For those local to the Philadelphia area, a “jawn” can be nearly anything or anyone — and at least for this weekend, it can even be a hacker con building up steam as it enters its third year. Kicking off this Friday at Arcadia University, JawnCon0x2 promises to be another can’t-miss event for anyone with a curious mind that lives within a reasonable distance of the Liberty Bell.
The slate of talks leans slightly towards the infosec crowd, but there’s really something for everyone on the schedule. Presentations such as Nothing is Safe: An Introduction to Hardware (In)Security and Making the GameTank – A New, Real 8-Bit Game Machine will certainly appeal to those of us who keep a hot soldering iron within arm’s reach, while Rolling Recon & Tire Prints: Perimeter Intrusion Detection and Remote Shenanigans via Rogue Tire Stem RF and Get More Radio Frequency Curious will certainly appeal to the radio enthusiasts.
Supercon is just around the corner, and we’re absolutely thrilled to announce the second half of our slate! Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. If you’re on the fence, we hope this pushes you over the line. And if it doesn’t, stay tuned — we’ve still got to tell you everything about the badge and the fantastic keynote speaker lineup.
(What? More than one keynote speaker? Unheard of!)
And as if that weren’t enough, there’s delicious food, great live music, hot soldering irons, and an absolutely fantastic crowd of the Hackaday faithful, and hopefully a bunch of new folks too. If you’re a Supercon fan, we’re looking forward to seeing you again, and if it’s your first time, we’ll be sure to make you feel welcome. Continue reading “2025 Hackaday Supercon: More Wonderful Speakers”→
Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! Just check out this roster of talks that will be going down. We’ve got something for everyone out there in the Hackday universe, from poking at pins, to making things beautiful, to robots, radios, and FPGAs. And this isn’t even half of the list yet.
We’ve got a great mix of old favorites and new faces this year, and as good as they are, honestly the talks are only half of the fun. The badge hacking, the food, the brainstorming, and just the socializing with the geekiest of the geeky, make it an event you won’t want to miss. If you don’t have tickets yet, you can still get them here.
Plus, this year, because Friday night is Halloween, we’ll be hosting a Sci-Fi-themed costume party for those who want to show off their best props or most elaborate spacesuits. And if that is the sort of thing that you’re into, you will absolutely want to stay tuned to our Keynote Speaker(s) announcement in a little while. (Spoiler number one.) Continue reading “2025 Hackaday Speakers, Round One! And Spoilers”→
Can you feel the nip of fall in the air? That can only mean one thing: Supercon is just around the corner. The next few weeks are going to bring a blitz of Supercon-related reveals, and we’re starting off with a big one: the workshops.
Electromagnetic Field manage to get live music at a hacker camp right, by turning it into the most cyberpunk future possible.
A couple of decades ago now, several things happened which gave life to our world and made it what it has become. Hackerspaces proliferated, giving what was previously dispersed a physical focus. Alongside that a range of hardware gave new expression to our projects; among them the Arduino, affordable 3D printing, and mail-order printed circuit boards.
The result was a flowering of creativity and of a community we’d never had before.Visiting another city could come with a while spent in their hackerspace, and from that new-found community blossomed a fresh wave of events. The older hacker camps expanded and morphed in character to become more exciting showcases for our expression, and new events sprang up alongside them. The 2010s provided me and my friends with some of the most formative experiences of our lives, and we’re guessing that among those of you reading this piece will be plenty who also found their people.
And then came COVID. Something that sticks in my mind when thinking about the COVID pandemic is a British news pundit from March 2020 saying that nothing would be quite the same as before once the pandemic was over. In our community this came home to me after 2022, when the first large European hacker camps made a return. They were awesome in their own way, but somehow sterile, it was as though something was missing. Since then we’ve had a few more summers spent trailing across the continent to hang out and drink Club-Mate in the sun, and while we commend the respective orgas for creating some great experiences, finding that spark can still be elusive. Hanging out with some of my friends round a European hackerspace barbecue before we headed home recently, we tried to put our finger on exactly where the problem lay.
The largest European hacker camp this year was in the Netherlands — What Hackers Yearn (WHY) 2025 is the latest in the long-running series of four-yearly events from that country, and 2025 saw a move from the Flevoland site used by SHA2017 and MCH2021, back to just north of Alkmaar in Noord-Holland, where the OHM2013 event took place. WHY has found itself making the news in the Dutch technical media for all the wrong reasons over the last few days, after serious concerns were raised about the fire safety of its badge.
This is the cell supplied with the WHY badge, complete with manufacturer’s warning.
The concerns were raised from the RevSpace hackerspace in Leidschendam, and centre around the design of the battery power traces on the PCB between the battery holders and the power supply circuitry. Because the 18650 cells supplied with that badge lack any protection circuitry, bridging the power traces could be a fire risk.
In short: their report names the cell holders as having tags too large for their pads on the PCB, a too-tight gap between positive and negative battery traces, protected only by soldermask, and the inadequacy of the badge’s short circuit protection. In the event that metal shorted these battery tags, or wore through the soldermask, the batteries would be effectively shorted, and traces or components could get dangerously hot.
The WHY organizers have responded with a printed disclaimer leaflet warning against misuse of the cells, and added a last-minute epoxy coating to the boards to offer additional protection. Some people are 3D-printing cases, which should also help reduce the risk of short-circuiting due to foreign metal objects. Using an external powerbank with short-circuit protection instead of the cells would solve the problem as well. Meanwhile a group of hackers collecting aid for Ukraine are accepting the batteries as donations.
It’s understood that sometimes bugs find their way into any project, and in that an event badge is no exception. In this particular case, the original Dutch badge team resigned en masse at the start of the year following a disagreement with the WHY2025 organizers, so this badge has been a particularly hurried production. Either way, we are fortunate that the issue was spotted, and conference organizers took action before any regrettable incidents occurred.
As is tradition, we’ve reserved 100 tickets priced at $148 (plus fees) for what we like to call the True-Believers. Those are the folks that are willing to sign up even without knowing who will be speaking or what this year’s badge looks like. Once those are sold out, the regular admission tickets will cost $296 (plus fees). We might be slightly biased, but even at full price, we like to think Supercon is a screaming deal.
Those who join us in Pasadena, California from October 31st through November 2nd can look forward to a weekend of talks, workshops, demos, and badge hacking. But what’s more, you’ll experience the unique sense of camaraderie that’s produced when you pack hundreds of hardware hackers into an alleyway and ply them with as much caffeine as they can handle. Some treat it like a normal hacker con, others as a social experiment, but nobody thinks of it as anything less than a fantastic time.
We’re still working closely with our friends at Supplyframe, DigiKey, and Framework to put together a full itinerary for Supercon 2025, so stay tuned over the coming weeks as things are finalized. But in the meantime, we’ve got a couple new additions this year that we’re pretty excited about.
