Get Ready For Supercon

October 25, 2025 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

It’s just about all we can think about over here: the week leading up to the 2025 Superconference. From what we hear, it’s all-hands-on over in Pasadena right now, as everyone is putting the finishing touches on preparations for Hackaday’s annual US gathering.

We’ve been heads-down in the badge for a little while, and between that and all of the logistics, it’s easy to get lost in the work. And then we saw this video that [InstantArcade] shot, just casually walking through the event a couple years back. It’s not particularly a highlights reel, but seeing so many of the people I recognized, and remembering the many fantastic conversations we’d had. So much energy, interest, and simple excitement in sharing stories, what they’re working on, or just what they’ve seen lately that blew their mind.

There is no substitute for being there in person, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try! We’ll be putting the talks up on our YouTube channel next Saturday, and as always, you’re invited to join in the discussion on our Discord server both during the event and whenever. If you’re not going to be there in the alley, join us virtually!

We’ll be meeting up Thursday night at 7:00 pm at King’s Row for an informal pre-meetup. Bring a hack if you’ve got something to share! Then things start for real on Friday morning over at Supplyframe HQ. We’ll talk badges, get to know each other, and just nerd out and chill. (I love Fridays!) Halloween / sci-fi costume party Friday night, get some sleep, and head on over to the LACM and Design Lab for two tracks of talks and a full day on Saturday going late into the night. And as usual, the change back to standard time gets you an extra hour of sleep so that you’re rested and ready for Sunday.

There is still a lot to do behind the scenes, but seeing you all there makes it more than worth it! See you at Supercon.

(Oh, and no newsletter next week, but you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday watching the talks. That makes up for it, right?)

Announcing The 2025 Hackaday Superconference Communicator Badge

October 23, 2025 by Elliot Williams 43 Comments

It’s the moment you hard-core hardware nerds have been waiting for: the reveal of the 2025 Hackaday Supercon Communicator Badge. And this year, we’ve outdone ourselves, but that’s thanks to help from stellar collaboration with folks from the community, and help from sponsors. This badge is bigger than the sum of its parts, and we’ve planned for it to be useful for you to hack on in the afterlife. Indeed, as always, you are going to be the final collaborator, so we can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it.

We’re going out – wide out – on a limb and trying to create a dense mesh network of badges talking to each other at Supercon. It’s going to be like a badge-hosted collection of chat rooms, as connected as we can make them without talking over each other.

You look up a topic, say Retro Computing or SAO trading, punch in the channel number on the numpad, and your badge starts listening to everything going on around that topic. But they also listen to everything else, and repeat anything they hear on to their neighbors. Like IRC, but LoRa.

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Screenshot of the email received: Hi there, Upon a thorough review by our Risk Control Team, we are sorry to inform you that, your account access will be permanently disabled on December 13th, 2025 due to compliance policy requirements. Before this date, you may: 1) Complete any existing orders. 2) Pickup components from your parts inventory. 3) Withdraw your remaining account balance (JLC Balance) 4) Back up your historical Gerber Files or any other information. Please note that after December 13th, 2025, your account will be permanently locked and cannot be reopened. Best Regards, The JLCPCB Risk Control Team

JLCPCB Locking Accounts, Mentions “Risky IP Addresses, Activities”

October 19, 2025 by Arya Voronova 71 Comments

In the past week, a few forum and Reddit threads have popped up, with people stating that JLCPCB has emailed them with a notice, saying their accounts are set up for terminations after an assessment by JLCPCB’s “Risk Control Team”. Reasons given are vague, the terminations are non-appealable, and if you’re planning a JLCPCB order sometime soon, it can certainly come as a surprise. From the looks of it, the accounts restricted do not appear to be tied to any specific country – and not even from the same “kind” of countries.

As quite a few people have observed, the JLCPCB reasoning resembles a compliance action way more than it resembles any sort of internal policy. A few days ago, JLCPCB has released a statement on their blog, claiming that a “history of risky IP addresses and risky activities” would be grounds for a termination, and mentioning “compliance” in ways that would hint at external legal pressures.

By now, quickly checking around Reddit and some other places, we’ve counted at least ten people affected so far – most of them have received emails about account closures, but at least one person has reported a denial when attempting to place an order, instead of getting an email ahead of time. The latter hints that there’s a number of people not yet notified about their account getting terminated, and the amount of people actually affected might very well be a fair bit larger than we can see.

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Three Years In, JawnCon Continues To Grow And Impress

October 16, 2025 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Make no mistake, just getting a hacker con off the ground is a considerable challenge. But the really hard part comes after. To be more than a one-off success story, you’ve got to expand the event year after year in a manageable way. Go too slow, and attendees might lose interest. Move too fast, and you run the risk of going broke if your ticket sales don’t keep up with your ambitions.

Luckily for hackers living in the Philadelphia area, the folks behind JawnCon have once again demonstrated they’re able to thread the needle. While the ticket price remained the same as in 2024, this year an additional track of talks was introduced as well as expanded activities throughout the con. Even though it only wrapped this past weekend, there’s already buzz about what the event will look like in 2026.

Until then, let’s take a look at some of the projects that were on display at this year’s JawnCon. If it’s the talks you’re after, they’ll be edited and uploaded to the event’s YouTube page in the near future. In the meantime, the Friday and Saturday live streams are still available.

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2025 Hackaday Supercon: Crafting The Final Frontier Keynote Event

October 15, 2025 by Tom Nardi No comments

In the history of entertainment, few properties have made the sort of indelible mark on popular culture as Star Trek has. In 950 episodes across the twelve television series that have carried the name, the franchise has made a spectacle not of explosions and machismo, but of competent professionals working together to solve complex problems. In the world of Star Trek, the coolest people in the room are the scientists, engineers, physicists, and doctors — is it any wonder so many in the sciences credit the show for putting them on their career path?

Hardware hacker, maker, and Trekkie Andrew [MakeItHackin] will lead the panel.

To celebrate the impact of Star Trek, we’re proud to announce our keynote event for the 2025 Hackaday Supercon: Crafting the Final Frontier. This round-table discussion led by Andrew [MakeItHackin] will bring together some of the artists that have helped cultivate the look and feel of the final frontier since Star Trek: The Next Generation and all the way into the modern era with Star Trek: Picard.

While the art direction of the original Star Trek series from 1966 was remarkably ahead of its time, these are some of the key individuals who were brought in to refine those early rough-hewn ideas into cultural touchstones. Their work ended up becoming more than simple entertainment, and ultimately helped inspire some of the real-world technology we use on a daily basis. The iconic LCARS computer interface predicted the rise of the touch screen, while its impossible to look at props such as the PADD and Tricorder and not see the parallels with modern tablets and smartphones.

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DIY 35mm Film Scanning

October 12, 2025 by Al Williams 24 Comments

If you are sitting on a horde of negatives, waiting for the digital photography fad to die off, it may be time to think about digitizing your old film. [Kinpro1024] can help with the PiDigitzier, an open-source film scanning solution. The build centers around a Pi Zero 2, a Pi HQ camera, and a diffusing LED lighting fixture. Of course, there’s also some miscellaneous hardware and a camera lens; the example used a Pentax 50 mm f1.8 lens.

Half of the project is mechanical. An MDF tower provides a stable 250 mm workspace and decks that can slide up and down using threaded rods and curtain rods. Apparently, leveling the platforms is important not only for the optics but also to allow the MDF to move along the rods without binding.

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Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith

October 8, 2025 by Tom Nardi 54 Comments

We at Hackaday are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Robert Murray-Smith. The prolific experimenter had spent over a decade on YouTube, creating more than 2,500 videos where he gleefully demonstrated his seemingly endless collection of homemade contraptions. At least eighteen of which ended up on the pages of Hackaday since we first crossed paths with him back in 2013.

Like many of you, we were also shocked to find that Robert made the decision to end his own life. As cliché as it might sound, he simply didn’t seem like the type. His demeanor was always boisterous in his videos, exhibiting an almost child-like joy as he showed off his latest creation with a laugh and smile.

But as explained by his brother Dave in the brief announcement video posted yesterday, his outward appearance was a well-rehearsed mask that covered a deepening depression. Regular viewers of Robert’s videos knew he lost his wife, as he shared a memorial video for her in April of 2024. What he was less open about with his viewers was his own health, which it turns out had been rapidly declining for the last few months.

We now know that simply getting up and walking around had become painful for Robert, a fact obscured by the fact that most of his videos saw him seated at his workbench or in the back garden. That he was able to continue making so many videos at all speaks not only to his passion for technology and engineering, but the great love he had for the community that he’d built.

From the video we also learned that Robert found it very difficult to discuss his declining mental and physical health with friends and family. For men of his generation, the “strong and silent type” was often the ideal. Given all that he was going through, nobody could fault him for experiencing a sense of hopelessness, and yet his brother explains that Robert would never admit to the difficulties he was facing. Whenever pushed to talk about his feelings, he’d respond with that phrase which we’ve all heard (and maybe used once or twice) — “I’m fine.”

Because of this, Robert’s family has partnered with the suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) to try and raise awareness about men’s mental health. They ask that anyone who wishes to honor Robert make a donation to CALM, in the hopes that they can help others who may find themselves in a similar situation.

It’s no great secret that many in the hacker and maker communities face their own daily struggles. Whether it’s from being neurodivergent, or the inability to fit in with mainstream society. Several of the staff here at Hackaday are from marginalized groups, and even among those who aren’t, let’s just say we have it on good authority that most of them didn’t get to sit with the “cool kids” back in high school. We also know that, just like Robert, many in the community find it difficult to communicate with others about how this impacts their mental health.

The lasting legacy of Robert Murray-Smith will of course be his incredible body of work, which will continue to inspire millions of viewers. But we can also honor him by making sure that we’re looking out for the well-being of friends, family, and even ourselves. There are resources available, and there’s no shame in asking for help when you need it.

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