cons

1388 Articles

This Saturday: Meetup With Hackaday, Tindie, And Kickstarter

May 15, 2019 by 2 Comments

If you’re near San Francisco this weekend, this is what you should be doing. It’s The 6th Annual Hackaday x Tindie MFBA Meetup w/ Kickstarter.

Come hang out with the hardware hackers and bring along a project of your own to get the conversation going. We’re excited to move to a new, larger venue this year. All the good of the past five years will come along with us, plus many benefits of exclusively booking out an entire venue. You can catch up with people who have been on their feet all day running booths — and usually see the stuff they can’t show you at the Faire. The crew from Hackaday, Tindie, and Kickstarter will be on hand. And you’ll get a glimpse of a lot of the cool people and projects you’ve admired on the pages of Hackaday over the years. It’s fun, you should go!

First beer is on us if you RSVP using the link at the top of this article. But we’re mainly publishing this today to show off the poster art. Deposit your adoration for this exquisite illustration in the comments below.

Amazing Art by Joe Kim

We love all of the original art that Joe Kim creates for Hackaday articles. It’s impossible to look at his poster for this event and be anything but overjoyed. Here’s a link to the full size image, but be warned that the file is 14.4 MB

6th Annual Hackaday X Tindie MFBA Meetup With A New, Larger Venue

May 7, 2019 by 1 Comment

We want to hang out with you at Maker Faire Bay Area! Put our after-hours meetup on your schedule with a Sharpie, because the 6th Annual Hackaday x Tindie MFBA Meetup w/ Kickstarter will be bigger and better than ever with a new venue that has plenty of room for everyone!

The hacker crowd descends upon San Mateo weekend after next to show off a year of creations at Maker Faire. On Saturday, May 18th, the Faire will close for the evening as our meetup heats up. Bring along some hardware to show off and get the conversation started. Whether you’re attending the Faire or staffing a booth all day, this is the perfect way to unwind.

New Place with More Space!

Every year we’ve been packed to the gills and it’s time to make room for more people. This year Hackaday and Tindie have teamed up with Kickstarter to rent out the entire B Street Station in San Mateo. It’s close by and has plenty of room to hang out with friends new and old. We’ll provide light food and the first drink is on us! Please RSVP so we know how many people to expect, and like we said, grab a project to bring along! This event is open to all who are 21 years of age or older.

Begin Your Weekend with HDDG on Thursday

Start the weekend off right with the HDDG meetup on Thursday night. In keeping with tradition, this special Maker Faire edition of the Hardware Developer’s Didactic Galactic is happen at the San Francisco Supplyframe office on May 16th. You’ll find a ton of people from out of town on hand to enjoy talks ranging from non-rectangular phone design and mitigating ESD in wearables, to getting your projects funded with PR stunts. Speakers include Christina Cyr, Mary West, and Mic Black.

Newsletter from the Editors

Stay caught up on the finest Hackaday articles and get info about event announcements like this one. Every week the Hackaday Editors put together a newsletter delivered directly to your inbox.

The Vintage Computer Festival East Is Happening This Weekend

May 1, 2019 by 18 Comments

This weekend is the premier vintage computer meetup on the East Coast. It’s VCF East, and it’s all going down this weekend, Friday to Sunday afternoon, in Wall, New Jersey.

2019 is a fantastic year for computer history, being the 50th anniversary of Unix, and the 40th anniversary of Atari. For that, there will be exhibits of dozens of systems running some sort of *nix, including systems from Apple, AT&T, DEC, IBM, NeXT, SGI, and Sun. For the Atari extravaganza, you’re getting the full line of Atari 8-bitters, some STs, and a Falcon 030. There will be other exhibits about POTS, so bring a landline phone, a progress update on a 1/10th scale, pulse-level simulator of the ENIAC, and someone will assuredly have Super Mario Brothers for the C64 running.

Keynotes reflect this great year of computer history with a keynote by the one and only Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix. On Sunday, there’s a talk with Joe Decuir, engineer who helped develop the Atari VCS and Atari 800. There’s also a Homebrew Computing Discussion Panel.

As always, there will be a flea market, an understated highlight of any Vintage Computer Festival. It’s like a museum you can buy. One time there was an LCD for an Apple IIc. Too rich for my blood, but technically the first Apple laptop.

As with all VCF East events, it’s held at the InfoAge Science & History Center the site of the Camp Evans Signal Corps R&D lab during World War II. It’s basically the site of what would become DARPA. You’ve also got the Silverball pinball museum just up the road in Asbury Park. There’s plenty to do and see on the Jersey Shore this weekend, and it’s not even Labor Day.

KiCad Community Shines At First Ever KiCon

April 30, 2019 by 22 Comments

Last weekend was KiCon, a gathering of hardware developers from all over the world who use KiCad open source EDA software. This included many of the software engineers who drive development, people who use KiCad in their business, and those who simply love it for being a professional quality tool available for anyone to use.

From hardware show-and-tell, to the lineup of talks, and the social events each evening, there was so much packed into two (plus) days. Join me after the break for a whirlwind tour of the people and the hardware found at 2019 KiCon.

Continue reading “KiCad Community Shines At First Ever KiCon” →

Emulate A Paper Tape, To Be Life And Soul Of The Cyphercon Party

April 28, 2019 by No comments

The recent Cyphercon badge featured a very clever integrated paper tape reader, and had the hidden feature of a party mode in which all its lights would flash. When [Gigawatts] discovered this after the conference had ended, it was too late to find the tape to activate it. The solution? Build a tape emulator with a microcontroller hooked into the badge’s tape sensors to send the data directly into it.

It was a Tweet from [AND!XOR] that revealed the flashing hidden mode, and in case you missed it you can find all about the amazing badge in our review. The emulator takes a TI Stellaris LaunchPad LM4F120 and a set of jumper wires soldered directly to the jumper wires on the badge’s reverse. Hex values are created from a tape through an in-browser HTML page with a checkbox interface, a sketch converts the hex to tape, and the badge runs the code. The GitHub readme includes a description of the paper tape format as well as some sample tapes including a badge reset one for when you tire of party mode.

Most of us weren’t lucky enough to make it to Cyphercon and receive a badge. But we’re still impressed by the ingenuity of the badge’s designer, and by the complexity of the CTF game of which it formed a part.

What’s The Secret Of Cyphercon?

April 21, 2019 by 5 Comments

Cyphercon is not particularly large, or in a glamorous part of the world — in fact most people who came in from out of town had to fight snow to make it. Yet when I stepped into the con last Thursday there was no doubt something awesome was in progress. People were camped out in small groups, working furiously on their computers, talks were packed with people who came alive in the Q&A, and everywhere you looked you found people deep in conversation with friends old and new. If you missed out on Cyphercon 4.0, you need to make an effort to be here for 5.0.

Join me after the break for the highlights of this two-day security conference nestled in the heart of Milwaukee.

Continue reading “What’s The Secret Of Cyphercon?” →

Next Week Is KiCon: Come For The Talks, Stay For The Parties

April 17, 2019 by 7 Comments

KiCad is the electronic design automation software that lives at the intersection of electronic design and open source software. It’s seen a huge push in development over the last few years which has grown the suite into a mountain of powerful tools. To help better navigate that mountain, the first ever KiCad conference, KiCon, is happening next week in Chicago and Hackaday is hosting one of the afterparties.

The two days of talks take place on April 26th and 27th covering a multitude of topics. KiCad’s project leader, Wayne Stambaugh, will discuss the state of the development effort. You’ll find talks on best practices for using the software as an individual and as a team, how to avoid common mistakes, and when you should actually try to use the auto-router. You can learn about automating your design process with programs that generate footprints, by connecting it through git, and through alternate user interfaces. KiCad has 3D modeling to make sure your boards will fit their intended enclosures and talks will cover generating models in FreeCAD and rendering designs in both Fusion360 and Blender. Dust off your dark arts with RF and microwave design tips as well as simulating KiCad circuits in SPICE. If you can do it in KiCad, you’ll learn about it at KiCon.

Of course there’s a ton of fun to be had as interesting hackers from all over the world come together in the Windy City. Hackaday’s own Anool Mahidharia and Kerry Scharfglass will be presenting talks, and Mike Szczys will be in the audience. We anticipate an excellent “lobby con” where the conversations away from the stages are as interesting as the formal talks. And of course there are afterparties!

  • Friday 4/26 Pumping Station: One, the popular Chicago hackerspace now celebrating its 10 year anniversary, is hosting an afterparty (details TBA)
  • Saturday 4/27: Hackaday is hosting an after party at Jefferson Tap from 6-8:30. We’re providing beverages and light food for all who attended the conference.

If you still don’t have a ticket to KiCon, you better get one right now. We’re told that you can count what’s left on two hands. Supplyframe (Hackaday’s parent company) is a sponsor of KiCon, and we have two extra tickets that came with that sponsorship. We like seeing a diverse community at these events and have saved these tickets for people from under-represented groups (such as for example women, LGBT+, and people of color) in the hardware world. Email us directly for the tickets, your information will remain confidential.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone next week!