Supercon 2023: MakeItHackin Automates The Tindie Workflow

May 7, 2024 by Arya Voronova 2 Comments

Selling your hardware hacks is a great way to multiply your project’s impact, get your creations into others’ hands, and contribute to your hacking-related budget while at it. If you’re good at it, your store begins to grow. From receiving a couple orders a year, to getting one almost every day – if you don’t optimize the process of mailing orders out, it might just start taking a toll on you.

That is not to say that you should worry – it’s merely a matter of optimization, and, now you have a veritable resource to refer to. At Supercon 2023, [MakeItHackin]/[Andrew] has graced us with his extensive experience scaling up your sales and making your shipping process as seamless as it could be. His experience is multifaceted, and he’s working with entire four platforms – Tindie, Lectronz, Etsy and Shopify, which makes his talk all that more valuable.

[MakeItHackin] tells us how he started out selling hardware, how his stores grew, and what pushed him to automate the shipping process to a formidable extent. Not just that – he’s developed a codebase for making the shipping experience as smooth as possible, and he’s sharing it all with us.

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Supercon 2023: Jose Angel Torres On Building A Junkyard Secure Phone

May 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 10 Comments

If you ever wondered just what it takes to build a modern device like a phone, you should have come to last year’s Supercon and talked with [Jose Angel Torres]. He’s an engineer whose passion into investigating what makes modern devices tick is undeniable, and he tells us all about where his forays have led so far – discovering marvels that a Western hacker might not be aware of.

Six years ago, he has moved to China, having previously been responsible for making sure that their Chinese subcontractors would manufacture things in the right ways. Turns out, doing that while being separated by an ocean set up more than just the timezone barriers – they were communicating between different worlds.

[Jose] tells us of having learned Chinese on the spot, purely from communicating with people around him, and it’s no wonder he’s had the motivation! What he’s experienced is being at the heart of cycle of hardware life, where devices are manufactured, taken apart and rebuilt anew. Here’s how he tapped into that cycle, and where he’s heading now.

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Supercon 2023: Alex Lynd Explores MCUs In Infosec

April 24, 2024 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

The average Hackaday reader hardly needs to be reminded of the incredible potential of the modern microcontroller. While the Arduino was certainly transformative when it hit the scene, those early 8-bit MCUs were nothing compared to what’s on the market now. Multiple cores with clock speeds measured in the hundreds of megahertz, several MB of flash storage, and of course integrated WiFi capability mean today’s chips are much closer to being fully-fledged computers than their predecessors.

It’s not hard to see the impact this has had on the electronics hobby. In the early 2000s, getting your hardware project connected to the Internet was a major accomplishment that probably involved bringing some hacked home router along for the ride. But today, most would consider something like an Internet-connected remote environmental monitor to be a good starter project. Just plug in a couple I2C sensors, write a few lines of Python, and you’ve got live data pouring into a web interface that you can view on your mobile device — all for just a few bucks worth of hardware.

But just because we’re keenly aware of the benefits and capabilities of microcontrollers like the ESP32 or the Pi Pico, doesn’t mean they’ve made the same impact in other tech circles. In his talk Wireless Hacking on a $5 Budget, Alex Lynd goes over some examples of how he’s personally put these devices to work as part of his information security (infosec) research.

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Adding Cellular Connectivity To The Hackaday Supercon Badge

December 2, 2023 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

Did you manage to make it down to Hackaday Supercon 2023? Maybe you did, and maybe you had a great time hacking away on the badge. [Dan] and ex-Hackaday alumnus [Mike Szczys] certainly did, with the guys from Golioth adding cellular connectivity to the hardware and developing a community art project.

The badge was hooked up over I2C to a Golioth Aludel Mini, which is a prototyping platform featuring a Sparkfun nRF9160 cellular modem. A custom Micropython implementation was compiled for the badge so that the badge could act as an I2C peripheral to be queried by the Aludel Mini. The sketch app on the badge was tweaked to allow the small pictures it created to be be uploaded to a cloud site called Badgecase, programmed in Rust. Amusingly, it turns out the sketch app uses a rectangular workspace, though you only see a circular section of it on the Supercon badge’s awesomely round display.

Much of the hack is happening off-board from the badge itself, but it’s a neat piece of work that shows how easy cellular connectivity is to implement these days. We’ve seen some other great feats with the Vectorscope badge, and it looked great if you happened to 3D print a case for it, too. Video after the break.

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Add Some Blinkenlights To Your Supercon Badge

December 1, 2023 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

We’re not sure what is more amazing here: the glow of the blinkenlights themselves, the tedium involved in creating it, or the fact that [makeTVee] soldered 280 microscopic WS2812 LEDs while at Supercon.

This hack began before the con when [makeTVee] designed the LED-diffusing frame in Fusion 360 and printed it in clear resin. Rather than solder the LEDs straight, the frame has 280 teeth that support each one at a 55° angle.

Not only does this look cool, it makes the bridging of DOUT to DIN much easier. That leaves GND and VCC to be painstakingly connected with 30 AWG wire. How, you might ask? With a little help from 3.5x magnifying glasses and the smallest soldering iron tip available, of course.

But that’s not all. Since 280 addressable LEDs need a lot of power, [makeTVee] also designed a holder for the LiPo battery pack that fits into the existing AA holders.

Want to see more awesome badge hacks? Check out the compendium.

A Look At All The Badge Hacks Of Supercon 2023

November 15, 2023 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

For those of you who’ve had the opportunity to join us in Pasadena for Supercon, you’ll know it’s a wild ride from start to finish. Singling out a single moment as our favorite is pretty much impossible, but certainly the Sunday Badge Hacking Ceremony has to rank up there. It’s the culmination of ~78 hours of intense hardware and software hacking, and that’s not even counting the pre-show work that attendees often put into their creations. Every year, without fail, this community manages to pull off badge hacks that are beyond anything we could have imagined — and we’re the ones who made the thing in the first place.

Unfortunately, in the mad rush, we’ve never had a chance to actually photograph the hacked badges and share them with the Hackaday readers. This year, at the urging of some of the badge hackers themselves, we were able to throw together a suitable overhead light at the last minute and actually snapped shots of each badge after it was presented to the audience.

The resulting images, sorted by badge hacking category, are below. While some proved difficult to photograph, especially with an impromptu setup, we’re happy to at least have a complete record of this year’s creations. Hopefully we’ll be able to improve on our technique for 2024 and beyond. If yours shows up, or if you’d like to share your appreciation, sound off in the comments below!

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Vectorscope KiCad Redrawing Project

November 13, 2023 by Chris Lott 23 Comments

When I saw this year’s Supercon Vectorscope badge, I decided that I had to build one for myself. Since I couldn’t attend in-person, I immediately got the PCBs and parts on order. Noting that the GitHub repository only had the KiCad PCB file and not the associated schematics and project file, I assumed this was because everyone was in a rush during the days leading up to Supercon weekend. I later learned, however, that there really wasn’t a KiCad project — the original design was done in Circuit Maker and the PCB was converted into KiCad. I thought, “how hard can this be?” and decided to try my hand at completing the KiCad project.

Fortunately I didn’t have to start from scratch. The PCB schematics were provided, although only as image files. They are nicely laid out and fortunately don’t suffer the scourge of many schematics these days — “visual net lists” that are neither good schematics nor useful net lists. To the contrary, these schematics, while having a slightly unorthodox top to bottom flow, are an example of good schematic design. Continue reading “Vectorscope KiCad Redrawing Project” →