sha2017

18 Articles

The SHA2017 Badge Revealed

May 8, 2017 by 19 Comments

It’s that excellent time of year in which one slowly comes to the realisation that the summer’s eagerly anticipated events are now no longer at some impossibly distant point in the future, but in fact only a matter of a few months or even weeks away. For our European readers, this means that August’s SHA2017 hacker camp is appearing on the horizon, four days of outdoor technological indulgence for our community in a scout camp on the Dutch polders.

As it is a tradition of such events to have an electronic badge incorporating ever more impressive levels of computing power, it follows that the pre-production announcement of an event badge has become an important milestone in the countdown to the day. SHA2017 is no exception, and thus today we see the announcement of their take on the essentials for a hacker camp badge in 2017.

The most immediately obvious thing about the badge is its 296×128 pixel e-ink display, which should provide an immediate benefit in terms of battery life. There are the usual plethora of interfaces, GPIOs, USB, and Neopixels, and the user input is via a set of capacitive buttons. Powering the device is an ESP32, and a key design goal was to have a network for the badges that does not put pressure on the 2.4GHz infrastructure. We’re guessing they’re doing this using raw WiFi packets in the same way as the MAGfest swadge. On the software front it will provide a straightforward development route via MicroPython, and there will be an app library for those without the inclination to code their own. You can get an early look at the schematic from the project repo (PDF).

Their target is to have the badge ready and with stable software on day 1 of the event, a laudable aim if they can manage it.

Members of the Hackaday team will be making the trip to the Netherlands for SHA2017, we look forward to seeing you if you attend too, and please show us anything interesting you do with your badges! Keep your eyes peeled for the Jolly Wrench, and come say hello. You’ll find me with the OxHack contingent and giving a talk on the kit biz which I have also published in the Project to Kit series of articles.

We’ve covered so many badges here at Hackaday that we could almost serve of a retrospective exhibition of the art form. Of particular interest to us though is our own [Voja Antonic]’s badge for last year’s Hackaday SuperConference.

Thanks [Sebastius] for the tip.

Hackaday Links: April 16, 2017

April 16, 2017 by 10 Comments

Guess what’s going on at the end of the month? The Vintage Computer Festival Southeast is happening April 29th and 30th. The event is being held at the Computer Museum of America and is, by all accounts, a really cool show.

Walk into any package sorting facility or Amazon fulfillment center and you’ll find a maze of conveyor belts, slides, and ramps that move boxes from one point to another. Conveyor belts are so last century, so here’s a fleet of robots.

In 2017, the CITES treaty — an international treaty for the protection of endangered species — changed a lot. While the original treaty protected individual species, in 2017, enforcement of this treaty on tropical hardwoods changed to an entire genus. This is a problem when it comes to rosewood; previously only Dalbergia nigra was covered under CITES, now the entire Dalbergia genus is covered. This sucks for guitar makers, but a Dutch guy is making guitars out of newspaper. We’re probably looking at some sort of micarta thing here, but it sounds acceptable.

Where did Apple’s Spinning Beach Ball of Death come from? 1984, or thereabouts. The ubiquitous Apple ‘wait’ cursor is from the first versions of the Macintosh Toolbox, and it has remained mostly unchanged all this time. This is Apple Wait, a demonstration of this first spinny ball of death. It’s a Raspberry Pi connected to an Apple monochrome monitor that just displays a spinny wait logo. Check out the video.

How do you make strips of RGB LEDs turn a corner? Wire, usually. Here are some corner pieces for WS2812B LED strips. It looks very handy if you’re building a gigantic RGB LED matrix.

SHA2017 is an outdoor hacker conference that’s happening this summer. They’re working on a badge, but they need some help. They’re looking for some funding for their ESP32-powered, touch controller, sunlight-readable ePaper badge. If you have a job that likes to sponsor stuff like this, it’s a worthy cause.

A Bold Experiment In A Decentralised Low Voltage Local DC Power Grid

January 18, 2017 by 29 Comments

January, for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere, can be a depressing month. It’s cold or wet depending where you live, the days are still a bit short, and the summer still seems an awfully long way away. You console yourself by booking a ticket to a hacker camp, but the seven months or so you’ll have to wait seems interminable.

If you want an interesting project to look forward to, take a look at [Benadski]’s idea for a decentralised low voltage local DC power grid for the upcoming SHA 2017 hacker camp in the Netherlands. The idea is to create a network that is both safe and open for hacking, allowing those with an interest in personal power generation to both have an available low-voltage power source and share their surplus power with other attendees.

The voltage is quoted as being 42V DC +/- 15%, which keeps it safely under the 50V limit set by the European Low Voltage Directive. Individuals can request a single 4A connection to the system, and villages can have a pair of 16A connections, which should supply enough for most needs. Users will need to provide their own inverters to connect their 5V or 12V appliances, fortunately a market served by numerous modules from your favourite Far Eastern sales portal.

This project will never be the solution to all power distribution needs, but to be fair that is probably not the intention. It does however provide a platform for experimentation, collaboration, and data gathering for those interested in the field, and since it is intended to make an appearance at future hacker camps there should be the opportunity for all that built up expertise to make it better over time.

We’ve touched on this subject before here at Hackaday, with our look at the availability of standard low voltage DC domestic connectors.

Wind turbine image: Glogger (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.

Hackenings: Technologica Incognita Parties After SHA2017 Plans

November 19, 2016 by 6 Comments

Welcome to [Hackenings], our weekly calendar of what’s going on in the global hackerspace community this week. As ever, if you have any upcoming events that you’d like us to cover, email us at tips@hackaday.com and put [Hackenings] in the subject so that we don’t miss it.

TechInc Turns Five!

Technologia Incognita is a five-year-old hackerspace in Amsterdam, and they’re having a party on the 26th. How do you celebrate five years of social hacking, creative cooking, and general geekery? With more of the same, plus drinks. If you’ve never been to TechInc, you’ll find directions here.

The TechInc crew is not all play and no work, however. Their party coincides with the end of the second organizational planning meeting for SHA2017, a summer outdoor camping hacker camp/festival/conference that’s going to take place next summer, not coincidentally just outside of Amsterdam.

The European hacker scene is a little bit like international soccer / football — every four years there’s a World Cup, and in the off years there are equally important regional tournaments. The German Chaos Communication Camp and the Dutch series-of-camps-that-changes-name-every-time are like this, but for us. If you missed the CCC last summer, or ToorCamp this summer, then start making plans for SHA2017 next summer.

Don’t Forget Dublin

We mentioned this last week, but TOG Hackerspace in Dublin is having a 36 hour hackathon starting today (the 19th). This looks like a great time to get together with other nerds and make something crazy in a shortish amount of time. If you’re anywhere nearby, you should head on over. After all, it’s for science!