Hackaday Superconference: Tickets and Proposals

July 10, 2017 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

We’re thrilled to announce Supercon tickets are now available. The 2017 Hackaday Superconference is November 11th and 12th 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, and the Supercon is your chance to experience all things involved in hardware creation for one great weekend. There will be 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.

Call for Proposals

Want to present a talk (or a workshop) at this year’s Supercon? Great, 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. This covers admission for both days of the con, admission to the Hackaday Prize party on Saturday night and food on both days.

This is the third 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 it was really fun seeing the geeky and unique shirts on exhibit throughout.

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

Hackaday.io Passes 200,000 Registered Users

February 14, 2017 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Hackaday.io just welcomed the 200,000th registered user! We are the world’s largest repository of open hardware projects and Hackaday.io is proving its worth as the world’s most vibrant technology community. This is where you go to get inspiration for your next project, to get help fleshing out your product ideas, to build your engineering dream team, and to tell the tales of the workbench whether that be success, failure, or anything in between.

Over the past six months, as we’ve grown from the 150k member milestone to this one, our movement has enjoyed ever-increasing interaction among this amazing group of people. Thank you for spending so much time here and making Hackaday.io a great place for everyone!

Hack Chat Bring Experts from Many Fields

It’s always great when you can watch a conference talk or interview online. But if you weren’t there in person the opportunity for meaningful interaction has already passed. With this in mind, we’ve been inviting experts from numerous fields to host discussions live in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat room.

This is a great way to further our goal of forming a global virtual hackerspace. It’s common to have talks and workshops at a hackerspace, where you can not only learn from and ask questions of the person leading the event, but meet others who share your interests. This has happened time and again with recent guests including Bunnie Huang who talked about making and breaking hardware, a group of Adafruit engineers who discussed their work extending the MicroPython libraries, Sprite_tm who covered the continuing development of ESP32 support, and many more.

This Friday at Noon PST Hackaday’s own Jenny List will be leading the Hack Chat on RF Product design. See you there!

Amazing Projects

It’s pretty amazing to see a guide on building a smartphone for $50 in parts. If that exists anywhere, it’s probably on Hackaday.io — and it’s actually pushing about 80,000 views so far! Arsenijs is a regular around these parts and his ZeroPhone — a 2G communications device based on the Raspberry Pi Zero — is a project that he’s been updating as his prototype-to-production journey progresses. It has a big team behind it and we can’t wait to see where this one goes.

Working on your own is still a great way to learn and we see all kinds of examples of that. Just4Fun is learning the dark arts that went into early personal computing with a $4 project to build a Z80 system on a breadboard.

We revel in the joy of seeing great hardware art come to life. FlipFrame is a great example; it’s a digital picture frame project that goes far beyond that simple description. It rotates the entire screen to fit the layout of the image while showing off all of the hardware that makes this possible rather than hiding it away inside a case.

In addition to our registered users milestone, we’re just about to pass our 20,000th published project. There are so many projects to celebrate and draw inspiration from, and that collection grows every day!

The Rise of Build Contests

This winter we’ve seen a ton of interest in the build contests hosted on Hackaday.io. Of course, nothing can compare to the reach of the Hackaday Prize, our worldwide engineering initiative that challenges people to Build Something That Matters. The 2016 winners were announced in November; even so, people have been tripping over themselves to get a project built for the numerous contests we’ve hosted since then.

Of note is the 1 kB Challenge — a contest dreamed up by our own Adam Fabio which challenged entrants to build an embedded project whose compiled code was 1 kB or less. It was a joy to dive into the entries for this and it will certainly return again.

Running right now is the revival of my favorite build contest: the Hackaday Sci-Fi Contest. Bring your favorite Sci-Fi tech to life — it just needs to be recognizable from a book, movie, or TV show and include some type of electronics.

Meet Your Friends in Real Life

Some of my closest friends in life were first met online. But eventually, you just want to hang out in the same room. This is becoming more and more common with Hackaday.io. In November we celebrated our second Hackaday SuperConferece where hundreds of people who love hardware creation gathered in Los Angeles for two days of amazing talks, workshops, and hands-on hacking challenges. This is a good one to add to your calendar but tickets do sell out so consider some other options.

We have regular meetups in LA and New York. If you are ever traveling there, make sure to look up the schedule and see if it can be part of your trip. Perhaps the most interesting was World Create Day. In 2016, we had 80 groups across the world plan meetups on the same day so that the Hackaday community could hang out in real life. We’re not ready to share the details quite yet, but you should plan for that to happen again this year. Something to look forward to!

The Story of Kickstarting the OpenMV

December 29, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Robots are the ‘it’ thing right now, computer vision is a hot topic, and microcontrollers have never been faster. These facts lead inexorably to the OpenMV, an embedded computer vision module that bills itself as the ‘Arduino of Machine Vision.’

The original OpenMV was an entry for the first Hackaday Prize, and since then the project has had a lot of success. There are tons of followers, plenty of users, and the project even had a successful Kickstarter. That last bit of info is fairly contentious — while the Kickstarter did meet the minimum funding level, there were a lot of problems bringing this very cool product to market. Issues with suppliers and community management were the biggest problems, but the team behind OpenMV eventually pulled it off.

At the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference, Kwabena Agyeman, one of the project leads for the OpenMV, told the story about bringing the OpenMV to market:

Continue reading “The Story of Kickstarting the OpenMV” →

New SuperCon Badge is 40% Lighter and a Work of Art

September 28, 2016 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

The 2016 Hackaday SuperConference is just around the corner and today we get a good look at the hardware badge. It was designed by [Voja Antonic] — a legend of hardware creation who will be at the conference. I like to think of him as the Woz of the Eastern Bloc, having designed the Galaksija computer. This badge is a beautiful example of embedded design. We’ll dive into all of the details after the break.

Get your ticket now for 48-hours of talks, workshops, the Hackaday Prize party, badge hacking, and so much more.

Continue reading “New SuperCon Badge is 40% Lighter and a Work of Art” →

5 More SuperCon Speakers You Don’t Want to Miss

September 21, 2016 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This morning it is my pleasure to announce five more confirmed speakers for the Hackaday SuperConference. The ultimate hardware conference takes place in just a few weeks: November 5th and 6th in Pasadena, California.

Get your tickets now!

Continue reading “5 More SuperCon Speakers You Don’t Want to Miss” →

Be A Part Of The Best Hardware Conference Ever

August 15, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

The 2016 Hackaday SuperConference is on. If you haven’t had time to submit your proposal for a talk or workshop at the world’s greatest conference for hardware, now is the time to do it. We’re looking for everything – war stories from deep in the trenches or next to the pick and place, the problem of having your board house 5,000 miles from your lab, and that time you accidentally discovered P=NP in the firmware of a reflow toaster oven.

The Hackaday Supercon will be in Pasadena, California on November 5th and 6th, and will be the host of hundreds of hackers, designers, engineers, and the only makers that you want to meet. We’re going to have several venues with talks, workshops, and other various activities.

Talks will be scheduled for 20-40 minutes, and workshops will be scheduled for 1-4 hours. In both cases, topics can range from rapid prototyping, new and interesting techniques, creativity in technical design, and stories of product development and manufacturing.

Last year’s SuperConference was the greatest hardware conference we’ve ever seen. That success was due entirely to the talented engineers, speakers, and presenters of the Hackaday community who put together their stories to share for the benefit of all. If you couldn’t make it, you can still check out all the talks from last year.

If you’re reading this and think you should propose a talk, do it!. Submit your proposal. This conference is only a success because of the awesome Hackaday community and the efforts of readers just like you.

If you’re wondering what the usual talk at the Hackaday Supercon is like, I present (below) the greatest talk I have ever seen. It’s [Jeroen Domburg] a.k.a. [sprite_tm]’s efforts to create a Matrix of Tamagotchis. It’s thirteen Tamagotchis, fully virtualized, emulated, and running on a server, going about their lives without any awareness they’re inside a computer.

Continue reading “Be A Part Of The Best Hardware Conference Ever” →

Hackaday SuperConference: Call for Proposals

July 19, 2016 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

The 2016 Hackaday SuperConference is coming. Now is the time to submit your proposal for a talk or a workshop at the world’s greatest conference about hardware creation. The SuperCon is an unparalleled opportunity to present on a deeply technical level where you can be certain everyone in the audience is following. All of those details, the war stories of production, the out-of-stock problems and board respins, the moments when you’ve bent physics to your will, these stories will be met with awe and cheers as the audience of your peers takes the ride along with you.

SuperCon will take place in Pasadena, California on November 5th and 6th, 2016. It is a gathering of hackers, designers, and engineers passionate about learning, teaching, and celebrating what goes into making new and exciting creations. The atmosphere will be that of a hacker village, with several venues in close proximity playing host to talks, workshops, and other activities. This breaks out of the beige prison that usually accompanies hotel-based conferences and opens the weekend up for you to meet and interact with a cadre of interesting people. SuperCon is the place to share your hard-won knowledge and experience, and to add to your own arsenal of skills.

Accepted talks will be scheduled for 20-40 minutes, and workshops will be booked for 1-4 hours. In both cases, topics may include themes like techniques for rapid prototyping, new and interesting uses of technology, creativity in technical design, and stories of product development and manufacturing.

Last year’s SuperConference was incredibly successful. If you weren’t able to attend you can still work your way through all of the talks which were recorded and posted shortly after the event. That success is a credit to all of the talented presenters in the Hackaday community who put together their stories to share for the benefit of all. Thank you!

To all of you reading this now and wondering if you should propose a talk, you should! We thank you in advance for taking time out of your life to make this year’s SuperConference even more amazing by submitting your own proposal. It won’t happen without you because this is a conference of active involvement and not one of passive consumption. Be the hardware movement; this is your chance.