Building Cameras For The Immersive Future

February 28, 2020 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Thus far, the vast majority of human photographic output has been two-dimensional. 3D displays have come and gone in various forms over the years, but as technology progresses, we’re beginning to see more and more immersive display technologies. Of course, to use these displays requires content, and capturing that content in three dimensions requires special tools and techniques. Kim Pimmel came down to Hackaday Superconference to give us a talk on the current state of the art in advanced AR and VR camera technologies.

[Kim]’s interest in light painting techniques explored volumetric as well as 2D concepts.

Kim has plenty of experience with advanced displays, with an impressive resume in the field. Having worked on Microsoft’s Holo Lens, he now leads Adobe’s Aero project, an AR app aimed at creatives. Kim’s journey began at a young age, first experimenting with his family’s Yashica 35mm camera, where he discovered a love for capturing images. Over the years, he experimented with a wide variety of gear, receiving a Canon DSLR from his wife as a gift, and later tinkering with the Stereorealist 35mm 3D camera. The latter led to Kim’s growing obsession with three-dimensional capture techniques.

Through his work in the field of AR and VR displays, Kim became familiar with the combination of the Ricoh Theta S 360 degree camera and the Oculus Rift headset. This allowed users to essentially sit inside a photo sphere, and see the image around them in three dimensions. While this was compelling, [Kim] noted that a lot of 360 degree content has issues with framing. There’s no way to guide the observer towards the part of the image you want them to see.

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Last Call For Hackaday Belgrade Proposals Grants You A Four-Day Reprieve

February 28, 2020 by Mike Szczys No comments

We want you to present a talk at Hackaday Belgrade and this is the last call to send us your proposal.

Europe’s biennial conference on hardware creation returns to Serbia on May 9th for an all-day-and-into-the-night extravaganza. Core to this conference is people from the Hackaday community sharing their stories of pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on their electronics workbenches, firmware repos, and manufacturing projects.

Here at Hackaday we live a life of never ending deadlines, but we also understand that this isn’t true for everyone. In that spirit, we’re extending the deadline so that those who count procrastination as a core skill don’t miss their chance to secure a speaking slot at the last minute. You now have until 18:00 GMT (19:00 in Belgrade) next Friday to file your talk proposal.

The conference badge is being built by Voja Antonic, the inventor of Yugoslavia’s first widely-adopted personal computer. We know he has prototype PCBs on hand and plan to share more information on what he has in store for you very soon.

Developing Retro Games For Conference Badges With Kate Morris

February 26, 2020 by Lewin Day No comments

PCB badges have exploded in popularity in recent years. Starting out as a fun token of entry to a conference, they’re now being developed by all manner of independent groups, with DEFCON serving as the heart of the #badgelife movement. After DEFCON 26, Kate Morris and associates decided to undertake the development of their own badge, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing. Kate’s talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference serves to tell the tale of creating a retro game to run on a badge platform.

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Bitluni Brings All The ESP-32 Multimedia Hacks To Supercon

February 24, 2020 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Of all the people I was looking forward to meeting at Supercon, aside from my Hackaday colleagues with whom I had worked for five years without ever meeting, was a fellow from Germany named Matthias Balwierz. The name might not ring a bell, but he’ll certainly be familiar to Hackaday readers as Bitluni, the sometimes goofy but always entertaining and enlightening face of “Bitluni’s Lab” on YouTube.

I’d been covering Bitluni’s many ESP32 hacks over the years, and had struck up a correspondence with him, swapping ideas and asking for advice on the many projects I start but somehow never finish. Luckily for us, Bitluni is far better on follow-through than I am, and he brought that breadth and depth of experience to the Design Lab stage for that venue’s last talk of the 2019 Superconference, before the party moved next door for the badge-hacking presentations.

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Software Defined Everything With Mike Ossmann And Kate Temkin

February 21, 2020 by Jenny List 7 Comments

Software defined radio has become a staple of the RF tinkerer, but it’s likely that very few of us have ever taken their software defined toolchain outside the bounds of radio. It’s an area explored by Mike Ossmann and Kate Temkin in their newly published Supercon talk as they use GNU Radio to do some things that you might find unexpected.

For most people, a software defined radio is a device. An RTL-SDR dongle perhaps, or the HackRF that a popular multi-tool for working in the radio frequency realm. But as they explain, the SDR hardware can be considered merely as the analogue front end, being just the minimal analogue circuitry coupled with a digitiser. The real software-defined part comes — as you might expect — in the software

Kate and Mike introduce GNU Radio Companion — the graphical UI for GNU Radio — as their tool of choice and praise it’s use as a general purpose digital signal processing system whether or not that includes radio. Taking their own Great Scott Gadgets GreatFET One USB hackers toolkit peripheral as an input device they demonstrate this by analysing the output from a light sensor. Instantly they can analyse the mains frequency in a frequency-domain plot, and the pulse frequency of the LEDs. But their bag of tricks goes much deeper, exploring multiple “atypical use cases” that unlock a whole new world through creative digital signal processing (DSP).

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The CarolinaCon 16 Badge Slithers Into Life

February 19, 2020 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

It’s something of an unwritten rule at this point that you can’t hold a hacking conference without providing a badge with at least a few LEDs on it. Not only can they be a great way to learn electronics for the attendees that tinker with them, but they’re a keepsake to commemorate the event. As a perfect example, [Matt Agius] recently wrote in to tell us about the badge he’s made for the upcoming CarolinaCon 16.

As [Matt] explains, the idea with this badge was to make it as easy as possible for attendees to assemble. In the final version there are only going to be three components that need to be soldered, so even if they’ve never touched SMD components before, they should still be able to get their badge lit up.

The badge largely makes up for its simplistic electronics with some fantastic board art on the flip side. The two red LEDs illuminate the eyes of a rather sinister looking octopus that’s ensnaring the unsuspecting state of North Carolina in its tentacled grip. The art was originally done by [Katie Dorn], with [Matt] spearheading its conversion into something that could be sent out for PCB fabrication.

Anyone looking to add this latest entry to their growing collection of badges will need to attend CarolinaCon on April 10th and 11th, where you’ll be able to catch a talk [Matt] is giving on the subject called “How to design Printed Circuit Boards for Hacking and for Art”.

Machine Inside Of A Chip: How Sprite_TM Built The FPGA Game Boy Badge

February 19, 2020 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

Kids of the 1990’s would call you a liar if you told them that within thirty years you’d go to a conference and be handed a Super Nintendo Entertainment System to wear around your neck. But that’s what happened with the badge Jeroen Domburg, aka [Sprite_TM], designed for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference. It’s built in the Game Boy form factor, complete with a cartridge slot, beautiful screen, and the familiar button layout. But there’s so much more here, like the HDMI port on the bottom and the ability to completely reconfigure the device by dropping a binary file onto it over USB.

Of course what makes this possible is the FPGA at the heart of the design. The story of how the badge was developed is shared in great detail during Sprite’s Supercon talk. The timeline, the hardware choices, and the oopses along the way make for a great story. But what you really don’t want to miss is how he built the machine inside of the FPGA — the collection of Verilog code known as “gateware” that brings together the System-on-a-Chip (SoC). From his delight at being able to spawn more processor cores by changing a single variable, to the fascinating SNES-inspired graphics subsystem, the inside story shared below is even more interesting than the physical device itself.

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