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The Orphaned Sources At The Hacker Camp: What Happened Next

July 28, 2026 by 20 Comments

At the 2024 Electromagnetic Field event in the UK, some awkward items turned up at the swap meet: radioactive sources. Fortunately there was [Tryst] at hand, who works in the nuclear industry, so they were safely collected. At this year’s EMF he was back, with a talk about what happened next.

It seems they were an industrial version of the smoke detectors we’ll all be familiar with, containing the same Americium alpha emitters, but in greater quantity. Their path from industry to hacker camp is purposefully shrouded in mystery to avoid future incidents happening because people are scared to come forward, but it seems that but for a bit of post-Brexit regulatory chaos they would normally have been taken back by their Danish manufacturer for disposal.

We’re treated to a fascinating deep dive into radioactive source regulation and just what these sources are. In short, they’re not too dangerous as they are, but what makes them a worry is that they can easily be dismantled and their contents released. Ingestion of alpha particle emitters is a particular worry, so they must be kept safe and accounted for. Which leaves [Tryst] with a set of radioactive sources that sit in a regulatory grey area and can’t easily be disposed of. He ends by asking for suggestions as to how they might be used, of which we favor a true random number generator.

Light-hearted interludes aside, this is a cautionary tale for all of us who delight in digging through technological junk, and we are lucky that our community includes people with the expertise to do something about items like these. The full talk is below the break.

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Flexible PCBs: Not Only For The Few

July 27, 2026 by 2 Comments

Flexible printed circuit boards are a fascinating technique for making electronics venture beyond the two-dimensional, but surprisingly they’re not something many of us have worked with. [Jessica Stanley] gave a talk at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK, exploring the different ways to make your electronics bend.

She starts with an overview of flexible electronics, detailing the techniques used with conventional polyimide substrates and etched copper.  We’re particularly enamoured of a stretchable PCB made by coiling a flexible circuit round a piece of elastic. Since she’s looking for techniques accessible to everyone that don’t either cost a fortune or require dangerous chemicals we look at conductive paint and electrolysis, before arriving at using a vinyl cutter to create adhesive traces.

We’ve no doubt all noticed that flexible PCBs can be ordered from the usual fabrication houses at a price, but the value in this talk lies in reminding the viewer that this is not the only path. She demonstrates well that simple flexible PCBs can be within the reach of almost anyone, which is perhaps the encouragement needed for people to try this medium. The full talk is below the break.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: High Performance SDR On The Cheap

July 27, 2026 by 9 Comments

Radios were once big complicated appliances, full of warm valves and paper-wrapped capacitors, all humming and glowing to capture signals from the aether and spit them out of a speaker. Every component was chosen to build the radio to suit a particular purpose.

These days, we have altogether fancier technology that lets us build radios that can be reconfigured on the fly; software-defined radios, if you will. [Anders Nielsen] has been exploring how to build a high-performance SDR recently, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel

July 20, 2026 by 10 Comments

There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.

But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.

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The BornHack 2026 Cyber Ægg Is A Badge With A Life Afterwards

July 17, 2026 by 3 Comments

A problem facing the designers of event badges is this: what happens to the badge after the event? It’s one that designers have tried to solve in many ways with varying levels of success, whether that be by making it a dev board, a games console, a mesh-networked communicator, or as in the case of Electromagnetic Field, a continuing badge for future events. Ar BornHack 2026 they have taken a novel approach, by making it a useful desktop appliance. The BornHack Cyber Ægg is a half-egg-shaped badge with a 3D-printed case, and aside from its on-camp applications it’s both a desktop clock/calendar, and a MeshCore node.

Produced with the assistance of the badge.team European badge makers, it’s an egg-shaped PCB with a Nordic nRF52840 at its heart, a Semtech LoRa module, and an e-paper display. On-site there’s a Tamagotchi-style virtual pet game, an event calender, and an RFID token game, but it’s the other two features that give it a life after the camp. The clock and Meshcore, coupled with its case being designed with a flat spot to sit on a desk, make this badge as much an appliance as it is a badge. This is where it will sit in the Hackaday office, and we’re pretty sure most BornHack attendees will use it thus too.

We like this approach to giving a badge a life after the event, and we look forward to seeing what influence it has on future badges. A badge should be a thing to enjoy, not a piece of e-waste.

Hackaday Europe 2026 – Build A Cable Modem For Your Arduino

July 16, 2026 by 20 Comments

Even for those of us that are quite technically minded, we spend precious little time thinking about the cables that carry our signals and do all the important work we need them to do on a daily basis. A great deal of theory and engineering goes into making things like telephone lines and HDMI cables work, but we mostly just plug them in and get on with whatever we’re doing.

If this is your experience, you might find the Hackaday Europe talk from [Michael Wiebusch] to be particularly interesting. He dives into transmission line theory from an accessible standpoint, explaining how two disparate signals can go in opposite directions on the very same wire. Then he demonstrates the theory by building a cable modem… well, sort of!

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2026 Hackaday Supercon: Call For Proposals

July 13, 2026 by 6 Comments

We are absolutely stoked to announce that the Hackaday Superconference is taking place this year November 6th through 8th in glorious Pasadena California, and we want to see you there!

If you’ve been to any of the previous nine Supercons, you know that it’s a fantastic gathering of the most motivated and interesting hackers around — but it’s also been a relatively small gathering. And while we love the very high signal-to-noise ratio of folks who show up, we’re always a little bit sad when the tickets sell out because it represents hackers who couldn’t be there.

So this year, we’re celebrating Supercon Ten by expanding out of our traditional location at the Design Lab so that we can accommodate 20% more hackers, while still keeping the cozy nature of the event intact. So if you’ve been wanting to come to Supercon, but procrastinated the ticket sales every year, this year is looking 20% better.

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