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SHA 2017 Talk Schedule Revealed

June 16, 2017 by 5 Comments

It’s always an exciting moment when an event schedule is released, and since events in our community don’t come much larger than this August’s SHA Camp in the Netherlands, you can imagine that the announcement of their schedule of lectures of talks is something of an event in itself. The event runs over five days, and you can browse the schedule itself to make your picks.

The SHA team have made their own picks, but with so many stages and speakers they are only a tiny selection. Running a Hackaday eye over the schedule, here are the ones that caught our eye.

[Kliment] has a workshop, Surface Mount Electronics Assembly for Terrified Beginners, in which you assemble a 20€ surface-mount power supply kit. [Editor’s Note: We’ve seen this one live — you can do it!]

[dennisdebel]’s lecture, from glass fiber to fiber glass noodles caught our eye. Using mung bean vermicelli, or ‘glass noodles’, for data transmission, is not something you hear about every day.

If you are a regular at European hardware hacker camps, you may have encountered the chiptune extravaganza performances of [Gasman], otherwise known as [Matt Westcott]. Hie lecture, Zero to chiptune in one hour, will create, from scratch, a chiptune cover version of a pop song chosen by the audience, all on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The Hackeboy handheld game console is a project from a small Hamburg-based indie game label.[Axel Theilmann] describes the process of building the handheld console they always dreamed of.

One of the final lectures of the event comes from [Niek Blankers], and will describe in detail the SHA2017 badge. How it was designed, and showcasing what some of the attendees will by then have managed to do with it.

Finally, if you want to see a Hackaday scribe talking about fun and games with little plastic bags of parts, you could do worse than seeking out From Project To Kit, all you will need to know about turning your personal electronic projects into a kit business.

Watch this space for more from SHA Camp as we get it. Meanwhile you can take a look at our coverage of the SHA2017 badge launch.

Hackaday’s BAMF Meetup Spills into the Streets of San Mateo

May 24, 2017 by 11 Comments

Saturday night marked the fourth annual Hackaday BAMF meetup. The night when weary exhibitors close up their booths at Bay Area Maker Faire and head over to O’Neil’s Irish Pub where the real fun starts. There are many drawbacks to having a booth; you’re on your feet all day repeating the same small snippet to everyone passing by, and usually you don’t get much of a chance to mingle with friends old and new.

Walking into the meetup, it was striking to watch aching bodies slow with weariness perk up to the energy and excitement of the Hackaday Community incarnate. Join me after the break for a peek into the fun of the evening.

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Zombie Badges Take Over Security Con

May 22, 2017 by 2 Comments

We can’t get enough of hacker-con badges. BSides Cape Town, held Last December, featured an IR-equipped badge that immersed attendees in a game while they chatted.

A group led by [AndrewMohawk] and [ElasticNinja] designed the badge around an ESP8266 and 128×64 OLED display, with eight buttons, an IR receiver and transmitter, five “level” LEDs, an RGB LED, and a 600 mAh LiPo that charged over USB.

The hardware was designed specifically to play an organic game so that the organizers could watch the interaction between the badges in real time. Each badge was randomly sorted into a faction, either red, blue, or green—identifiable by an RGB LED glowing on the badge. There was also a series of five LEDs signifying your level in the game. When two or more badges got close to each other, enough for the IR to link, the badge with the lowest level was converted to the faction of the winner.

Of course, the badge displayed attendees’ handles and contained a list of convention programming. It also presented attendees with a series of challenges, which could be unlocked to play Pong or Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock, scan for wireless networks, and run animations.

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It’s Back! Hackaday Meetup at Bay Area Maker Faire

May 15, 2017 by No comments

If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, the only place to be on Saturday night is O’Neill’s Irish Pub in San Mateo. Hackaday is once again hosting a meetup after Maker Faire closes for the evening, and you don’t want to miss it. Please RSVP now.

This is the fourth year of our BAMF meetup and we’re continually amazed at the turnout — we pack ’em in and it’s not just because the first round of drinks is on us. This is the mixer for everyone who is passionate about hardware. You’ll find your Internet heroes on hand (think YouTube and electronics podcasts), those going through the grinder of startups exhibiting at the faire, engineers for the giant silicon valley firms, plus all of the hackers who spend their time in basements, garages, and taking over the kitchen table to break something open and make it their own. And of course the Hackaday crew will be on hand, you’ll find [Mike], [Jasmine], [Shulie], [Rich], [Jordan], and [Gerrit] losing our voices as the conversation carries on late into the evening.

The photo at the top of the page is from the 2016 Meetup. This photo is from the 2015 Meetup. Now’s your chance to be the face of the party in next year’s announcement!

Our profoundly awesome sister site, Tindie, is also putting out the call to all hardware artisans (they call themselves Tindarians) to turn out for the meetup. If you’ve never heard of Tindie you’re missing out. And if you’ve never sold your creations there, this meetup is a perfect chance to meet some of the people who do. They’re not just purveyors of bleeding edge hardware, they’re the ones who dream it up and make it happen. You should join their ranks!

We love hackers from all walks of life. But unfortunately, because of the venue for this event, we must limit this to those who are 21 years of age and older. If you can’t get into this event, come find us at the Hackaday/Tindie booth at the Faire.

Other than that, we love to see smiling faces, blinking or moving hardware, and the coolest T-shirt you have in your dresser. Come hang out with Hackaday. You’ll have a most excellent evening if you do. See you Saturday!

Hacking the Thotcon 0x8 Badge

May 10, 2017 by 11 Comments

[Kenjo] attended Chicago’s Thotcon this past week and has started hacking the convention badge and detailing what he learned. Thotcon’s badge, designed by [Jedha] and programmed by [John Wallis] of Workshop 88, is packed with the requisite electronic hardware and cryptic clues. There are four NeoPixel LEDs, three pots, and a micro USB, all run by an ATmega32u4.

The stock firmware is a game called tesserHack, a maze game using the three pots for navigation. You can also connect via USB to play through the serial console, and this version includes a map view and help menu.

[Kenjo] who previously hacked the Thotcon 0x6 badge, accidentally deleted the stock firmware on this year’s badge, so he used a Bus Pirate as an ISP to burn the Arduino boot loader back on, and has started mapping out the pots and LEDs. If you’re interested in helping out, check out the project on Hackaday.io. [Thanks, gigawatts]

The SHA2017 Badge Revealed

May 8, 2017 by 19 Comments

It’s that excellent time of year in which one slowly comes to the realisation that the summer’s eagerly anticipated events are now no longer at some impossibly distant point in the future, but in fact only a matter of a few months or even weeks away. For our European readers, this means that August’s SHA2017 hacker camp is appearing on the horizon, four days of outdoor technological indulgence for our community in a scout camp on the Dutch polders.

As it is a tradition of such events to have an electronic badge incorporating ever more impressive levels of computing power, it follows that the pre-production announcement of an event badge has become an important milestone in the countdown to the day. SHA2017 is no exception, and thus today we see the announcement of their take on the essentials for a hacker camp badge in 2017.

The most immediately obvious thing about the badge is its 296×128 pixel e-ink display, which should provide an immediate benefit in terms of battery life. There are the usual plethora of interfaces, GPIOs, USB, and Neopixels, and the user input is via a set of capacitive buttons. Powering the device is an ESP32, and a key design goal was to have a network for the badges that does not put pressure on the 2.4GHz infrastructure. We’re guessing they’re doing this using raw WiFi packets in the same way as the MAGfest swadge. On the software front it will provide a straightforward development route via MicroPython, and there will be an app library for those without the inclination to code their own. You can get an early look at the schematic from the project repo (PDF).

Their target is to have the badge ready and with stable software on day 1 of the event, a laudable aim if they can manage it.

Members of the Hackaday team will be making the trip to the Netherlands for SHA2017, we look forward to seeing you if you attend too, and please show us anything interesting you do with your badges! Keep your eyes peeled for the Jolly Wrench, and come say hello. You’ll find me with the OxHack contingent and giving a talk on the kit biz which I have also published in the Project to Kit series of articles.

We’ve covered so many badges here at Hackaday that we could almost serve of a retrospective exhibition of the art form. Of particular interest to us though is our own [Voja Antonic]’s badge for last year’s Hackaday SuperConference.

Thanks [Sebastius] for the tip.

Make Munich was Awesome

May 8, 2017 by 8 Comments

It was a good weekend to be geeky in Bavaria. In addition to our own Hackaday Prize Bring-a-Hack party, there was the reason that we scheduled it in the first place, Munich’s independent DIY expo, Make Munich.

If you’re a loyal Hackaday reader, many of the projects would seem uncannily familiar. I walked in and was greeted by some beautiful word clocks in both German and English, for instance. Still, seeing the Open Theremin being sold with an “as seen on Hackaday” sticker made us smile. And then we had a great conversation about [Urs Gaudenz]’s other project: DIY biological apparatus, also seen on Hackaday.

There were robots galore. Someone (from Gmünd?) was driving around a graffiti-bot and spraying the floor with water instead of paint or chalk to very nice effect. The full evolution of the Zoobotics robot family was on display. Even the Calliope (a German version of the micro:bit) booth had this cute Bluetooth vibrobot. Join me after the break as I dive into all of the great stuff on display over the weekend.

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