Supercon And Soylent Green

November 11, 2023 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

The 2023 Hackaday Supercon is all done and dusted, and we’re still catching up on our sleep. I couldn’t ask everyone, but a great time was had by everyone I talked to. It’s honestly a very special crowd that shows up in Pasadena every November, and it’s really the attendees who make it what it is. We just provide the platform to watch you shine. Thank you all!

It all started out on Friday with an open day of chilling out and badge experimentation. Well, chill for those of you who didn’t have a bug in their badge code, anyway. But thanks to some very keen observation and fantastic bug reports by attendees, Al and I figured out what we’d done and pushed a fix out to all 300 of the badges that were given out on the first day. And thanks to the remaining 200 folks who walked in the next day, who fixed their own badges at Tom’s Flashing Station.

From then on, it was one great talk after another, punctuated by badge hacks and all the other crazy stuff that people brought along with them to show off. For me, one of the highlights was on Sunday morning, as the Lightning Talks gave people who were there a chance to get up and talk about whatever for seven minutes. And subjects ranged from a mad explosive propane balloon party, to Scotty Allen’s experience with a bad concussion and how he recovered, to a deep dive into the world of LED strands and soft sculptures from our go-to guru of blinkiness, Debra [Geek Mom] Ansell.

Supercon first-timer Katie [Smalls] Connell gave a phenomenal talk about her wearable LED art things, Spritelights. These are far from simple art pieces, being a combination of medical adhesive, home-mixed Galinstan – a metal alloy that stays flexible at human body temperature, and soon even flexible printed batteries. That this whole project hit us without warning from out of the audience just made it more impressive.

And these were just the folks who stepped up on stage. The true story of Supercon also belongs to all the smaller conversations and personal demos taking place in the alley or by the coffee stand. Who knows how many great ideas were hatched, or at least seeds planted?

So as always, thank you all for coming and bringing your passions along with. Just like Soylent Green, Supercon is made of people, and it wouldn’t be half as yummy without you. See you all next year. And if you’re thinking of joining us, get your tickets early and/or submit a talk proposal when the time comes around. You won’t meet a more warm and welcoming bunch of nerds anywhere.

Mining And Refining: Graphite

November 9, 2023 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

In my teenage years I worked for a couple of summers at a small amusement park as a ride operator. Looking back on it, the whole experience was a lot of fun, although with the minimum wage at $3.37 an hour and being subjected to the fickle New England weather that ranged from freezing rains to heat stroke-inducing tropical swelter, it didn’t seem like it at the time.

One of my assignments, and the one I remember most fondly, was running the bumper cars. Like everything else in the park, the ride was old and worn out, and maintenance was a daily chore. To keep the sheet steel floor of the track from rusting, every morning we had to brush on a coat of graphite “paint”. It was an impossibly messy job — get the least bit of the greasy silver-black goop on your hands, and it was there for the day. And for the first few runs of the day, before the stuff worked into the floor, the excited guests were as likely as not to get their shoes loaded up with the stuff, and since everyone invariably stepped on the seat of the car before sitting on it… well, let’s just say it was easy to spot who just rode the bumper cars from behind, especially with white shorts on.

The properties that made graphite great for bumper cars — slippery, electrically conductive, tenacious, and cheap — are properties that make it a fit with innumerable industrial processes. The stuff turns up everywhere, and it’s becoming increasingly important as the decarbonization of transportation picks up pace. Graphite is amazingly useful stuff and fairly common, but not all that easy to extract and purify. So let’s take a look at what it takes to mine and refine graphite.

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2G Or Not 2G, That Is The Question

November 8, 2023 by Jenny List 66 Comments

Since the very early 1990s, we have become used to ubiquitous digital mobile phone coverage for both voice and data. Such has been their success that they have for many users entirely supplanted the landline phone, and increasingly their voice functionality has become secondary to their provision of an always-on internet connection. With the 5G connections that are now the pinnacle of mobile connectivity we’re on the fourth generation of digital networks, with the earlier so-called “1G” networks using an analogue connection being the first. As consumers have over time migrated to the newer and faster mobile network standards then, the usage of the older versions has reduced to the point at which carriers are starting to turn them off. Those 2G networks from the 1990s and the 2000s-era 3G networks which supplanted them are now expensive to maintain, consuming energy and RF spectrum as they do, while generating precious little customer revenue.

Tech From When Any Phone That Wasn’t A Brick Was Cool

A 1990s Motorola phone — If this is your phone, you may be in trouble. Digitalsignal, CC BY-SA 3.0.

All this sounds like a natural progression of technology which might raise few concerns, in the same way that nobody really noticed the final demise of the old analogue systems. There should be little fuss at the 2G and 3G turn-off. But the success of these networks seems to in this case be their undoing, as despite their shutdown being on the cards now for years, there remain many devices still using them.

There can’t be many consumers still using an early-2000s Motorola Flip as their daily driver, but the proliferation of remotely connected IoT devices means that there are still many millions of 2G and 3G modems using those networks. This presents a major problem for network operators, utilities, and other industrial customers, and raises one or two questions here at Hackaday which we’re wondering whether our readers could shed some light on. Who is still using, or trying to use, 2G and 3G networks, why do they have to be turned off in the first place, and what if any alternatives are there when no 4G or 5G coverage is available? Continue reading “2G Or Not 2G, That Is The Question” →

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: RiscOS 5.28

November 8, 2023 by Jenny List 35 Comments

On a mundane day at some point in late 1987, though I didn’t grasp exactly what it would become at the time, I sat in front of the future. My school had a lab full of BBC Micros which I’d spent the previous few years getting to know, but on that day there was a new machine in one corner. It was a brand-new Acorn Archimedes, probably an A300, and it was the first time I had used an operating system with a desktop GUI. The computer was the first consumer application of the ARM processor architecture which has since gone on to conquer the world, and the operating system was called Arthur, which hasn’t. That’s not to say that Arthur is forgotten though, because it was soon renamed as RiscOS, managed to outlive both Acorn and the Archimedes, and still survives as a maintained though admittedly niche operating system to this day. So my Daily Driver this month is the current generation of RiscOS, version 5.28, and the machine I’m running it on is a Raspberry Pi 4. For a computer with an ARM core that’s designed and sold by a company based in Cambridge just like the original Acorn, it’s the most appropriate pairing I can think of.

Probably the Smallest OS In This Series

A beige desktop with no monitor, keyboard and mouse in front. It shows signs of yellowing with age. — The first ARM product, an Acorn Archimedes A310. mikkohoo, CC BY-SA 4.0.

At one point the Raspberry Pi folks even featured the Pi version of RiscOS on their website, but for those missing it there it’s freely downloadable as a disk image from the RiscOS Open site. Having spent most of its life as a closed-source product it’s been opened up over the last decade, and you can grab the source if you’re interested. When it’s normal for an OS download to run into the many gigabytes, it’s a bit of a shock to grab one that’s a shade under 140 megabytes and can be written to a 2 gigabyte SD card. This makes it probably one of the quickest operating system installs I have ever done, with all steps completed in a very short time. Sticking the SD card into the Pi it boots to a desktop in about 32 seconds which is only 5 seconds less than the latest Raspberry Pi OS image, so sadly that compactness doesn’t net you any extra speed. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: RiscOS 5.28” →

Hackaday Prize 2023: Ending 10 Years On A High Note

November 7, 2023 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

It’s a fact of life — all good things must eventually come to an end. The trick is not to focus so much on the chapter that’s closing, but look ahead to what comes next. This is precisely how the Hackaday Prize ended its incredible ten-year run on Saturday during Supercon.

This final year of the competition saw some of the most impressive entries we’ve ever had, leaving us with five exceptionally promising winners. These projects exemplify the qualities that the Hackaday Prize was designed to seek out and amplify and make a perfect capstone for this grand experiment in philanthropic hacking.

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All About Cats, And What Ethernet Classifications Mean Beyond ‘Bigger Number Better’

November 7, 2023 by Maya Posch 48 Comments

Although it probably feels like forever to many of us since Category 5 Ethernet cabling became prevalent, now that 2.5 and even 5 Gbit Ethernet has trickled into the mainstream, a pertinent question that many probably end up asking, is when you should replace Cat-5e wiring with Cat-6, or even Cat-7. Since most of us are likely to use copper network wiring for the foreseeable future in our domiciles and offices, it is a good question that deserves a good answer. Although swapping a Cat-5e patch cable with a Cat-7 one between a network port and computer is easy enough, replacing all the network cable already pulled through the conduits of a ‘future-proofed’ home is not.

The good news is probably that Category 8 Class II (Cat-8.2) is all you need to run your 40 Gbit Ethernet network with standard twisted pair wiring. The bad news is that you’re limited to runs of only thirty meters before signal degradation begins to kick in. If you take things down a notch to Cat-6A or Cat-7 (ISO/IEC 11801 Class E_A and F, respectively), you can do 100 meter runs at 10 Gbit/s just like 100 meters runs at 1 Gbit/s were possible with Cat-5e before. Yet what differentiates these categories exactly?

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Hackaday Links: November 5, 2023

November 5, 2023 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

As I write this, Supercon 2023 is in full swing down in Pasadena — 80 degrees and sunny at the moment, as opposed to 50 and pouring rain where I am, not that I’m bitter. Luckily, though, we can all follow along with the proceedings thanks to the livestreams on the Hackaday channel, which of course will all be available once they’re edited in case you miss anything live. There are a ton of interesting talks coming up, so there’ll be a lot to catch up on when the dust settles. And that won’t be far from now; by the time this post publishes, Supercon will be all but over, which makes it the Thanksgiving dinner of cons — all that work and it’s over in just a few minutes.

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