Hackaday Berlin: First Round Of Talks

March 7, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

We’re super excited to announce the first round of speakers for Hackaday Berlin! We’re set to convene on Friday night, March 24th for an evening warm up before the main show on Saturday, March 25. Featuring the triumphant return of Voja’s 4-bit badge, a crew of awesome speakers, lightning talks, workshops, music, food, badge hacking, and all the best of the Hackaday community, this will be a day to remember. And then we’ll chill out Sunday morning with a Bring-a-Hack brunch.

So without further ado: the first round of speakers!

Jiska Classen
Hacking Closed-Source: Reverse Engineering Real-World Products

Closed-source software is prevalent in our everyday lives, limiting our ability to understand how it works, which privacy implication it poses to the processed data, and addressing potential issues in time. Despite the growth of open-source movements, users often have no choice but to rely on closed-source solutions, e.g., for medical devices and IoT products. We’ll discuss key techniques to help you get started with reverse engineering. Hacking your own devices can be challenging, bricking a device is not uncommon, but so is celebrating the moments of a revived and modified device.

James Bruton
Being a Full-Time YouTuber

YouTube is my full-time job and has been for four years. I create STEM education content using everything from 3D printing, CNC, Welding, to Microcontrollers and Coding. Find out how I got started, how I make money, what goes on in the background, and what my future plans are. I’ll tell you how you can do it too!

Trammell Hudson
Hacking your dishwasher for cloudless appliances

Why does your dishwasher, laundry or coffee-pot need to talk to the cloud? In this presentation, Trammell Hudson shows how he reverse engineered the encrypted connections between Home Connect appliances and the Bosch-Siemens Cloud servers, and how you can control your own appliances with your self-hosted MQTT home automation system by extracting the devices’ authentication keys and connecting to their local websocket ports. No cloud required!

Bleeptrack
Oops, my project ended up in a museum

Parameterized design allows for the adaption of projects to different needs but can also change the aesthetic to a persons liking. Bleeptrack will walk you through the creation process and tools of her generative projects, talk about her experience manufacturing unique pieces and explains how to cope when your freshly finished project gets locked up in an art exhibition for a few months.

Ali Shtarbanov
Creating Hardware Development Platforms for Real-World Impact: FlowIO Platform

What does it really take do create and deploy a development platform for real-world impact? Why do we need development platforms and how can they democratize emerging fields and accelerate innovation? Why do most platform attempts fail and only very few succeed in terms of impact? I will discuss the key characteristics that any platform technology must have in order for it to be able to useful for diverse users. FlowIO was the winner of the 2021 Hackaday Grand Prize as well as over a dozen other engineering, research, and design awards.

Come join us!

You!

Whatever you’re up to.

We want you to bring your current project, world-changing ideas, or simply fun hacks for a 7-minute lightning talk!

Hackaday Links: December 18, 2022

December 18, 2022 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

By now everyone has probably seen the devastation wrought by the structural failure of what was once the world’s largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium. The scale of the tank, which until about 5:50 AM Berlin time on Friday graced the lobby of the Raddison Blu hotel, was amazing — 16 meters tall, 12 meters in diameter, holding a million liters of saltwater and some 1,500 tropical fish. The tank sat atop a bar in the hotel lobby and was so big that it even had an elevator passing up through the middle of it.

But for some reason, the tank failed catastrophically, emptying its contents into the hotel lobby and spilling the hapless fish out into the freezing streets of Berlin. No humans were killed by the flood, which is miraculous when you consider the forces that were unleashed here. Given the level of destruction, the displaced hotel guests, and the fact that a €13 million structure just up and failed, we’re pretty sure there will be a thorough analysis of the incident. We’re pretty interested in why structures fail, so we’ll be looking forward to finding out the story here.

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Berlin Clock Takes Inspiration From Sci-Fi Sources, Looks Incredible

July 7, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 7 Comments

What would a HAL9000 look like if it eye were yellow and sat atop a front panel inspired by an Altair 8800? You’d have today’s feature, [Stephan]’s BerlinUhr, a gorgeous little take on a Berlin Clock.

At Hackaday, we have a soft spot for clock builds. They’ve graced our pages from early times. When we saw this ultra cool Berlin Clock, we couldn’t resist the urge to share it with all of our readers. For those of you not familiar with a Berlin Clock, it’s a clock that consists of 24 lights, and was the first of its kind back in 1975.

[Stephan]’s build is notable because not only is it a beautiful design, but the work that went into the design and build. At several inches tall, the BerlinUhr is supported solely by a USB-C connection, although it can also be hung on a wall. The RTC is backed up by a CR1216, and an ATtiny167 provides the brains for the operation.

A neat part of the build comes with the KPS-3227 light sensor, used to adjust the LED brightness according to ambient lighting. Rather than being a straightforward part to insert into the PCB, KiCad’s footprint had some pins reversed, causing [Stephan] to learn how to correct it and contribute the fix to KiCad. Well done!

We weren’t kidding about clocks, by the way- check out the link to the Atomic Wrist Watch on this post from 2005, and this Russian VFD based clock from 2006- with video!

Do you have your own favorite clock build you’d love to see grace our pages? Be sure to submit a tip!

Hack My Wired Heart

June 12, 2019 by Helen Leigh 3 Comments

Liner notes? Passé. In Berlin, the release of a special edition synth-wave record came with an accompanying experimental synthesizer called Wired Heart.

At the core of this adorable heart-shaped synth, designed by music technology enthusiast [tobi tubbutec], is the classic 74HCT14 chip with six Schmitt trigger oscillators. The bright red PCB has eight gold touch and humidity sensing pads that activate and modulate these oscillators. As well as changing the sounds by playing with pressure and conductive liquids you can use the six sets of header pins on board to plug in your own components for noisy experimentation. Wired Heart ships with LEDs, photoresistors and a potentiometer, but we’ve also plugged our own DIY fabric pressure sensors into this synth to make some excellent electronic sounds.

In the Hackaday.io post linked above, [tobi tubbutec] walks us through a number of the circuit design decisions he made while prototyping his “cardiotronic human-touch hexoscillatric stereo esoteric snythespacer”. We enjoyed his creative and sometimes unconventional designs, from his inclusion of non-functioning traces for aesthetic reasons to his chosen method of hard syncing — injecting a small pulse of one oscillator into the other. If you want to examine his layout in more detail, [tobi tubbutec] has helpfully included the KiCad schematic file in his write up.

This adorable, hackable synth caught our eye at this year’s SuperBooth — an annual indie electronic music conference in Berlin that’s well worth checking out if odd noises and handmade electronics are your thing — but it’s recently been listed on Tindie too. To listen to the upbeat synth-wave record Wired Heart originally shipped with, visit the artist Hyboid’s bandcamp.

If you’re interested in experimental musical instruments and synthy chip tune you’ll also love [jarek319]’s Sega Genesis synthesiser.

Check out a demo of the Wired Heart synth in the video after the break.

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ASCII Games, Chiptunes, Hacker Celebrities At Hackaday Prize Worldwide Berlin

October 14, 2015 by Sophi Kravitz 4 Comments

Hackaday teamed up with the Vintage Computer Festival to have a Meetup last week. It was quite a party, with Berlin based chiptunes band Thunder.Bird and TheRyk using Commodore 64s and SID sound chip. The age of this equipment and relatively small volume original production runs makes it hard to find these days, but there is an underground group making music with these who trade among themselves. TheRyk created PlayEm64 (pictured above) to organize and play the music using the SID hardware and says that an advantage of this software is that it includes the play time (not in the fileheader), which is really useful for party entertainment! These chips sounded fantastic and added to the energy of the packed house.

A Hackaday party means that people bring their projects to show off and entertain the crowd with. [Nils Dagsson Moskopp] brought a game called Zoo Tycoon Roguelike that he built for a 7 day long competition. This is a text based roguelike game based on the 2011 Microsoft game Zoo Tycoon. As with the original game, Nils’ game aimed to keep animals happy within a thriving zoo. What’s neat about Nils’ version is that all the actions are displayed in words on the right side of the screen and he custom developed the characters in bitmap form.

[Sisam] brought Cube Tetris, a social gaming device with 4 sides, each individually controlled so that players must collaborate with each other to win. The new take on the already addictive game kept a crowd around this table the entire night.

[Dave Darko] and [Alex] brought a collaborative project that they’ve been developing on Hackaday.io together. The first, third and 4th board shown below are [Alex’s] boards, and the second one with the acrylic case is [Dave Darko’s]. They both started with 5x5cm breakout boards for the ESP8266 but they’ve been adding features off of each other’s boards like support for the ESP-07 / ESP-12 and an additional ESP-01 footprint. Someone wished for a USB micro port, and that is now on both of their boards. The next stage for [Alex] is adding 2 pin rows for GVS (ground-voltage-signal) to his boards, a feature which [Dave Darko] has already put in place on his offerings.

Alex and DaveDarko ESP8266 boards

We also saw an appearance by Captain Crunch (John Draper) – he’s pictured here with some friends from Lithuania. Our next event is in San Francisco in November, and we hope to see you at some point somewhere in the world.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Vintage Computer Fest: Berlin 2015

October 9, 2015 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

Berlin was a good city to be a geek in last weekend. Alongside the Berlin Maker Faire, there was the 2015 meeting of the Vintage Computing Festival: Berlin (VCFB). Each VCFB has a special theme, and this year it was analogue computers, but there was no lack of old computers large and small, teletext machines, vintage video game consoles, and general nerdy nostalgia.

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Hackaday At Berlin Maker Faire

October 8, 2015 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

The first-ever Berlin Maker Faire was last weekend, and Hackaday was there. Berlin’s a city with an incredible creative vibe, so it’s no surprise that there was good stuff on display. What was surprising, though, was how far many of the presenters traveled to be there. I wandered around with a camera and a notebook, and here’s what we saw.

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