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1333 Articles

Come Join Us For Hackaday Berlin!

February 7, 2023 by 54 Comments

It’s been far too long since we’ve had an event in Europe, and we’re going to fix that right now. Hackaday Berlin 2023 will be a day-long conference full of great talks, badge hacking, music, art, madness, and gathering with your favorite hackers on Saturday, March 25.

But it doesn’t stop there. We’ll have a pre-event party Friday night, and then a bring-a-hack brunch on Sunday with further opportunities to show off whatever projects you’re bringing along, hack some more on the badge, wind down, and/or play together. So if your travel plans allow it, come in Friday mid-day and don’t schedule your return ticket until Sunday evening.

Cutting to the chase: early bird tickets are on sale right now, so go get one! But even if you miss out on those, and they’ll go like hotcakes, the regular tickets are well worth it. Everything is fully catered, the badge and the swag are phenomenal, and the talks will be first-rate.

Last time we were in Europe, the party went on until 2 AM!

Saturday’s main events will include a handful of fantastic invited guest talks, but also a few hours of Lightning Talks given by you – yes, you! If you’ve never attended a lightning talk, you get seven minutes to run through one of your favorite projects. We want to know what’s on your workbench right now, what new skills you’ve been teaching yourself, or the groundwork you’ve been laying for the next big project. It’s your chance to inspire everyone in the room – grab it.

Everyone asked us to do a second run of the 2022 Hackaday Supercon badge, and now we’ve got the perfect excuse! Designed by Voja Antonic, the badge is a standalone retrocomputer in the style of an Altair or similar, but it’s much more. Between blinking LEDs that display everything going on, down to the gates in the ALU, and a trimmed-down machine language, it’s an invitation to get deeply in touch with the machine. If you felt left out because you couldn’t travel to Pasadena last November, here’s your second chance.

And then there’s the crowd. Hackaday really is a global community of hackers, and Hackaday events tend to bring out the best. Even if you’re not planning to give a lightning talk (and you should!) be prepared to talk about what you’re doing, because everyone else there is just as interested in cool projects as you are. Hackaday Berlin will be a great opportunity to connect and reconnect with new and old friends alike. Come join us!

We’ll be following up with a speaker announcement next week, but if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below. Otherwise, we’ll see you in Berlin.

Supercon 2022: Sophy Wong Is Making An Impact With Artistic Wearables

January 25, 2023 by 5 Comments

Prolific designer and maker Sophy Wong is always looking toward the future, and that goes for everything from the costume pieces she makes to the idea of making itself. In her excellent and highly-visual Supercon talk, Sophy explores both, and gives the viewer a window on her evolved-and-evolving design philosophy.

You likely know Sophy as That Maker Who 3D Prints On Fabric, a label she is quick to dismiss, pointing animatedly toward the seminal work of one David Shorey, who also happened to be at Supercon 2022. As Sophy explains, the process begins by modeling disconnected bodies to be printed, then printing the first layer and pausing the print. At this point, a piece of nylon mesh is inserted, and the print is resumed. The result is that the mesh is trapped between the first and second layers, and the bodies are now connected by a common thread. Carefully remove the sandwich from the print bed and you have a highly-flexible, mesmerizing piece of material that almost acts like chain maille.

Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Sophy Wong Is Making An Impact With Artistic Wearables” →

Supercon 2022: All Aboard The SS MAPR With Sherry Chen

January 17, 2023 by 8 Comments

How do you figure out what is in a moving body of water over a mile wide? For those in charge of assessing the water quality of the Delaware river, this is a real problem. Collecting the data required to evaluate the water quality was expensive and time-consuming, taking over six years. Even then, the data was relatively sparse, with just a few water quality stations and only one surface sample for every six miles of river.

Sherry Chen, Quinn Wu, Vanessa Howell, Eunice Lee, Mia Mansour, and Frank Fan teamed up to create a solution, and the SS MAPR was the result. At Hackaday Supercon 2022, Sherry outlined the mission, why it was necessary, and their journey toward an autonomous robot boat. What follows is a fantastic guide and story of a massive project coming together. There are plans, evaluations, and tests for each component.

Sherry and the team first started by defining what was needed. It needed to be cheap, easy to use, and able to sample from various depths in a well-confined bounding box. It needed to run for four hours, be operated by a single person, and take ten samples across a 1-mile (2 km) section of the river. Some of the commercial solutions were evaluated, but they found none of them met the requirements, even ignoring their high costs. They selected a multi-hull style boat with off-the-shelf pontoons for stability and cost reasons.
Continue reading “Supercon 2022: All Aboard The SS MAPR With Sherry Chen” →

Supercon 2022: Samy Kamkar’s Glowing Breath

January 10, 2023 by 6 Comments

Sometimes the journey itself is the destination. This one started when [Samy] was 10 and his mom bought a computer. He logged on to IRC to talk with people about the X-Files and was WinNuked. Because of that experience, modulo a life of hacking and poking and playing, the talk ends with a wearable flex-PCB Tesla coil driving essentially a neon sign made from an ampule of [Samy]’s own breath around his neck. Got that? Buckle up, it’s a rollercoaster.

Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Samy Kamkar’s Glowing Breath” →

3D render of the badge programming adapter PCB

Supercon 2022 Badge Gets A Tinkering Helper Add-on

January 2, 2023 by 3 Comments

Are you one of the lucky ones to own a Hackaday Supercon 2022 badge? Would you like to make it even easier to program than it already is? [brokebit] has exactly the project you might’ve been dreaming of all along — it’s a Supercon 2022 Badge programming adapter. With pass-through for all badge pins, four buttons, a total of ten DIP switches and four LEDs, the sheer IO of this add-on makes good use of the badge’s expansion header. But that’s not all, as there’s a USB-UART converter accessible through a MicroUSB socket.

Using mostly through-hole components, this board won’t leave you digging through parts drawers for exotic buttons or pin headers; most everything is jellybean. The pass-through capability of the adapter means that other badge add-ons will be compatible and you can even use this adapter to debug them, with DIP switches helping you disconnect whatever onboard circuitry interferes. For instance, if you’re not looking for USB-UART functionality provided by the classic CP2102, the dual DIP switches are right there for you to disconnect it on the fly.

The board is 6 layers, but since the quoted price was the same as a 4-layer board, it made for a more comfortable layout. Want a refresher on the badge? Here you go, and here’s our write-up about it before Supercon. Hackers have been stretching the limits of what the 2022 badge can get done — here’s a punch card reader, for instance.

Decentralized Chaos In Germany

December 28, 2022 by 17 Comments

When you’re planning an event with 15,000 hackers in a tight space these days, the COVID logistics can take the wind right out of your sails. And so the Chaos Computer Club decided, for one more year, to put aside plans for the traditional year-end Chaos Communications Congress. In it’s place this year? Everyone is doing their own thing, together but apart, for the “Dezentrale Jahresendveranstaltungen”.

Some local clubs are putting on local events, some of them have talk streams, and it’s all happening everywhere and at once. If you’re not near one of the roughly 30 locations in Europe that are doing something live – check out the streams. But be warned, there’s a lot to process!

Maybe it’s best to start with the schedule, where you can see what’s coming up next. Live streams are going on throughout, until Dec 30. If you missed a talk, you can check out the pre-release versions on Relive, but note that start times and end times are approximate, so you might need to seek around. And once they’re edited and polished up, they’ll show up on the permanent event playlist, which is still just getting started as we write this.

Right now, we’re watching a talk in German about how to program laser shows, but yesterday there were some great talks on subjects as varied as the history of the C language, how perimeter cybersecurity is dead, how to find the Norwegian prime minister in an “anonymous” dataset, and how Hackaday friend [Dave Darko] made his LED dodecahedron that he was showing off at Supercon.

In short, there’s a lot going on. Check it out.

Supercon 2022: Mooneer Salem Goes Ham With An ESP32

December 28, 2022 by 10 Comments

After being licensed as a ham radio operator since the early 2000s, you tend to start thinking about combining your love for the radio with other talents. In a 20-minute talk at Hackaday Supercon 2022, [Mooneer Salem] tells the story of one such passion project that combined software and radio to miniaturize a digital ham radio modulator.

[Mooneer] works as a software developer and contributes to a project called FreeDV (free digital voice), a digital voice mode for HF radio. FreeDV first compresses the digital audio stream, then converts it into a modulation scheme sent out over a radio. The appeal is that this can be understandable down to very low signal-to-noise ratios and includes metadata and all the other niceties that digital signals bring.

Traditionally, this has required a computer to compress the audio and modulate the signal in addition to two sound cards. One card processes the audio in and out of your headset, and another for the audio coming in and out of the radio. [David Rowe] and [Rick Barnich] developed the SM1000, a portable FreeDV adapter based around the STM32F4 microcontroller. However, flash space was running low, and the cost was more than they wanted. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Mooneer Salem Goes Ham With An ESP32” →