] shot, just casually walking through the event a couple years back. It’s not particularly a highlights reel, but seeing so many of the people I recognized, and remembering the many fantastic conversations we’d had. So much energy, interest, and simple excitement in sharing stories, what they’re working on, or just what they’ve seen lately that blew their mind.

There is no substitute for being there in person, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try! We’ll be putting the talks up on our YouTube channel next Saturday, and as always, you’re invited to join in the discussion on our Discord server both during the event and whenever. If you’re not going to be there in the alley, join us virtually!

We’ll be meeting up Thursday night at 7:00 pm at King’s Row for an informal pre-meetup. Bring a hack if you’ve got something to share! Then things start for real on Friday morning over at Supplyframe HQ. We’ll talk badges, get to know each other, and just nerd out and chill. (I love Fridays!) Halloween / sci-fi costume party Friday night, get some sleep, and head on over to the LACM and Design Lab for two tracks of talks and a full day on Saturday going late into the night. And as usual, the change back to standard time gets you an extra hour of sleep so that you’re rested and ready for Sunday.

There is still a lot to do behind the scenes, but seeing you all there makes it more than worth it! See you at Supercon.

(Oh, and no newsletter next week, but you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday watching the talks. That makes up for it, right?)

Announcing The 2025 Hackaday Superconference Communicator Badge

October 23, 2025 by Elliot Williams 44 Comments

It’s the moment you hard-core hardware nerds have been waiting for: the reveal of the 2025 Hackaday Supercon Communicator Badge. And this year, we’ve outdone ourselves, but that’s thanks to help from stellar collaboration with folks from the community, and help from sponsors. This badge is bigger than the sum of its parts, and we’ve planned for it to be useful for you to hack on in the afterlife. Indeed, as always, you are going to be the final collaborator, so we can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it.

We’re going out – wide out – on a limb and trying to create a dense mesh network of badges talking to each other at Supercon. It’s going to be like a badge-hosted collection of chat rooms, as connected as we can make them without talking over each other.

You look up a topic, say Retro Computing or SAO trading, punch in the channel number on the numpad, and your badge starts listening to everything going on around that topic. But they also listen to everything else, and repeat anything they hear on to their neighbors. Like IRC, but LoRa.

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2025 Hackaday Supercon: Two New Workshops, Costume Party, Lightning Talks, And A New-Space Panel

October 21, 2025 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

So much news, so little time left until Supercon! We hope you all have your tickets. If not: Workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now. We’re getting down to the last slightly-more-than-two-handfuls, so if you’re thinking of coming, the time for procrastination has passed.

First up, we have two late-addition workshops, and tickets were just made available. Maybe you noticed that Arduino was bought by Qualcomm, and they kicked off the union with a brand-new board? You can get yourself one, and learn how to use it. And not to be outdone, the CEO of Framework, makers of modular laptop computers, is coming with a grab-bag of parts for you to play with.

Leonardo Cavagnis & Tyler Wojciechowicz

Arduino x DigiKey Presents – From Blink to Think: Discover Arduino Uno Q

Explore the power of Arduino Uno Q, the new board combining a microcontroller and a microprocessor. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to get started with Uno Q and unlock its dual-core capabilities for intelligent and connected projects.

Nirav Patel
Framework Mystery Boxes: Swap & Build

This workshop is hosted by Framework’s Founder and CEO, Nirav Patel. You’ll receive a box of assorted returned/refurbished Framework Laptop parts at the start of the workshop. You can then trade parts with other attendees and work together to try to build a functioning computer of some kind. You’ll pick up some tips and tricks on debugging and repair along the way.

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Three Years In, JawnCon Continues To Grow And Impress

October 16, 2025 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Make no mistake, just getting a hacker con off the ground is a considerable challenge. But the really hard part comes after. To be more than a one-off success story, you’ve got to expand the event year after year in a manageable way. Go too slow, and attendees might lose interest. Move too fast, and you run the risk of going broke if your ticket sales don’t keep up with your ambitions.

Luckily for hackers living in the Philadelphia area, the folks behind JawnCon have once again demonstrated they’re able to thread the needle. While the ticket price remained the same as in 2024, this year an additional track of talks was introduced as well as expanded activities throughout the con. Even though it only wrapped this past weekend, there’s already buzz about what the event will look like in 2026.

Until then, let’s take a look at some of the projects that were on display at this year’s JawnCon. If it’s the talks you’re after, they’ll be edited and uploaded to the event’s YouTube page in the near future. In the meantime, the Friday and Saturday live streams are still available.

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