Keynote Video: Dr. Keith Thorne Explains The Extreme Engineering Of The LIGO Hardware

December 9, 2021 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a huge installation measured in kilometers that is listening for wrinkles in space-time. Pulling this off is a true story of hardware and software hacking, and we were lucky to have Dr. Keith Thorne dive into those details with his newly published “Extreme Instruments for Extreme Astrophysics” keynote from the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon.

Gravity causes space-time to stretch — think back to the diagrams you’ve seen of a massive orb (a star or planet) sitting on a plane with grid lines drawn on it, the fabric of that plane being stretch downward from the mass of the orb. If you have two massive entities like black holes orbiting each other, they give off gravitational waves. When they collide and merge, they create a brief but very strong train of waves. Evidence of these events are what LIGO is looking for.

Rai Weiss had the idea to look for gravitational waves using laser interferometers in about 1967, but the available laser technology was too new to accomplish the feat. In an interferometer, a laser is shot through a beam splitter and one beam reflects out and back over a distance, and is then recombined with the other half using a photodetector to measure the intensity of light. As the distance in the long leg changes, the relative phase of the lasers shift, and the power detected will vary.

LIGO is not your desktop interferometer. It uses a 5 kW laser input. The 4 km legs of the interferometer bounce the light back and forth 1,000 times for an effective 4,000 km travel distance. These legs are kept under extreme vacuum and the mirrors are held exceptionally still. It’s worth it; the instrument can measure at a precision of 1/10,000 the diameter of a proton!

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Hackaday Remoticon: What’s Happening Right Now

November 20, 2021 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Here’s what you need to know to take part in the Hackaday Remoticon Today.

Watch all of today’s talks on the live stream
Interact with everyone by joining Discord

Notable Events:

All talk and schedule information is available on the conference webpage, but here are the things you don’t want to miss (all times are Pacific time zone):

10:10 am | Keynote: Keith Thorne
5:25 pm | Keynote: Jeremy Fielding
6:25 pm | Hackaday Prize Ceremony
7:35pm | After party live set from DJ Jackalope — watch on Twitch, socialize on Discord

Remoticon Is On!

November 20, 2021 by Elliot Williams No comments

If you’re reading this post while the bits are still fresh, you’ve got about four hours until day two of Hackaday Remoticon 2021. You can feel the electricity in the air, right? We’ve got an absolutely stellar line-up this year: every talk is gonna be a good talk.

Friday was great fun, and you can still still rewind Friday’s live stream if you hurry. Otherwise, at 11:00 AM PST, we’ll start up day two with a keynote talk by Keith Thorne, who’s going to take us through all of the work, and hacks, that made the LIGO experiment the most sensitive instrument mankind has ever made. Bookending the talks, just before the Hackaday Prize announcement and after-party DJ Jackalope Live Set, Jeremy Fielding is going to be walking through everything about his robotic arm and what you need to know about anything that moves.

Watch some great talks, and then hang out with the presenters afterwards over on our Discord server. What more do you want on a Saturday?

We really don’t want you to miss out on anything, but in case you come late to the talks, you can rewind the live stream to catch up. After it’s all done, we’ll slice and dice up the talks so you can find them later. But if you miss out on the discussions, the chance to ask our speakers questions, and the pervasive Jolly Wrencher ambiance, you’ve just missed out. Join us live if you possibly can! We’d love to see you.

Hackaday Remoticon: What’s Happening Right Now

November 19, 2021 by Mike Szczys No comments

Here’s what you need to know to take part in the Hackaday Remoticon Today.

Watch all of today’s talks on the live stream
Interact with everyone by joining Discord

Notable Events:

All talk and schedule information is available on the conference webpage, but here are the things you don’t want to miss (all times are Pacific time zone):

11:10 am | Keynote: Elicia White
5:15 pm | Hacker Trivia: https://youtu.be/uRpUdQi31tg
6:15pm | Bring-a-Hack: Remoticon ticket holders will receive an email on how to join, we’ll also share that info in the Discord

Friday: Getting Social With Discord And Bring-a-Hack

November 17, 2021 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

With just a few days to go before the kickoff of the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon, we’re still working furiously behind the scenes to pack as much content as possible into the two day virtual event. In fact, there’s so much going on that we thought you’d appreciate getting a bit of a head start as far as planning your own personal course through the weekend goes. The event might be free, but that’s no reason not to squeeze as much out of it as you can.

Chat It Up on Discord

To begin with, you’re really going to want to join the official Hackaday Remoticon Discord server. We know some subset of the Hackaday readership would rather we used Matrix, or IRC, or maybe carefully modulated smoke signals; but at the end of the day, Discord has bubbled to the top as the defacto choice for this kind of thing. Give it a shot, you might actually like it.

The Discord server isn’t just a place for like-minded hackers to hang out and discuss the musical stylings of DJ Jackalope during the Saturday afterparty. It’s also how attendees can ask questions at the end of each presenter’s talk, as we’ll be turning off YouTube chat to keep things centralized. Even if you don’t plan on communicating with others (though you really should), the Discord server has an interactive schedule of events which will let you sign up to be notified when the talks you’ve selected are about to start, and we’ll be dropping important announcements and links in there as the event goes on.

Friday Bring-a-Hack on Gather Town

Friday night ends with a Bring-a-Hack where attendees can show off whatever they’ve been working on using Gather. It’s a video chat platform inside a virtual 2D world that looks a bit like Legend of Zelda.

Using this virtual environment, you can easily drop into an ongoing video stream simply by walking up to the presenter. Once you’ve seen enough, just walk over to the next little cluster of users. The point is to recreate the experience of stopping by a crowded after party where everyone brought some hardware project along with them to get spark conversations. Space will be limited, with ticket holders and people in Discord getting the first dibs, so keep an eye on your inbox for information about how to join.

Of course this is not the only Friday evening activity. A few weeks ago we announced that Lewin Day will be hosting Hacker Trivia, giving our beloved commenters the chance to show off your unimpeachable knowledge of technology and Hackaday history. The Friday talk stream will dump immediately into trivia, but here’s the dedicated link if you want to set a reminder for yourself.

Try It, You’ll Like It!

It’s difficult, perhaps even impossible, to truly recreate the experience of going to an in-person hacker con. But with interactive events and the latest and greatest communication software, we’re hoping the 2021 Remoticon can get pretty close. All the pieces are in place, the only thing we need now is to have a whole bunch of excited hackers to join in and have a good time. Think you can help us out?

DJ Jackalope playing live set at Hackaday Superconference

DJ Jackalope Live Set Will Close Out Hackaday Remoticon

November 15, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Remoticon is almost here, but by Saturday night it’ll be gone! The best sendoff we can think of is with a party, and DJ Jackalope is playing a live set to make that happen.

We’ve been lucky to have live music from DJ Jackalope at numberous Hackaday Superconferences immediately after the Hackaday Prize ceremony. This year she reached out and suggested we continue the tradition, offering up her Twitch stream as the audio/video platform.

Everyone can enjoy the music, and still socialize via the Remoticon Discord server (invites will be sent out on Wednesday). Her set is scheduled to begin at 7:35 pm Pacific time on Saturday, November 20th.

But really you should plan to show up on the Remoticon live stream for Jeremy Fielding’s keynote at 5:25 pm followed by the Hackaday Prize ceremony at 6:25 pm — if not for the entire day. You can see why we need to cap the evening with a party!

All speaker and schedule info is available on the Remoticon website. Be sure to grab a free ticket; we’ll remind you about the live stream links, and that’s also how you’ll get access to Friday night’s Bring-a-hack. It bums us out that we can’t be together in person this year, but we’re going to do everything possible to enjoy each others’ company — come be a part that!

Peek Behind The Curtains: Conference Badge Design

November 13, 2021 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

In the before-times, back when we could have in-person Hackaday Supercons, there was always the problem of the badge. Making a few hundred small electronic thingies, for a smart but broad range of hackers, is tricky. We always want it to do something all on its own, but also ideally to allow enough free range that the motivated badge hacker can make it into something exquisite. Add in the fact that some attendees are hardware types and some are software types, and toss in a price constraint too. Oh, and it has to look good. Tough problem.

Here’s one extreme solution: the badge at the first Supercon. Faced with essentially zero budget and a tight time constraint, the Hackaday team punted — and produced a prototype board, but had tons of parts on hand for everyone to draw from. And the Hackaday crowd delivered. This was the badge that demonstrates what happens if you leave everything open.

Contrast with the 2018 Belgrade and Supercon badges, which were essentially the same except for color. Here, the hardware interface was limited to a 9-pin header, but the badge itself was a fully functional microcomputer, complete with keyboard and screen. Most of the hacks were written in the native BASIC, though a few hearty souls played around with the alternative CP/M system. This was our most software badge.

Our last in-person badge, the 2019 Supercon badge, was free rein for both hardware and software hackers. The whole thing was based on an FPGA, with completely custom gateware written by Sprite_tm running RISC-V, but based loosely on the Z80 architecture. This was probably also the badge with the highest hurdle to hackers, but you all came through with inventive hardware add-ons, but also a team that came through with a custom Linux OS running on this never-before-seen virtual environment, enabled by a hardware SDRAM cartridge hack.

And finally, even before the global supply crisis, even a tight-knit conference like ours could stock-out the world’s supply of a given component. The untold story of the 2016 Belgrade badge is that Voja Antonic bought out the world’s supply of Kingbright 8×8 common-cathode LED matrixes, and had to redesign the board in the last minute to incorporate the common-anode parts too. (Or was it vice-versa?) Lesson learned, the 2016 Supercon badge traded out the LED modules for discrete LEDs. Not gonna stock out on red LEDs.

So that’s a long-winded introduction to Thomas Flummer’s unofficial Remoticon 2 badges. With the parts crisis and a virtual conference, you’re on your own to source the badge. Splitting the freedom vs. in-built functionality problem like Samson, he’s got two boards — one a breadboard and the other fully populated. And like all his badges, they both look great. If you manage to get one made by Remoticon next week, be sure to show it off in the Bring-a-Hack. And if you don’t get it in time, bring it by in person to the 2022 Supercon!