Hackaday Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy

When we talk about programming in “bare metal,” it basically means writing software that runs right on the hardware with no operating system or abstraction layers in between. This gives the program the most direct possible access to peripherals and memory, with the tradeoff being that you don’t get the protection and ancillary features that come with an OS.

Sylvain Huet came down to Hackaday Europe 2026 to talk about making bare metal easy. Not just by ignoring operating systems and ever-bloating dependencies, but by rethinking the way we approach software development and by building a transparent platform from the ground up.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: Outdoors With Robots

Erin Kennedy has been building robots for over a decade now, with a focus on smaller bots that interact with, or maybe even clean up, the outdoor environment. Still other bots are made to interact with people, and when the people are outside in the park, that’s where your robot needs to go.

Whatever the reason, Erin’s talk at Hackaday Europe 2026 is an invitation to take your projects out into the outdoors. But the great wide world outside of your lab is not necessarily the most friendly place for a little bot, and the other half of this talk is about practical design tips and lessons learned to help it survive. Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Outdoors With Robots” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: The 1-Bit CPU That Ran Factories

Powered machinery started the industrial revolution, and it was automation that kicked it up another notch in the 20th century. The ability for machines to make things by themselves spurred increased output and in turn boosted economic growth. The concept became widely popular for manufacturers to implement, as any change with serious economic benefit tends to do. Fast forward to today, and advanced robots and fancy machine vision systems running on powerful computers are the norm in modern factories which create the many wonderful products that we all purchase, use, and enjoy.

Once upon a time, though, things weren’t so sophisticated. [Nicola Cimmino] came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about a remarkably simple 1-bit CPU that used to run factories.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: The 1-Bit CPU That Ran Factories” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: Open Source Hardware Goes Underground, Literally

These days open source is everywhere, and frankly, we couldn’t be happier about it. But even with as prevalent as open software and hardware has become, we still occasionally hear about a project that takes the concept somewhere unexpected. Which is precisely why we were so eager to hear more about the fascinating work [Phil Underwood] has been doing.

In his talk Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools at Hackaday Europe 2026, [Phil] takes us through a series of progressively more advanced open hardware devices that he’s designed to increase the speed and accuracy of underground mapping efforts. Along the way, he’s learned a number of valuable lessons about designing hardware that’s robust enough to handle the uniquely challenging environment underground while still being accessible enough for a hobbyist to build and use.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Open Source Hardware Goes Underground, Literally” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: Is Your Blood Pressure Monitor Lying To You?

Blood pressure is one of the so-called “vital signs” that medical practitioners use to determine the basic state of a patient in any given moment. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a measurement of the pressure of the blood flowing through the body, with some complications to account for the pulsatile nature of human blood flow.

You might think measuring blood pressure is a solved concern, and it mostly is. With that said, some blood pressure monitors out there aren’t quite doing their job properly, and [Milos Rasic] came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to spell out the problem.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Is Your Blood Pressure Monitor Lying To You?” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: Building A Retro PC From Scratch

If you’re big into retrocomputing, you probably spend a lot of time chasing parts and machines on online classifieds or through local swap meets. But what if there was a different way to build a classic retro PC? What if you could put one together from bare chips, from the ground up?

[Jeroen Domburg] is no stranger to the pages of Hackaday. You might know him by his alias, [sprite_tm], under which he’s shared many projects, from miniaturizing old hardware to unearthing the secrets of undocumented commercial hardware. Now, he’s turning his considerable skills to figuring out how to build a retro PC in today’s world, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to show us all how it’s done.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Building A Retro PC From Scratch” →

Amazing Stories

The 2026 installment of Hackaday Europe was last weekend, and I’m still basking in the warm glow of hanging out with such an inspiring group of hackers. It’s hard to emphasize how important it is, maybe especially for those of us on the inside of Hackaday, to get to nerd out together like that. While we do our best to present your stories on our pages, there is just no substitute for getting to talk about projects, hacks, and dreams in real life.

While we can’t bring you all of the side-conversations that took place, we did manage to get the talks recorded, and we’ll be writing them up shortly. We have some bad news on that front, though: due to a technical limitation with the setup that the university had in place, we only got the audio and slide feeds, and not the camera that should have been filming the presenters. Still, we have a record of most everything that went down on the main stage, so stay tuned.

We know that not everyone can make it out to either Supercon or Hackaday Europe, but we heartily recommend keeping your eyes out for local hacker events near you. This weekend, there’s Open Hardware Summit in Berlin, for instance. If you’re near NYC, there’s HOPE coming up in August. If your tastes run more toward retrocomupting, there might be a Vintage Computer Festival chapter near you. Heck, consider looking into some of the more mainstream events as well, if that’s what is in your neighborhood.

It’s definitely more of an effort to get out to an event in the physical world, but the connections you make with fellow hackers are absolutely worth it. Any events that we should know about?