Looking Forward To SHA2017

We’re at the start of August, which can only mean one thing. Europe’s hackers and makers are about to converge in a field somewhere for a long weekend of sitting around drinking beer and Club-Mate, eating unhealthy street food, being assaulted by some of the most underground chiptune electronic dance music on the planet, sharing the fruits of their labours with their peers, and gazing lovingly upon other people’s hacks. This year it’s the turn of the Netherlands, for over the first full weekend in August that country will host the SHA2017 outdoor hacker camp in a scouting camp on the polders. It promises to be quite an event, with just short of 4000 attendees spread over several fields, arenas, and social areas, and we’re going to be there. Tent and power lead with Schuko plug sorted, massive pile of stickers secured, DECT phone charged, emergency supplies of PG Tips packed.

There is so much to take in at these events that it can sometimes be difficult to catch everything. One can do the rounds as diligently as possible and still miss some of the cool stuff, so this is where you come in. Are you going to SHA? Are you bringing anything you consider cool to the event? Tell us about it in the comments, we’d love to hear about it as would we’re sure the rest of our readers.

Meanwhile, if you think you’ve missed the boat, don’t panic! At the time of writing, there are about 180 tickets still unsold, but they’ll be going fast! Head over to the SHA2017 tickets site to get yours.

(The stripey header, in case you were wondering, is SHA2017’s branding using as you might have guessed, the SHA algorithm to generate HTML colours. What you see are the colours for “Hackaday”.)

SHA 2017 Talk Schedule Revealed

It’s always an exciting moment when an event schedule is released, and since events in our community don’t come much larger than this August’s SHA Camp in the Netherlands, you can imagine that the announcement of their schedule of lectures of talks is something of an event in itself. The event runs over five days, and you can browse the schedule itself to make your picks.

The SHA team have made their own picks, but with so many stages and speakers they are only a tiny selection. Running a Hackaday eye over the schedule, here are the ones that caught our eye.

[Kliment] has a workshop, Surface Mount Electronics Assembly for Terrified Beginners, in which you assemble a 20€ surface-mount power supply kit. [Editor’s Note: We’ve seen this one live — you can do it!]

[dennisdebel]’s lecture, from glass fiber to fiber glass noodles caught our eye. Using mung bean vermicelli, or ‘glass noodles’, for data transmission, is not something you hear about every day.

If you are a regular at European hardware hacker camps, you may have encountered the chiptune extravaganza performances of [Gasman], otherwise known as [Matt Westcott]. Hie lecture, Zero to chiptune in one hour, will create, from scratch, a chiptune cover version of a pop song chosen by the audience, all on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The Hackeboy handheld game console is a project from a small Hamburg-based indie game label.[Axel Theilmann] describes the process of building the handheld console they always dreamed of.

One of the final lectures of the event comes from [Niek Blankers], and will describe in detail the SHA2017 badge. How it was designed, and showcasing what some of the attendees will by then have managed to do with it.

Finally, if you want to see a Hackaday scribe talking about fun and games with little plastic bags of parts, you could do worse than seeking out From Project To Kit, all you will need to know about turning your personal electronic projects into a kit business.

Watch this space for more from SHA Camp as we get it. Meanwhile you can take a look at our coverage of the SHA2017 badge launch.