cons

1332 Articles

The Long And The Short Of It

April 20, 2024 by 11 Comments

Last weekend was Hackaday Europe 2024, and it was great. Besides having some time to catch up with everyone, see some fun new badge hacks, and of course all the projects that folks brought along, I also had time to attend most all of the talks. And the talks were split into two distinct sections: long-format talks on Saturday and a two-hour session of seven-minute lightning talks on Sunday.

I don’t know if it’s our short attention spans, or the wide range of topics in a short period of time, but a number of people came up after the fact and said that they really appreciated the short-but-sweet format. One heretic even went so far as to suggest that we only have lightning talks in the future.

Well, we’ve done that before – the Hackaday Unconferences. One year, we even ran three of them simultaneously! I was at Hackaday’s London Unconference the year later, and it was a blast.

But I absolutely appreciate the longer talks too. Sometimes, you just have to give a speaker free rein to dig really deeply into a topic. When the scope of the project warrants it, there’s just no substitute for letting someone tell the whole story. So I see a place for both!

If you were at Hackaday Europe, or any other conference with a lightning talks track, what do you think? Long or short? Or a good mix?

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

VCF East 2024 Was Bigger And Better Than Ever

April 17, 2024 by 16 Comments

I knew something had changed before I even paid for my ticket to this year’s Vintage Computer Festival East at the InfoAge Science and History Museum in Wall, New Jersey.

Over the last couple of years, attendance has been growing to the point that parking in the lot directly next to the main entrance has been reserved for only the earliest of risers. That hasn’t described yours truly since the days when I still had what my wife refers to as a “real job”, so that’s meant parking in the overflow lot down the road and walking the half a mile or so back to the main gate. Penance for working on the Internet, let’s call it.

But this time, while walking along the fence that surrounds the sprawling InfoAge campus, I came across an open gate and a volunteer selling tickets. When commenting to her that this was a pleasant surprise compared to the march I’d anticipated, she responded that there had been so many people trying to get into the main entrance that morning that they decided to station her out here to handle the overflow.

I was a few steps past her table and into InfoAge before the implications of this interaction really hit me. Two entrances. How many attendees does there need to be before you setup a secondary ticket booth out by the reserve parking lot just to keep things moving smoothly? Well, I can’t tell you what the exact number is. But after spending the rest of the day walking between all the buildings it took to contain all of the exhibits, talks, and activities this year, I can tell you it’s however many people came to VCF East 2024.

Compared to its relatively humble beginnings, it’s incredible to see what this event has grown into. InfoAge was packed to the rafters, and despite what you might think about a festival celebrating decades old computing hardware, there were plenty of young faces in the crowd. I’m not sure exactly what’s changed, but the whole place was positively jumping. Perhaps it’s partially the generational nostalgia that’s kept Netflix cranking out new seasons of the 1980’s set Stranger Things. I’m sure attention (and attendance) from several well known YouTube personalities have played a big part as well.

Whatever the magic formula that’s turned what was once a somewhat somber retrospective on early desktop computers into a major destination for tech lovers, I’m all for it. Love Live the Vintage Computer Festival!

Continue reading “VCF East 2024 Was Bigger And Better Than Ever” →

Hackaday Europe Is Almost Here, Last Call For Tickets

April 9, 2024 by 12 Comments

By the time this post hits the front page, we’ll be just a few days away from the kickoff of Hackaday Europe 2024!

For those of you joining us in Berlin this weekend, we’ve got an incredible amount of content planned for you. Things get rolling on Friday with a pre-event meetup. But Saturday is when things really kick into high gear. Before the day’s out, we’ll have played host to nearly a dozen speakers and — literally — more workshops than we could fit into the schedule. Two workshops will be “floating” events that will happen once enough interested parties have congregated in one place. We’ll keep things going until well past midnight, which leads directly into Sunday. We want to get a few sessions of lightning talks packed in, so start coming up with your talk ideas now.

The Vectorscope will be making its European debut.

In addition, there will be food, music, camaraderie, badge hacking, and the general technolust surrounding a Hackaday event. In our humble and totally unbiased opinion, we put on some of the best and most unique hardware hacking meetups in the world — if you like reading Hackaday, you’ll love living it for a couple of days.

As of this writing, we still have a very few tickets for Hackaday Europe 2024 available. Want one? Head over to the Eventbrite page. But you better hurry. We’re talking a literal handful here, so don’t be surprised if they’ve dried up by the time you read this.

The workshops have all sold out, but as usual, we’ll be running a waiting list right up until the last minute: should anyone have to drop out of a workshop (which happens more than you might think), their spot will go to the person next in line. If you’d like to get on the list, email prize@hackaday.com with your name, ticket number, and the workshop you’re hoping to sneak into, and we’ll see what we can do.

But don’t let the workshops stop you. There’s still plenty to see, do, and experience. See you there!

A Telegraph Interface For The Hacker Hotel 2024 Badge

March 30, 2024 by 5 Comments

Hacker Hotel is a small Dutch hacker event that takes place, as its name suggests, in a hotel. It’s a welcome high point in the damp of a north-west-European winter, and attendees come to its setting in the wooded Veluwe region in the centre of the country from far and wide. As is the custom with such events it has an electronic badge, and this year’s one had a rather unusual interface. Instead of a keyboard for text input, it replicates a 19th century Crook and Wheatstone telegraph, replacing the five needles of the original with a diamond-shaped grid of LEDs.

At its heart is an Espressif ESP32-C6 microcontroller which provides both a processor powerhouse and the usual array of wireless connectivity. Paired with that is a much more modest CH32V003 microcontroller to handle I/O tasks, and an e-paper screen using displays salvaged from surplus German supermarket shelf labels. That interface is handled by an array of five-way switches, and in a stroke of genius there’s a small relay on board which does nothing but provide a satisfying tactile “click”. Expansion is seen to by an SAO connector, Qwiic, and a USB-C socket. The software meanwhile is a combination of a non-volatile nametag, a complex set of puzzles used in the on-site competition, and a messaging system using the C6’s 802.15.4 mesh networking. A particularly neat feature of this was a Battleships game that could be played with another badge.

While this isn’t the first Hacker Hotel badge with an e-paper display, we like this one for its novel interface, for the mesh connectivity, and for that clicky relay. We’ll definitely be using ours as a name badge for some time to come.

2024 Hackaday Europe: Workshops Announced, Get Your Tickets

March 26, 2024 by 7 Comments

There are only a few weeks left until Hackaday Europe takes place in Berlin on April 13th and 14th. With only one full day of programming, we simply can’t run as many workshops as we do at Supercon, but what we do have should tickle your fancy. As if that weren’t enough, there will be at least a few other impromptu workshops and activities to distract you from the talks.

If you’re thinking of attending, get your tickets now for both the event and the workshops of your choice. There are only a few left, and workshops sell out like hotcakes.

Continue reading “2024 Hackaday Europe: Workshops Announced, Get Your Tickets” →

The Electromagnetic Field 2024 Badge Is A Little Different

March 23, 2024 by 4 Comments

It’s a problem that faces every designer of an event badge: how to make something that won’t simply become a piece of e-waste once the last attendee has gone home. Various events have had badges with extra sensors, ones designed to be dev boards, and ones that try to do useful software tasks, but this year’s Electromagnetic Field in the UK has a different take. Its badge is designed to be used across multiple events, with the badge itself being a hub for event-specific add-ons.

To achieve this feat, the Tildagon badge is a hexagonal hub with an expansion port on every side. Each of these sports an edge connector, and the corresponding part of the add-on is simply part of the PCB. The ‘hexpansions’ as the add-ons are called, don’t even have to have electronics, at their simplest they can even be cut from a piece of card. The brain of the outfit is an ESP32-C3 sporting a round LCD. Of course, and it has the usual buttons and LEDs.

We applaud the sentiment behind making a badge live beyond the event, and we expect that this won’t be the only take on a reusable badge we’ll see over the coming events. We’re guessing those edge connectors will add to the BoM cost though, which is why this probably will be the first EMF badge for which there will be a modest charge. We look forward to seeing it for real, meanwhile, they also published some technical info alongside the announcement linked above.