Supercon 2022: Sam Mulvey Shows You How To FM Radio

December 15, 2022 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

Sam Mulvey built his own radio station in Tacoma, WA. Is there a better way to meld ham radio practice with a colossal number of DIY electrical and computer projects? Sam would say there isn’t one! This 45-minute talk is basically the lessons-learned review of setting up KTQA 95.3 – the radio station on the hill.

Sam starts out the talk by introducing you to LPFM. And maybe you didn’t know that there’s a special type of license issued by the US FCC allowing non-profit community radio stations up to 100 W, covering an radius of around 5 km. It’s like running a pirate radio station, but by jumping through a few legal hoops, made legal.

Trash on the Radio

Putting a radio station together on a budget requires a ton of clever choices, flexibility, and above all, luck. But if you’re willing to repair a busted CD player or turntable, scrounge up some used computers, and work on your own amplifiers, the budget doesn’t have to be the limiting factor.

Being cheap means a lot of DIY. For instance, Sam and friends made a custom console to support all the gear and hide all the wiring. Some hot tips from the physical build-out: painted cinderblocks make great studio monitor stands, and Cat-5 can carry two channels of balanced audio along with power, with sufficient isolation that it all sounds clean. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Sam Mulvey Shows You How To FM Radio” →

Nostalgic 30-in-ONE Electronics Badge For DEF CON 30

December 9, 2022 by Joseph Long 12 Comments

[hamster] and the DC Zia crew offered up a throwback 30-in-ONE Learn Electronics indie badge for DEF CON 30. The badge is inspired by the Radio Shack “100-in-1” style project kits that so many of us cut our teeth on back in the 70s and 80s.

DC Zia is a hacker group loosely associated with New Mexico who have been working together to make an indie badge for DEF CON each year. If you aren’t familiar with the badgelife community of hardware hackers and programmers who make electronic indie conference badges, check out our BadgeLife Documentary.

The 30-in-ONE badge is provided in the form of a kit, so the learning and fun begins with assembling the badge. From there, an included booklet guides the badge holder through building and experimenting with 30 different circuits.

The included components include resistors, capacitors, LEDs, transistors, switches, transformer, speaker, OLED display, battery box, and a bundle of jumper wires for making any desired circuit connections. The documented circuits have compelling titles such as the Electric Cat, Light Theremin, Grandfather Clock, and Frequency Counter.

Flashback to what DC Zia, and other groups, were up to five years prior in our expose on The Hardware Badges of DEF CON 25.

Continue reading “Nostalgic 30-in-ONE Electronics Badge For DEF CON 30” →

A Hacker Walks Into A Trade Show: Electronica 2022

November 22, 2022 by Elliot Williams 24 Comments

Last week, the world’s largest electronics trade fair took place in Munich, so I had to attend. Electronica is so big that it happens only once every two years and fills up 14 airplane hangars. As the fairly generic name suggests, it covers anything and everything having to do with electronics. From the producers of your favorite MLCC capacitors to the firms that deliver them to your doorstep, from suppliers of ASIC test equipment to the little shop that’ll custom wind toroids for you, that’s a pretty wide scope. Walking around, I saw tomorrow’s technology today from the big players, but I also picked up some ideas that would be useful for the home gamer.

When I first walked in, for instance, I ran into the Elantas booth. They’re a company that makes flexible insulation and specialty industrial coatings. But what caught my eye was a thermoformed plastic sheet with circuit traces on it. To manufacture them, they cut out copper foil, glue it to a flat plastic sheet with a glue that has a little give, and then put it all together into a vacuum former. The result is a 3D circuit and organically formed substrate in one shot. Very cool, and none of the tech for doing that is outside of the reach of the determined hacker.

The Cool Stuff

All of the stands, big or small, try to lure you in with some gimmick. The big fish, firms with deep pockets, put up huge signs and open bars, and are staffed by no shortage of salespeople in suits. The little fish, on the other hand, have to resort to showing you the cool stuff that they do, and it’s more often the application engineers sitting there, ready to talk tech. You can guess which I found more interesting.

For instance when I walked up to an obviously DIY popcorn popper that was also showing 5000 FPS footage of kernels in mid-pop, I had to ask. The company in question was a small UK outfit that made custom programmable power supplies and digital acquisition gear that interfaced with it. You could plug in their box to some temperature probes, fire off the high-speed video camera, and control the heating and cooling profile without writing any code. Very sweet. Continue reading “A Hacker Walks Into A Trade Show: Electronica 2022” →

Hackaday supercon badge PCB showing illuminated activity lights after being loaded with a punch card

Supercon Badge Reads A “Punch” Card

November 17, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 10 Comments

This year’s Hackaday Supercon, the first since 2019 thanks to the pandemic, was a very similar affair to those of the past. Almost every hardware-orientated hacker event has its own custom electronic badge, and Supercon was no different. This year’s badge is a simulation platform for a hypothetical 4-bit CPU created by our own [Voja Antonic], and presented a real challenge for some of the attendees who had never touched machine code during their formative years. The challenge set was to come up with the most interesting hack for the badge, so collaborators [Ben Hencke] and [Zach Fredin] set about nailing the ‘expandr’ category of the competition with their optical punched card reader bolt-on.

Peripheral connectivity is somewhat limited. The idea was to build a bolt-on board with its own local processing — using a PixelBlaze board [Ben] brought along — to handle all the scanning details. Then, once the program on the card was read, dump the whole thing over to the badge CPU via its serial interface. Without access to their usual facilities back home, [Ben] and [Zach] obviously had to improvise with whatever they had with them, and whatever could be scrounged off other badges or other hardware lying around.

One big issue was that most people don’t usually carry photodiodes with them, but luckily they remembered that an LED can be used as a photodiode when reverse-biased appropriately. Feeding the signal developed over a one Meg resistance, into a transconductance amplifier courtesy of a donated LM358 there was enough variation for the STM32 ADC to reliably detect the difference between unfilled and filled check-boxes on the filled-in program cards.

The CPU required 12-bit opcodes, which obviously implies 12 photodiodes and 12 LEDs to read each word. The PixelBlaze board does not have this many analog inputs. A simple trick was instead of having discrete inputs, all 12 photodiodes were wired in parallel and fed into a single input amplifier. To differentiate the different bits, the illumination LEDs instead were charlieplexed, thus delivering the individual bits as a sequence of values into the ADC, for subsequent de-serialising. The demonstration video shows that it works, with a program loaded from a card and kicked into operation manually. Such fun!

Punch cards usually have a hole through them and can be read mechanically, and are a great way to configure testers like this interesting vacuum valve tester we covered a short while back.

Continue reading “Supercon Badge Reads A “Punch” Card” →

Welcome Back, Supercon!

November 12, 2022 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

The last two Novembers, Hackaday’s annual gathering was held in remote mode: Remoticon instead of Supercon. While still recovering from jetlag, I’m reflecting on the pros and cons of live versus virtual events. And wondering how we can combine the virtues of both for next year. Come brainstorm with me!

The blatantly obvious pros of having a live Supercon is the ease of talking to everyone who is there, trading code tips, life experience, and must-see projects. In person, you can physically trade badge add-ons in real time, without waiting for customs to clear the packages. Simply hanging out has a real charm to it, and doing so over shared tacos is even better. Spontaneous collaborations were easy and natural. And finally, while you can watch someone electrocute a twinkie with a neon sign transformer on YouTube, you can’t smell the ozone.

Against this, all of the expensive travel, the aforementioned jetlag for some, and the real-world limitations that only so many people can fit in a given physical space at once.

The best part of Remoticon was hearing from people who wouldn’t have been able to make it to an in-person con, whether it’s because it’s of geography or money. Since everything is online, there’s no missing out, and anyone can freely dip in to one talk or another. The online chat channels were better attended during Remoticon as well – perhaps because they were the only game in town – but that was a more global community.

There’s probably nothing that can be done about the tacos, but what could we do about incorporating the benefits of Remoticon? We did stream one stage live, and we had two chat channels open for commentary the whole time. If you took part remotely in Supercon, let us know how it went, and if you have any suggestions to improve our remote experience for next time. Because in the end, we want Hackaday to be as inclusive and as global as the hacker community itself.

Banner Photo by Poyu Chen.

Supercon Sunday: Check The Live Stream

November 6, 2022 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

Supercon is entering the final phase: it’s Sunday! But it’s not over yet: there is a phenomenal lineup of talks today, starting at 9:30 AM PST, and we’re streaming the main stage live from the very beginning until the badge-hacking awards ceremony at 5:30 pm. And if you’d like to join in the conversation, head over to the Hack Chat or the Discord.

We kicked off Friday with a full day of badge hacking, workshops, food, drink, and music. What used to be a late-afternoon pre-registration has grown into the early morning hours, and gave people a great opportunity to catch up after two years of remote mode.

Saturday was full-on Supercon, and the talks were phenomenal. We recorded interviews, took tons of photos, and of course recorded the talks given on the DesignLab stage, and we’ll be getting those out to you over the next weeks. (It’s a lot.)

In addition to all the talks, we announced the winners of the 2022 Hackaday Prize! It was a big year for small-scale energy generation and recycling, and all of the winning projects were clever, well tested, and easily replicable. Check them out.

So now that you’re all caught up, settle in for a jam-packed Sunday. See you in the livestream if not in real life!

Hackaday Prize 2022: Meet The Winners Of This Year’s Competition

November 5, 2022 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

This year, the 2022 Hackaday Prize challenged hackers and makers in the open source community to develop projects which evoked the concepts of Sustainability, Resiliency, and Circularity — ideas which perhaps have never been more important. As humanity works to become better stewards to the only planet they can call home, everything we build (or rebuild) should reflect our desire to preserve our world for future generations.

Today, we’re excited to announce the projects that our panel of expert judges believe best exemplified this year’s theme and took home their share of the $50,000 USD in prize money.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2022: Meet The Winners Of This Year’s Competition” →