Hackaday Superconference Tickets And Proposals Are Live Right Now

May 28, 2019 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Stop what you’re doing and get your ticket to the Hackaday Superconference. This is the ultimate hardware conference, November 15th, 16th, and 17th in Pasadena, California. It will sell out, especially the early bird tickets which are certain to be snapped up before the end of this day. (Edit: Early Bird tickets are already sold out, but you can still get the Early Bird price by submitting a talk).

Supercon is all about hardware creation. From prototypes and manufacturable designs, to one-off hardware art and products that have sold thousands, this is where you meet the people and hear the stories behind new and interesting feats of engineering. It’s a weekend filled with fascinating talks and mind-expanding workshops, but Supercon is so much more.

This is a Hacker Village where the greenest beginner and the grayest veteran sit shoulder to shoulder to solder, to code, to dream of the future, and to share stories of the past. We want you here, and you need to make it happen. Whether it’s professional development (yes! ask your boss to make this a business outing) or your hard-earned vacation, Supercon will recharge your batteries and top off your inspiration for the year to come.

Your Talk Here

The Call for Proposals is now open. We want you to speak at Supercon!

Yes, I’m talking to you. Core to the mission of the Hackaday Superconference is to encourage more people to speak publicly about everything that goes into designing and manufacturing hardware. This means we want first time speakers just as much as we want seasoned presenters. You will be celebrated at Supercon; the ethos of this community is warm, welcoming, and thankful that you took the time to help everyone learn something interesting.

Don’t stop to ask yourself if you should… yes, we want to read your talk proposal. No topic is too big or too small for consideration. This is your chance to give back as a thank-you to so many people who have helped you gather your own skills over the years. We stand on the shoulders of giants, it’s your turn to be giant.

True Believer Tickets

We like to think of our Early Bird tickets as a nod to the true believers out there. We haven’t published the speakers, the workshops, or really anything else. That info will be public as everything comes together, but by then it may be too late to get a ticket. Right now all we can tell you for certain is that there will be a big celebration to name the grand prize winner of the 2019 Hackaday Prize, there will be a ton of badge hacking on a mind-blowing hardware badge being designed by Sprite_TM (Jeroen Domburg), you will have way too much fun and get far too little sleep, and tickets will sell out. In other words, this will be awesome.

Competitive soldering

Hackaday Prize winners

Opening ceremonies were packed tight!

Workshops in full swing

Badge hacking throughout the weekend

Standing room only as Ben Krasnow gives the last talk of the conference on Sunday

Need more convincing? You can watch the recap video from 2018, or dive into the weekend overview, badge-hacking, and competitive soldering roundups. I’ve never met anyone from the first four years of Supercon who regretted buying early bird tickets. I’ve met plenty of people who regretted missing out. Don’t miss out on year five of the movement. This is your community, there is truly something for everyone, and Pasadena is a beautiful place to be in the middle of November. See you at Supercon!

Superconference Submission Deadline Extended

September 4, 2018 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

Who among us doesn’t procrastinate from time to time? We can’t count the number of times that we’ve taken advantage of the Post Office staying open until midnight on April 15th. And when the 15th falls on a weekend? Two glorious additional days to put off the inevitable!

If you’ve been sitting on submitting your talk or workshop proposal to the 2018 Hackaday Superconference, we’ve got the next best thing for you: we’re extending the deadline until 5 pm PDT on September 10th.

The Hackaday Superconference is a singularity of hardware hackers: more of the best people in the same space at the same time than anywhere else. And that means that your ideas and experiences will be shared with the people most likely to appreciate them. From heroic hacks to creative robotics or untold hardware histories, if there’s a crowd who’ll appreciate how a serial console saved your bacon, it’s this one.

And if you give a talk or workshop, you get in free. But it’s more than that — there’s a different experience of a convention, even a tight-knit and friendly one like Hackaday’s Supercon, when you’re on the other side of the curtain. Come join us! We’d love to hear what you’ve got to say. And now you’ve got a little more time to tell us.

(If you want to get in the old-fashioned way, tickets are still available, but they won’t be once we announce the slate of speakers. You’ve been warned.)

Call For Proposals: Hackaday Superconference

August 23, 2018 by Mike Szczys No comments

It’s time to submit your proposal for a talk or workshop at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference!

Yep, it’s easy to procrastinate with the late days of summer upon us, but don’t miss out on your chance to present at the Ultimate Hardware Conference. We’re hungry for great stories about hardware creation. Before you have the chance to ask “should I submit a proposal?” — YES! We’re talking to you!

Some of the general topics that have been really popular in the past include:

Hardware custom built for research labs
Clever methods for prototyping
Engineering heroics that met a deadline, kept on budget, or just made the thing work
Ins and outs of product development
Stories of elite hacks that deserve to be shared and preserved

This is your time. Send in your proposal now and get ready to have an incredible weekend at the Hackaday Superconference!

Hackaday Superconference: Tickets And Proposals

July 9, 2018 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Get your tickets now for the 2018 Hackaday Superconference. Join us November 2nd-4th in Pasadena, California!

This is the ultimate hardware conference. Hackers, designers, and engineers from all over the world converge — from the greenest beginners to those who have made history with their designs. This is the Hackaday community, these are your people, and you need to be here. Supercon is your chance to experience all things involved in hardware creation — the weekend is filled with unparalleled talks and workshops — but the experience of Supercon transcends the organized event. We call it a conference but it’s truly a hacker village with a who’s-who of hackerdom in attendance.

Call for Proposals

We want you to present a talk (or a workshop) at this year’s Supercon! Please submit your proposal using this form.

The number one question we get about CFP is “I’m excited about X, should I submit a proposal?” The answer is yes. Don’t self-eliminate — if you have an idea for a talk we want to hear from you. Supercon is a flat conference, your proposal will be judged on the idea and how you plan to present it, not on how many other amazing speaking slots you’ve secured.

To help get your mind moving about topics, we suggest that you consider this list of themes your talk might fit into: Engineering Heroics, Prototyping, Research, Product Development, Full-Stack Fabrication, and of course Wildcard.

Tickets! Get Your Tickets Here!

Are you a true believer? We’ve just opened up the Call for Proposal today, so we can’t tell you who’s speaking or what workshops will take place. However, we suspect there are many of you ready to take the plunge right now. Those first 96 true believers get an incredibly low ticket price of $128.

Standing room only during a 2017 Hackaday Supercon talk

Even at full price, the admission fee is an incredible value (see for yourself). Each ticket comes with admission for all three days, a custom hardware badge to hack on, admission to the Friday kick-off party and Saturday Hackaday Prize party, food and beverage throughout the conference, and much more.

This is the fourth year we’ve hosted the Hackaday Superconference. You can check out all of the talk videos from last year, there’s a slew of articles on the event, and of course an incredible hardware hacking scene throughout. In large part, the packed and jovial community atmosphere is why we’ve added Friday as a full day of workshops and badge hacking!

Get your ticket and book your travel. We look forward to hanging out with a huge chunk of the Hackaday community at Supercon!

One Week Left For Hackaday Belgrade Proposals

February 27, 2018 by Mike Szczys No comments

Do you have your tickets for Hackaday Belgrade? Our premiere European conference is on 26 May and tickets are on a rapid trajectory to sell out.

Those of you weighing the idea of presenting a talk, you now have less than one week to get your proposal to us. While we have already accepted several exemplary talks, final decisions won’t be made until after the submission deadline passes on Sunday, March 4th.

Mike Harrison showing off his demo work on the 2016 Hackaday Belgrade badge. If you have stories of the demoscene, consider sending in a talk proposal.

What kind of talks are we looking for? We’d love to have a few talks about the demoscene. The conference badge this year is a full-blown retrocomputer, and we’re working on a BASIC for it. If you can push pixels on a Comodore 64, we’d love to hear you talk about it. We’re also suckers for the lesser known stories of tech history (Mike Harrison’s talk on the Eidophor projector tech all but forgotten to history was a delight).

We’re always interested in creative design; think circuit boards that aren’t square and enclosures that go beyond just putting something in a simple box. And of course we’re forever in search of the rare gems that share a glimpse of the research world, like this computing cluster built to get around limited supercomputer time when calculating quantum effect simulations.

These are great talks presented to an audience hungry to share your excitement. Get those proposals in by the end of this weekend!

Hackaday Belgrade Call For Proposals Now Open!

January 22, 2018 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Prepare yourself for the return of Hackaday Belgrade! Our premier European conference — Hackaday Belgrade — is on 26 May and we want to hear what you’ve been working on. The Call for Proposals is now open. We seek talks and workshops exploring the most interesting uses of technology and the culture that goes along with it. This includes design, prototyping, research, manufacturing, and the stories of people and progress that move hardware hacking forward.

We’ve booked Dom Omladine for the event because it was perfect for our previous Belgrade conference in 2016. The sold-out conference became a living organism of excitement when the Hackaday community from across Europe came together. A spectacular slate of speakers presented topics like designing computing clusters for use in University research programs, combining projection mapping with high powered lasers, building hardware for advertising campaigns, uncovering forgotten projector technology called Eidophor, fully embracing Open Hardware during product development, and so much more. All of this while hundreds in attendance joined forces for some of the best hardware badge hacking we’ve ever seen.

Hackaday Belgrade is the rare kind of opportunity that is worth reorganizing your life to attend. Want to guarantee yourself a ticket? They’re not available yet, but you can hack your way into the conference: submit a proposal! In addition to the adoration of the Hackaday community, accepted speakers will receive free admission. Everyone who submits a quality talk proposal will be given priority when tickets do go on sale. This event will sell out!

For updates, keep an eye on the conference page and pop into the chat on the project page by clicking “Join this project’s team”. Do you know someone who should be a speaker at this conference? Reach out to them personally, share this CFP on social media, or let us know in the comments below so we can make it happen.

HJWYDK: The Journal Our Community Has Been Awaiting

November 28, 2017 by Mike Szczys 44 Comments

We’re excited to announce the Hackaday Journal of What You Don’t Know. This will be a peer-reviewed journal of white papers that goes well beyond “look what I did” and will provide full design, data, and everything else needed to reproduce the most interesting things the engineering world has to offer. It’s a complete description of your knowledge offered up for the benefit of all.

Topics will include original and creative research, engineering, and entertainment in the areas of interest to the Hackaday community. These papers should embody original insight, experience, or discovery in any sufficiently challenging domain knowledge. This will be the manual for the things you need to know, but probably don’t. HJWYDK makes that knowledge freely available using the Open Access model for publications. It will be a journal without paywalls or frustration. It’s the journal you will reach for whenever you need to do something that feels impossible.

Useful information doesn’t just happen. It’s won through struggle and leads to unique knowledge. Have your accomplishments recognized at a higher level, and make sure they live on and are freely available.

All papers accepted by the editorial and review process will be immediately published online. They will also be printed in the annual Proceedings of the Hackaday Superconference, with the best submissions invited to present in person at the conference. Submit your papers now!

We are currently seeking Associate Editors and Peer Reviewers. Editors should send your background info to journal@hackaday.com. Reviewers should join the team on the HJWYDK project page and mention your areas of expertise in the join request.