BornHack

11 Articles

BornHack 2019, A Laid-Back Hacker Camp In A Danish Forest

September 4, 2019 by 11 Comments

This is a fantastic summer for hacker camps and I was very happy to make it to BornHack this year. This week-long camp attracts hackers from all over Europe and the mix of a few hundred friends and soon-to-be friends who gathered on the Danish island of Fyn delivered a unique experience for the curious traveller.

The camp takes place at the Hylkedam Danish scout camp, located in a forest amid the rolling Danish famland not too far from the small town of Gelsted. It’s a few kilometres from a motorway junction, but easy enough to find after the long haul up from the UK via the Channel Tunnel. As an aside, every bored cop between France and the Danish border wanted to stop my 20-year-old right-hand-drive Volkswagen on UK plates, but soon lost interest after walking up to the passenger side and finding no driver. It seems Brits are considered harmless, which is good to hear. Continue reading “BornHack 2019, A Laid-Back Hacker Camp In A Danish Forest” →

The Danish Internet Of Hot Tubs

August 24, 2019 by 2 Comments

Every hacker camp has its own flavor, and BornHack 2019 in the Danish countryside gave us the opportunity to sample some hacker relaxation, Scandinavian style. Among the attractions was a wood-fired hot tub of gargantuan proportions, in which the tired attendee could rejuvenate themselves at 40 Celcius in the middle of the forest. A wood-fired hot tub is not the easiest of appliances to control, so to tame it [richard42graham] and a group of Danish hackerspace friends took it upon themselves to give it an internet-connected temperature sensor.

The starting point was a TMP112 temperature sensor and an ESP8266 module, which initially exposed the temperature reading via a web interface, but then collapsed under too much load. The solution was to make the raw data available via MQTT, and from that create a web interface for the event bar, Twitter and IRC bots. There was even an interface to display hot tub temperature on the ubiquitous OHMlights dotted around the camp.

It’s more normal to control a hot tub via an electric heater, but since the wood fire on this one has to be tended by a camp volunteer it made sense to use the IRC system as an alert. It will be back at BornHack 2020, so we’ll have to do our job here at Hackaday and spend a long time lounging in the hot tub in the name of journalistic research to see how well it works.

BornHack Tease Us With Their Badge

July 17, 2019 by No comments

Every August for the past four years, there has been a summer hacker camp on the Danish island of Bornholm, that may be a relatively new kid on the block but is slowly evolving into one of the summer’s essential stop-offs. This year for the first time they are moving to a larger site in an easier-to-reach part of the country, and in the usual build-up to the event they have released a teaser image of their badge.

Of course, you will want to know a little more about it than the picture can convey, so the BornHack folks were kind enough to give us a few more details. At its heart is a Silicon Labs Happy Gecko EFM32HG322F64G microcontroller, the same 25 MHz ultra-low-power ARM Cortex M0+ part that has featured in the previous BornHack offerings. Power comes from a pair of AA cells, and it sports a 240 x 240 pixel colour IPS display and an SD card holder. Connectivity is via USB and an infra-red interface for badge-to-badge communication, and human interface is via a mini joystick switch. Finally, it has a six-way v1.69bis Shitty Addon connector.

By some standards this is a relatively modest offering, but by using an evolution of their hardware from previous years as well as the same proven Geckoboot bootloader they are far more likely to deliver a satisfactory user experience than had they opted for a more ambitious design. We’ll be attending the camp, so we’ll report on the finished article once we have it.

BornHack will run from the 8th to the 15th of August, on the Danish island of Funen. There are a range of tickets still available, from single day visits to the whole week for 1200 DKK (about €160, or $181). Compared to some other events on our community’s calendar, we think that represents a bargain.

The Latest Hacker Camp Badge Comes From BornHack

August 15, 2017 by 9 Comments

If you’re a fan of outdoor hacker camps, or if you’re a SHACamp attendee who’s still coming down from the event high, you may already know about the upcoming BornHack 2017 hacker camp on the Danish island of Bornholm, from the 22nd to the 29th of this month. It’s a smaller camp than many of the others on the calendar, but it makes up for that with a quite reasonable ticket price, a much longer duration, and a location that is a destination in itself.

Today we have news of the BornHack badge announcement, and though the details are a little sketchy it’s safe to say that there should be plenty there to keep attendees occupied. The irregularly-shaped PCB contains a Silicon Labs “Happy Gecko” EFM32 ARM Cortex M0 microcontroller, a 128×64 pixel OLED display, and the usual array of I/O lines. There is no information about its connectivity as it seems the BornHack folks prefer to run a teaser campaign, but we’d be surprised if there wasn’t some kind of wireless module on the reverse.

Barring a transportation miracle it’s unlikely that any of the Hackaday team will be making it to BornHack, but that’s our loss. It may not be one of the larger camps, but it looks to offer no less of the atmosphere you’d expect from a European hacker camp. At the time of writing there are still BornHack tickets to be had, so head on over to their website if you fancy a week at a hacker camp on a Danish island.