BornHack Tease Us With Their Badge

July 17, 2019 by Jenny List 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 Smallest Hacker Camps Are The Most Satisfying, And You Can Do One Too

June 15, 2019 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Two of my friends and I crammed into a small and aged European hatchback, drove all day along hundreds of miles of motorway, and finally through a succession of ever smaller roads. We were heading for a set of GPS co-ordinates in the north of Scotland, along with all of our camping gear.

There’s nothing like the hacker camp we’re looking for. After heading down a lane barely wider than the car, we drove through a farmyard with a sheepdog lying in the middle of the road (the reclining mutt seemed unconcerned as we edge the car around). We had arrived at GampGND, one of Europe’s smallest hacker camps.

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Mid-Winter Hacker Camp In Civilised Surroundings

March 15, 2019 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Imagine a weekend of opulence in which you meet your companion at the railway station and whisk away across the continent in a 190mph express train for a relaxing couple of days enjoying the ambience of a luxury resort hotel in the fresh surroundings of a woodland in midwinter. Break out the Martinis, it’s a scene of elegance and sophistication from a byegone era! This is the general idea of Hacker Hotel 2019, and I had a wonderful time!

On a recent February weekend I broke out the Club-Mate instead stea of a Martini. My companion for the Eurostar and Thalys trip was my local hackspace friend Matt “Gasman” Westcott with his keytar in a bulky suitcase for a chiptune gig, and we were heading for the Netherlands. It’s a pivot from the summer’s hacker camps as over 200 hackers fill a resort hotel for the weekend, scoring comfortable beds instead of dust or mud!

What follows is my experience from this weekend. Join me below and find out why you simply can’t miss the next one! Continue reading “Mid-Winter Hacker Camp In Civilised Surroundings” →

The Electric Vehicles Of EMF Camp

June 25, 2018 by Jenny List 3 Comments

There is joy in the hearts of British and European hardware and software hackers and makers, for this is an EMF Camp year. Every couple of years, our community comes together for three summer days in a field somewhere, and thanks to a huge amount of work from its organizers and a ton of volunteers, enjoys an entertaining, stimulating, and engrossing hacker camp.

One of the features of a really good hacker camp are the electric vehicles. Not full-on electric cars, but personal camp transport. Because only the technically inept walk, right? From Hitchin’s Big Hak to TOG’s duck, with an assortment of motorized armchairs and beer crates thrown in, these allow the full creativity of the hardware community free rein through the medium of overdriven motors and cheap Chinese motor controllers.

This year at EMF Camp there will be an added dimension that should bring out a new wave of vehicles, there will be a Hacky Racers event. Novelty electric vehicles will compete for on-track glory, will parade around the camp, and will no doubt also sometimes release magic smoke. There is still plenty of time to enter, so if you’re going to EMF, get building!

We have an interest in these little electric vehicles, not least because there may well be a Hackaday-branded machine on the tarmac. We’d like to feature some of them over the weeks running up to the event, so if you are building one and have a write-up handy, please tell us about it in the comments. Charge your batteries, and we’ll see you there!

Header image: [Mark Mellors], with permission.

SHACamp 2017, A Personal Review

August 25, 2017 by Jenny List 7 Comments

There are a series of stages to coming down from a festival. After the hectic rush of travel there are the several days of catching up on lost sleep and picking up the threads of your life again, then once a semblance of order has been regained there’s that few weeks of emptiness. Your life will never be the same again, it’s all so mundane.

I'm pleased to say the Hackaday and Tindie stickers were very popular. — I’m pleased to say the Hackaday and Tindie stickers were very popular.

It’s now a couple of weeks since the SHACamp 2017 hacker festival in the Netherlands was in full swing, and the write-up below has slowly taken shape over that time amid the other work of being a Hackaday scribe and editor. It’s early morning here in Southern England as I write this, so on the equivalent day while I was at SHACamp at this time I would have been carrying a large pack of stickers for distribution on the swapping table through the rising sunlight of a camp still largely asleep after the previous night’s revelry. Past our German and Dutch immediate neighbours, down the ramp from the dyke, the cardboard tent depot on my left and the food court on my right, to the information tent. Greet the bleary-eyed volunteer at the end of their graveyard shift, and spread plenty of Hackaday and Tindie stickers on the table for the masses. And then? Find a coffee, and sally forth into the field for another day among one of the most stimulating communities on Earth. My community. Your community.

The sticker table is a good place to start if you wish to get a handle on a large hacker camp. On it you will find the logos of a cross-section of the diverse organisations and groups present. There are a few commercial ones like my Jolly Wrenchers and Tindie the puppy, there are some from voluntary organisations or interest groups, but mostly they are the logos of a continent’s — even the wider world’s in some cases — hackspaces and makerspaces. Here you see the breadth of the attendees, as the logos of spaces from thousands of miles away you’ve never encountered before mingle. This isn’t quite a global gathering, but there is a sense of global community around it.

How Do You Describe a Hacker Camp?

You shall find us by our clearly superior yet dangerous to barefoot pedestrians fused right-angled mains connector.

So before I take you through my experience of SHA, it’s best to start by describing a hacker camp in more general terms. When I’m describing a camp like SHA to the kind of people who don’t read Hackaday, I put it as similar to the music festivals they are used to but without the bands. Instead the audience provides the entertainment through the work they bring to the event or do at the event, and through a comprehensive program of talks and lectures. Oh — and this is the bit that makes their eyes open wide — every structure on site from the smallest one-man tent to the largest marquee has mains power and high-speed Internet. Sometimes people grasp what SHA is from this description, sometimes they don’t.

Different groups, be they individual hackspaces, people from a particular country, or other special interest groups, congregate in villages, collections of tents, marquees, and gazebos in which they set up whatever cool stuff they’ve brought along. My tent with its Hackaday flag was in a village composed of a mix of British hackspaces up on the dyke, which [Michael] from MK Makerspace had marked with a sign consisting of a huge BS1363A mains plug. More than one person pointed out it would have been better lying flat on the ground with pins in the air, ready to catch an unwary Monty Python foot.

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The Latest Hacker Camp Badge Comes From BornHack

August 15, 2017 by Jenny List 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.

Hands On With The SHACamp 2017 Badge

August 14, 2017 by Jenny List 24 Comments

The badge has become one of the defining features of a modern hacker camp, a wearable electronic device that serves as both event computer and platform for some mild software and hardware hacking. Some events have had astoundingly sophisticated badges while others are more simple affairs, and the phenomenon has even spawned an ecosystem of unofficial badges which have nothing to do with the event in question.

The SHACamp 2017 badge is the latest to come the way of a Hackaday writer, and certainly contains enough to be taken as representative of the state of hacker camp badges in 2017. It doesn’t have a star turn like CCCCamp 2015’s software defined radio, instead it’s an extremely handy little computer in its own right.

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