More Supercon Talks Taking The Hardware World By Storm

October 4, 2019 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

You’re going to love the talks at the Hackaday Superconference this November. The ultimate hardware conference is all about hardware creation. The ten speakers below join the talks we announced last week and that’s still not even half of what you’ll see on the stages of Supercon. Add to that the superb workshops we announced early this week and you begin to ask yourself just how much awesome can really fit into a single weekend. Well, it’s three full days and we’d recommend arriving the day before for the unofficial festivities too!

Of course, you’ll need a ticket to ride. At the time of writing there were some available (we’ve left the teens and are headed for single digits), but no guarantee there will be any left when this article is published. We’ll be maintaining a waiting list though, so if you’re sitting on a ticket you just can’t use, please return it so someone else can take your spot.

Enough delay, let’s see what talks await us at 2019 Supercon!

The Talks (Part Two of Many)

Shelley Green

Pressure connections: crimping isn’t as simple as you thought.

Crimping is generally defined as the joining of two conductors by mechanical forces. At first, the process appears to be rather simple. However, deeper investigations reveal complex dynamics that operate at macroscopic, microscopic, and nanoscales. I will cover the basic theory for pressure connections, examine the role of mechanical properties for both conductivity and tensile strength, look at oxides and surface films, and consider the design challenges for tooling, testing, and validation of crimp quality.
Mike Harrison

Everything I’ve Learnt About LEDs.

LEDs are not all created alike. I will cover a wide range of practical techniques involved in using LEDs, in particular in the context of large-scale installations, hower much of it will be equally applicable to smaller projects. Topics include suitable LED types, drive circuitry, dimming techniques, gamma correction. There will be live demonstrations illustrating many of the areas covered.

Kerry Scharfglass

Basic Device Security for Basic Needs

It feels like every day we hear about an unbelievable new security vulnerability that allows an attacker to spy on your dog through a connected light bulb or program your toaster oven remotely. Some of these are quite elaborate, requiring researchers years to track down. But others are total no-brainers; “why didn’t the manufacturer just do X!”. In our IoT-ified world device security is more important than ever, but not every hardware product needs to be secured like an ATM inside a missile. I will discuss basic design practices and implementation tricks which are easy to incorporate into your product and provide a solid baseline of security against casual adversaries.
Sophy Wong

Made With Machines: 3D Printing & Laser Cutting for Wearable Electronics

Building tech for the human body is tricky! Whether it’s a fitness tracker or a costume, making hardware comfortable and durable enough to wear is a fascinating design challenge. I like to tackle this challenge with the help of machines! In this talk, I’ll share my recent projects that use 3D printing and laser cutting to create wearable tech with precision and high impact. I’ll talk about the design process and build techniques for using 3D printing and laser cutting to create custom parts that are comfortable and perfect for wearables.

Jen Costillo

The Future is Us: Why the Open Source And Hobbyist Community Will Drive Hi-Tech Consumer Products

Where did we the OSHW and hobbyist community come from and what have we accomplished? The truth is we are driving modern consumer electronics industry. From prototyping, to tools to media and training, we have changed it all. I’ll talk about the reasons why, our impact and our future, as well as how to avoid becoming what the older industry is: obsolete.
Timothy Ansell

Xilinx Series 7 FPGAs Now Have a Fully Open Source Toolchain!

You should be super excited about FPGAs and how they allow open source projects to do hardware development. In this talk I will cover a basic introduction into what an FPGA is and can do, what an FPGA toolchain is, and how much things sucked when the only option was to use proprietary toolchains. The SymbiFlow project changed this and I’ll discuss what is currently supported including a demo of Linux on a RISC-V core with a cheap Xilinx FPGA development board.

Chris Gammell

Gaining RF Knowledge: An Analog Engineer Dives into RF Circuits

Starting my engineering career working on low level analog measurement, anything above 1kHz kind of felt like “high frequency”. This is very obviously not the case. I’ll go over the journey of discovering and rediscovering higher frequency techniques and squaring them with the low level measurement basics that I learned at the beginning my career. This will include a discussion of Maxwell’s equations and some of the assumptions that we make when we’re working on different types of circuits. You will find this information useful in the context of RF calculations around cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth and other commonly available communication methods.
Shanni Prutchi and Jeff Wood

Adventures in Building Secure Networks from Blockchain Transactions

In our talk, we will show how we designed and built a message authentication system operating on ADANA (Automated Detection of Anomalous Network Activity) and Hyperledger (a “smart contract” form of Blockchain) all hosted on just two servers that were no longer being used by Rowan College at Burlington County. The system was built using Docker, syslog-ng, Hyperledger Fabric and Composer, and a beta version of Splunk. This system is accessible by nodes wired into the network which interact with the hyperledger through a web browser. We’ll present the infrastructure of the network, details of the hyperledger, an explanation of all the tools used by the system, a walkthrough of how the system works, reflections on the particular challenges of this project, and what we see in the future of this technology.

John McMaster

Replicating a Secure Telephone Key

The STU-III secure telephone was originally developed by the NSA for defense use in the 1980’s but also saw use in unclassified commercial products like the Motorola Sectel 9600\. However, they require difficult to find electromechanical keys. I will describe the process of creating a compatible key for the Sectel 9600 by reverse engineering the mechanical and electrical design and subsequently fabricating it. Along the way I’ll discuss low volume manufacturing issues and strategies to overcome.

We Want You!

Don’t miss out. One weekend as one of so many amazing people will inspire you and recharge your creative batteries for the coming year of hardware hacking. See you at Supercon!

Get Hands-On At Supercon: Workshop Tickets Now Available

October 2, 2019 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Build something cool and pick up new skills from the workshops at the Hackaday Superconference. But decide right now, workshops will sell out and tickets to the conference itself are nearly gone.

You must have a Superconference ticket in order to purchase a workshop ticket; buy one right now if you haven’t already. We think this is “The Year of the FPGA” and we hope you do too — the badge is based on an FPGA running a RISC-V core and using Open Source tools. Try your hand at FPGA for the first time, hone your skills in the advanced course, or design synthesizer circuits using all of those gates in workshops using the badge itself.

But of course it’s not all about the badge. Jump into quantum computing, learn how to use living hinges in your 3D printed designs, sharpen your low-level C, and sit down at the Scanning Electron Microscope. You can brush up on capacitive touch design, learn about rolling-your-own USB devices, hack together a malicious hardware implant, and get your projects connected to the cloud.

Space in these workshops is limited so make sure to sign up before all the seats are taken. The base price for workshops is $15 (basically a “skin in the game” price to encourage those who register to show up). Any tickets priced above that base is meant to cover the material expense of the workshop. Here’s what we have planned:

Introduction to FPGA Hacking on the Supercon Badge

Piotr Esden-Tempski, Sylvain Munaut, Mike Walters, Sophi Kravitz

In this basic FPGA badge workshop you will get a quick introduction on how to add and program new virtual hardware on your Supercon badge. While a microcontroller always has a fixed set of hardware, the badge has an FPGA that can be reprogrammed and the RISC-V microcontroller inside the FPGA can be changed. In this workshop you will learn how to synthesize an existing IP core to your RISC-V core on the badge and how to use that new added hardware.

(To include as many people as possible, this workshop will be held in a least four identical sessions, please choose one.)

Introduction to Quantum Computing

Kitty Yeung

You’ll learn the basic physics and math concepts needed to get started with quantum computing. There will also be coding so please bring your computers. Instructions on installing Quantum Development Kit will be provided prior to the workshop.

USB Reverse Engineering: Ultra-Low-Cost Edition

Kate Temkin & Mikaela Szekely

Interested in learning more about the inner workings of USB? In this workshop we’ll cover some of the basic, low-level details of USB, then go into detail on how you can interact with (and create!) USB devices as a hobbyist, engineer, or hacker.

SEM Scan Electron Microscope

Adam McCombs

Come get hands-on with an Electron Microscope! In this workshop you will get a chance to get on console on a JEOL JSM-840 Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) capable of resolving 5nm details. We’ll cover all aspects of running an SEM, be that setup and alignment, sample preparation, or imaging.

Logic Noise: Build Silly Synths in the FPGA Fabric of the Supercon Badge

Elliot Williams

Most FPGA programming classes start off with the basics of logic circuits and how they’re implemented in an FPGA, and then jump 30 years into the present where FPGA design consists of downloading someone else’s IP and ironing out the timing bugs. But not this one! We’re going to stay fully stuck in the past: playing around with the combinatorial logic possibilities inside the Superconference badge’s FPGA fabric to make glitchy musical instruments. If you followed Hackaday’s Logic Noise series, you know how to make crazy noisemakers by abusing silicon on breadboards. In this workshop, we’ll be coding up the silicon and the breadboard. Whoah.

Prototyping Malicious Hardware on the Cheap

Joe FitzPatrick

Alleged multi-million-dollar hardware attacks might catch headlines, but what can we DIY with limited time and budget? We’ll have all the tools you need to prototype, build, and test both the hardware and software of a custom malicious hardware implant.

Advanced FPGA Hacking on the Supercon Badge

Piotr Esden-Tempski

In this advanced FPGA badge workshop you will learn how to develop your own simple FPGA IP core. You already know how to program microcontrollers and how memory-mapped IO works, but you want to go beyond that and develop your own hardware? This class is an introduction on how to write, synthesize and add new hardware periphery on your Supercon badge.

Flexure Lecture: designing springy and bi-stable mechanisms

Amy Qian

Flexures are used all around us to provide simple spring force, constrain degrees-of-freedom of motion, make satisfying clicky sounds, and much more. In this workshop, you’ll learn about basic flexure design, see lots of examples of how you might use them in your future projects, and assemble your very own laser-cut gripper mechanism.

Microcontrollers the Hard Way: Blink Like a Pro

Shawn Hymel (sponsored by Digi-Key)

Registers, timers, and interrupts, oh my! Get those semicolon-punching fingers ready, because we’re writing some C. Arduino, MicroPython, CircuitPython, and MakeCode have been steadily making microcontrollers easier to use and more accessible for a number of years. While ease-of-use is thankfully making embedded systems available to anyone, it means that writing optimized code still remains somewhat of a mystery, buried beneath layers of abstraction. In this workshop, we’ll write a simple fading LED program using registers, timers, and interrupts in an AVR ATtiny microcontroller. This workshop will help you understand some of the low-level, inner workings of microcontrollers and start to write space efficient and computationally quick code.

DK IoT Studio Using the ST NUCLEO-L476RG Sensor Demo

Robert Nelson (sponsored by Digi-Key)

This workshop is about developing an end-to-end solution, from sensor to the cloud. Learn about all the different elements involved in the design, from the sensor, to the processor, to connectivity, cloud storage, and data visualization. Participants will learn to develop an IoT application using the ST NUCLEO-L476RG Development Board. Learn to use Digi-Key IoT Studio design environment to connect easily to the cloud and visualize your data in real time. The new tool has a graphical user interface that allows for easy drag-and-drop functionality. Participants will be able to send data to the cloud thru the development environment and visualize the data.

From Outdated to Outstanding: Easily Add a Touchpad to Your Next Design

TBD (sponsored by Microchip)

What if you could easily make your design more advanced, and let’s face it, cooler? You can, and we can show you how by replacing your old-school pushbuttons with capacitive touch buttons or touchpad! In this workshop, we will practice how to use Microchip’s graphic code generator to produce the code for a simple water-tolerant touchpad. The capacitive touch sensing expert from Microchip will also introduce some tips and tricks of how to lay out a touch button. Come and find out everything you need to know about adding a touch button to your next design!

Superconference workshops tend to sell out extremely quickly. Don’t wait to get your ticket.

Here’s Your First Look At The Talks Of The 2019 Hackaday Superconference

September 27, 2019 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

The ultimate hardware conference returns this November as the Hackaday Superconference springs to life in Pasadena, California. It is our pleasure to announce the first set of accepted speakers who have confirmed their appearances at Supercon. This reveal is only the tip of the iceberg, so keep your eye on Hackaday as we continue to reveal the rest of the exemplary talks and workshops that make up this year’s conference.

However, don’t wait to get your ticket. Yes, we sell out every year, but the pace of ticket sales has been much faster this year and soon they will all be gone. Don’t miss out, as you can see from the small sample below, Supercon will be packed with amazing people and you need to be one of them!

The Talks (Part One of Many)

Matthias Balwierz aka bitluni

Multimedia Fun with the Esp32

The ESP32 microcontroller is a beast! Everyone knows that already. Composite video and VGA are common now. But a few years ago these capabilities weren’t obvious. This talk will recap the journey of squeezing out every possible bit of performance to generate audio and video with the least amount of additional components. It’s a detail-packed discussion of the projects I’ve documented on my YouTube channel bitluni’s lab.
Sarah Kaiser

Hacking Quantum Key Distribution Hardware or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Burn Things with Lasers

Quantum devices are the next big addition to the general computing and technology landscape. However, just like classical hardware, quantum hardware can be hacked. I will share some of my (successful) attempts to break the security of quantum key distribution hardware with the biggest laser I could find!

Mohit Bhoite

Building Free-Formed Circuit Sculptures

I’ll be talking about building free-formed circuit sculptures, and how anyone with the right tools can get involved in this art form. We’ll explore ways to make these sculptures interact with the environment around them or with the user.
Thea Flowers

Creating a Sega-Inspired Hardware Synthesizer from the Ground Up.

What makes the Sega Genesis sound chip unique? I’ll share some short history about why the Genesis happened at a very specific moment to have this sort of chip. I’ll talk about designing and building a synthesizer around it and the challenges I encountered by trying to do this as my first hardware project.

Helen Leigh

Sound Hacking and Music Technologies

I will explore the ways in which music is influenced by making and hacking, including a whistle-stop tour of some key points in music hacking history. This starts with 1940s Musique Concrete and Daphne Oram’s work on early electronic music at the BBC, and blossoms into the strange and wonderful projects coming out of the modern music hacker scenes, including a pipe organ made of Furbies, a sound art marble run, robotic music machines and singing plants.
Adam Zeloof

Thermodynamics for Electrical Engineers: Why Did My Board Melt (And How Can I Prevent It)?

In this presentation I will provide circuit designers with the foundation they need to consider thermal factors in their designs. Heat transfers through on-board components and knowing how to characterize this means we can choose the right heat sink for any application. Learn about free simulation tools that can be used to perform these analyses and boost your knowledge of thermodynamics and heat transfer (although those who are already familiar with the subject will find some utility in it as well).

Samy Kamkar

FPGA Glitching & Side Channel Attacks

I will explore some of the incredible work that has been done by researchers, academics, governments, and the nefarious in the realm of side channel analysis. We’ll inspect attacks that were once secret and costly, but now accessible to all of us using low cost hardware such as FPGAs. We’ll learn how to intentionally induce simple yet powerful faults in modern systems such as microcontrollers.
Daniel Samarin

Debugging Electronics: You Can’t Handle the Ground Truth!

Root-causing quickly is all about having the right tools, having the right infrastructure in place, and knowing how to use them. Is it the firmware, the circuit, a bad crimp, or backlash in the gears? I will outline strategies for finding out what the issue is, so that you can focus on fixing the right thing.

You Miss It, You’ll Miss It

If there’s any way you can make it to Supercon in person, you should. One of the two talk stages will be live-streamed, and the other recorded, but there is no substitute for hanging out with these eight awesome people, plus five hundred of our closest friends. Anyone who’s made it to the conference before can tell you that the intimate atmosphere is packed with opportunities to meet new people, connect with those you’ve only seen on the internet, and learn about the newest developments happening in the world of hardware creation. See you in November!

Pictorial Guide To The Unofficial Electronic Badges Of DEF CON 27

September 19, 2019 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

DEF CON has become the de facto showplace of the #Badgelife movement. It’s a pageant for clever tricks that transform traditional green rectangular circuit boards into something beautiful, unique, and often times hacky.

Today I’ve gathered up about three dozen badge designs seen at DC27. It’s a hint of what you’ll see in the hallways and meetups of the conference. From hot-glue light pipes and smartphone terminal debugging consoles to block printing effects and time of flight sensors, this is a great place to get inspiration if you’re thinking of trying your hand at unofficial badge design.

If you didn’t catch “The Badgies” you’ll want to go back and read that article too as it rounds up the designs I found to be the craziest and most interesting including the Car Hacking Village, Space Force, SecKC, DC503, and Frankenbadge. Do swing by the Hands-On articles for the AND!XOR badge and for [Joe Grand’s] official DC27 badge. There was also a lot of non-badge hardware on display during Hackaday’s Breakfast at DEF CON so check out that article as well.

Enough preamble, let’s get to the badges!

Continue reading “Pictorial Guide To The Unofficial Electronic Badges Of DEF CON 27” →

Hands-On: BornHack’s Light Sabre Badge

September 13, 2019 by Jenny List 3 Comments

A badge modelled after the handle of a light sabre? Yes Please! This Star Wars themed hardware is the work of hardware designer Thomas Flummer for the 2019 BornHack conference held in Denmark last month. (Check out my roundup of the event if this is the first you’ve heard of it.)

It's not a badge but a light sabre! The front of the BornHack 2019 badge. — It’s not a badge but a light sabre! The front of the BornHack 2019 badge.

It fits the hand nicely, and with clever side-on placement of the two AA battery holders (a trick we first saw with the 2016 Hackday Superconference badge) it also keeps any protruding solder joints away from clothing. In the centre of the badge is the 240×240 pixel colour display that also hides the Silicon Labs Happy Gecko processor and its surrounding components. Three buttons at the edge of the board to the left of the screen are a nice fit for your thumb when holding it in your left hand — a good choice if you happen to leave your right hand behind on a visit to the Cloud City of Bespin.

Between the battery holders lies a four-way joystick, two buttons, and a 6-pin add-on connector. Above it is a micro SD card socket and a micro USB socket, and above them are an IR emitter and receiver. All of the hardware is on the front of the PCB, with no components on the reverse (other than the solder joints for the batteries). But it is there you will find a set of exposed pads for serial and I2C interfaces. Continue reading “Hands-On: BornHack’s Light Sabre Badge” →

BornHack 2019, A Laid-Back Hacker Camp In A Danish Forest

September 4, 2019 by Jenny List 11 Comments

This is a fantastic summer for hacker camps and I was very happy to make it to BornHack this year. This week-long camp attracts hackers from all over Europe and the mix of a few hundred friends and soon-to-be friends who gathered on the Danish island of Fyn delivered a unique experience for the curious traveller.

The camp takes place at the Hylkedam Danish scout camp, located in a forest amid the rolling Danish famland not too far from the small town of Gelsted. It’s a few kilometres from a motorway junction, but easy enough to find after the long haul up from the UK via the Channel Tunnel. As an aside, every bored cop between France and the Danish border wanted to stop my 20-year-old right-hand-drive Volkswagen on UK plates, but soon lost interest after walking up to the passenger side and finding no driver. It seems Brits are considered harmless, which is good to hear. Continue reading “BornHack 2019, A Laid-Back Hacker Camp In A Danish Forest” →

The Numberwang Badge Brought Cheer To CCCamp 2019

September 2, 2019 by Jenny List 9 Comments

While wandering through CCCamp last weekend, in between episodes of forcing Marmite on the unwary, I ran into the well-known Hackaday.io user [Prof. Fartsparkle]. In a last-minute sprint leading up to the con he built himself the Numberwang badge to join in the colorful after-dark festivities with beautiful board artwork and remarkably enjoyable backlit LED display.

The Numberwang badge itself is a clone of the Adafruit Itsy Bitsy sporting an ATSAMD21G18 CPU and running CircuitPython. It has an LED strip on the reverse shining through the bare FR4 as a diffuser, and the Numberwang effect of selecting random numbers is achieved by a host of random touchable numbers sprinkled across its front. For something he freely admits was a last minute project, we think he’s done a pretty good job!

For those mystified by Numberwang, it is a fictional gameshow from a BBC TV comedy programme that involves contestants answering the quizmaster with random numbers. It joins a rich tradition of such hilarious nonsense, and has as a result become cult television.

If you’re really getting into Numberwang, don’t forget that it’s inspired a programming language.

Continue reading “The Numberwang Badge Brought Cheer To CCCamp 2019” →