2026 Hackaday Europe Call For Participation: We Want You!

February 18, 2026 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

Here’s the Hackaday Europe 2026 announcement that you’ve all been waiting for. But wait! This year there’s a twist, or rather two. What absolutely hasn’t changed, though, is that we’d love to see you there, and we’d love to hear about what you’ve been up to, so get your talk or workshop proposal in before March 18th.

New Place, New Time

Hackaday Europe is moving in all four dimensions! We’ll be meeting up in the absolutely lovely Lecco, Italy — just about equidistant from Milan and Bergamo, and taking place May 16th and 17th, with the traditional pre-event meetup on the night of the 15th for those who are already in town. The location is the Politecnico Milano campus, a hub of engineering nestled in the mountains.

Who is going to be speaking at Hackaday Europe? You could be! We’re opening up the Call for Participation right now, both for talks and for workshops. Whether you’ve presented your work live before or not, you’re not likely to find a more appreciative audience for epic hacks, creative constructions, or you own tales of hardware, firmware, or software derring-do.

Workshop space is limited, but if you want to teach a group of ten or so people your favorite techniques, we’d love to hear from you.

All presenters get in free, of course, so firm up what you’d like to share, and get your proposal submitted ASAP.

The Badge

We’ll be bringing the 2025 Hackaday Supercon Communicator Badge with us to Europe, so this is also your chance to get your hands on the retro-styled super sexy keyboard, LoRa module, and fantastically oblong screen. At Supercon, we ran our own custom mesh network, and it worked flawlessly, even on microwatts. We’ll be continuing the experiment in Italy, on different frequencies of course, but maybe pushing some of the transmission parameters to see how far we can go.

The user side of the badge is very accessible as well, being programmed in Micropython and supported with a sweet plug-in architecture that makes adding your own apps a breeze, or at least reasonably straightforward. And when Hackaday Europe comes to a close, you can simply reflash the badge with new firmware, and you’ve got the sweetest Meshtastic device out there.

And it wouldn’t be a Hackaday badge if it weren’t meant to be modified.

The People

The real reason to come to Hackaday Europe, though, is the other folks who come to Hackaday Europe. You’ve never seen a more interested group of hardware hackers, and that’s coincidentally also why you’d like to give a presentation. You get to tell everyone what you’re up to — it’s the ultimate ice-breaker.

At the risk of saying it again: Get your proposal in before March 18th, and we look forward to seeing you on the shore of Lake Como. (Info on tickets and more pre-conference hype coming soon.)

How Italians Got Their Power

May 18, 2024 by Jenny List 28 Comments

We take for granted that electrical power standards are generally unified across countries and territories. Europe for instance has a standard at 230 volts AC, with a wide enough voltage acceptance band to accommodate places still running at 220 or 240 volts. Even the sockets maintain a level of compatibility across territories, with a few notable exceptions.

It was not always this way though, and to illustrate this we have [Sam], who’s provided us with a potted history of mains power in Italy. The complex twists and turns of power delivery in that country reflect the diversity of the power industry in the late 19th and early 20th century as the technology spread across the continent.

Starting with a table showing the impressive range of voltages found across the country from differing power countries, it delves into the taxation of power in Italy which led to two entirely different plug standards, and their 110/220 volt system. Nationalization may have ironed out some of the kinks and unified 220 volts across the country, but the two plugs remain.

Altogether it’s a fascinating read, and one which brings to mind that where this is being written you could still find a few years ago some houses with three sizes of the archaic British round-pin socket. Interested in the diversity of plugs? We have a link for that.

The Medieval History Of Your Favourite Dev Board

December 1, 2021 by Jenny List 20 Comments

It’s become something of a trope in our community, that the simplest way to bestow a level of automation or smarts to a project is to reach for an Arduino. The genesis of the popular ecosystem of boards and associated bootloader and IDE combination is well known, coming from the work of a team at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, in Northern Italy. The name “Arduino” comes from their favourite watering hole, the Bar di Re Arduino, in turn named for Arduin of Ivrea, an early-mediaeval king.

As far as we can see the bar no longer exists and has been replaced by a café, which appears on the left in this Google Street View link. The bar named for Arduin of Ivrea is always mentioned as a side note in the Arduino microcontroller story, but for the curious electronics enthusiast it spawns the question: who was Arduin, and why was there a bar named after him in the first place?

The short answer is that Arduin was the Margrave of Ivrea, an Italian nobleman who became king of Italy in 1002 and abdicated in 1014. The longer answer requires a bit of background knowledge of European politics around the end of the first millennium, so if you’re ready we’ll take Hackaday into a rare tour of medieval history.

Continue reading “The Medieval History Of Your Favourite Dev Board” →

Dynamic Map Of Italy On A PCB

January 14, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

While most PCBs stick to tried-and-true methods of passing electrons through their layers of carefully-etched copper, modern construction methods allow for a large degree of customization of most aspects of these boards. From solder mask to number of layers, and even the shape of the board itself, everything is open for artistic license and experimentation now. [Luca] shows off some of these features with his PCB which acts as a live map of Italy.

The PCB is cut out in the shape of the famous boot, with an LED strategically placed in each of 20 regions in the country. This turns the PCB into a map with the RGB LEDs having the ability to be programmed to show any data that one might want. It’s powered by a Wemos D1 Mini (based on an ESP8266) which makes programming it straightforward. [Luca] has some sample programs which fetch live data from various sources, with it currently gathering daily COVID infection rates reported for each of the 20 regions.

The ability to turn a seemingly boring way to easily attach electronic parts together into a work of art without needing too much specialized equipment is a fantastic development in PCBs. We’ve seen them turned into full-color art installations with all the mask colors available, too, so the possibilities for interesting-looking (as well as interesting-behaving) circuits are really opening up.

Continue reading “Dynamic Map Of Italy On A PCB” →

Nessie, The Educational Robot

February 27, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

At the Lifelong Learning Robotics Laboratory at the Erasmo Da Rotterdam in Italy, robots are (not surprisingly) used to teach all of the fundamentals of robotics. [Alessandro Rossetti] and the students at the lab have been at it for years now, and have finally finished their fifth generation of a robot called Nessie. The big idea is to help teach fundamentals of programming and electronics by building something that actually uses these principles.

The robot is largely 3D printed and uses an FPGA to interact with the physical world through a set of motors and sensors. The robot also uses a Raspberry Pi to hold the robot’s framework. The robot manages the sensors in hardware with readers attached to the CPU AXI bus. The CPU reads their values from memory space, though, so the robot is reported to be quite quick.

The lab is hoping to take their robot to a robotics competition in Bari, Italy. We hope that they perform well there, since we are big fans of any robot that’s designed to teach anyone about robotics and programming. After all, there are robots that help teach STEM in Africa, robots that teach teen girls about robots, and robots that teach everyone.

Italian Law Changed By The Hackaday Prize

April 27, 2015 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

A recent change in Italian law was spurred by the Hackaday Prize. The old law restricted non-Italian companies from hosting contests in the country. With the update Italian citizens are now welcome to compete for the 2015 Hackaday Prize which will award $500,000 in prizes.

We’ve heard very few complaints about the Hackaday Prize. When we do, it’s almost always because there are some countries excluded from participation. We’ve tried very hard to include as much of the globe as possible, some countries simply must be excluded due to local laws regarding contests. The folks from Make in Italy saw last year’s offer of a Trip into Space or $196,418 and set out to get the local laws changed (translated). Happily they succeeded!

The Make in Italy Foundation was started to encourage and support FabLabs in Italy. After seeing two major Hacker and Maker oriented contests — The 2014 Hackaday Prize and the Intel Make it Wearable contest — exclude Italian citizens from entering. Their two prong approach sought out legal counsel and started a petition on Change.org signed by about 1.8k supporters.

We’ve been holding off on the announcement as we needed our own legal opinion on the change (we’re not great at understanding Italian legal PDFs without some help). But today we have removed Italy from the list of excluded countries. Submit your entry today just by writing down your idea of a build which will solve a problem faced by a large number of people. Build something that matters and you could win a Trip into Space, $100,000 for the ‘Best Product’, or hundreds of other prizes. But we’re not waiting until the end, over the next 17 weeks we’ll be giving out $50k in prizes to hundreds of entries.

[Thanks Alessandro]