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1362 Articles

Supercon 2024: From Consultant To Prototyper On A Shoestring Budget

June 5, 2025 by 3 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 9 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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Plenty Of LEDs And Useful Too: The 2025 DORS/CLUC Badge

June 1, 2025 by 2 Comments

It’s always nice to see new developments in the world of electronic badges, and while there are events and badge teams pushing the technological envelope there’s still plenty of scope for innovation without too many exotic parts. This year’s DORS/CLUC open source conference in Croatia has just such a badge, with a large alphanumeric LED display as well as USB and an NFC reader. During the conference it displayed the user’s name and could be used in an NFC-based game, but it’s also designed to be used as a general purpose notification device afterwards.

The write-up is familiar to anyone who has been involved with badge production, a tale of long soldering sessions as missing components had to be added later, and of last minute firmware flashing. The heart of the machine is an STM32L073, with an IS31FL3731 LED matrix driver chip and an ST25R3916 for the NFC. All the files can be found in a GitLab repo, and there’s a video below the break showing it all in action.

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Today In Edinburgh: The Open Hardware Summit

May 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

Just a quickie for anyone who is in the neighborhood, today the Open Source Hardware Association’s annual Open Hardware Summit conference starts in Edinburgh, Scotland. If you’re able to make it, it’s a microcosm of the open-source hardware world, and full of great talks and great hackers.

If you’re not in Scotland, they have a livestream on YouTube that you should check out, as well as a Discord server for discussions during the event.  It’s going on right now!

 

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 11 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 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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