Supercon

73 Articles

Here’s Your First Look At The Talks Of The 2019 Hackaday Superconference

September 27, 2019 by 21 Comments

The ultimate hardware conference returns this November as the Hackaday Superconference springs to life in Pasadena, California. It is our pleasure to announce the first set of accepted speakers who have confirmed their appearances at Supercon. This reveal is only the tip of the iceberg, so keep your eye on Hackaday as we continue to reveal the rest of the exemplary talks and workshops that make up this year’s conference.

However, don’t wait to get your ticket. Yes, we sell out every year, but the pace of ticket sales has been much faster this year and soon they will all be gone. Don’t miss out, as you can see from the small sample below, Supercon will be packed with amazing people and you need to be one of them!

The Talks (Part One of Many)


  • Matthias Balwierz aka bitluni

    Multimedia Fun with the Esp32

    The ESP32 microcontroller is a beast! Everyone knows that already. Composite video and VGA are common now. But a few years ago these capabilities weren’t obvious. This talk will recap the journey of squeezing out every possible bit of performance to generate audio and video with the least amount of additional components. It’s a detail-packed discussion of the projects I’ve documented on my YouTube channel bitluni’s lab.


  • Sarah Kaiser

    Hacking Quantum Key Distribution Hardware or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Burn Things with Lasers

    Quantum devices are the next big addition to the general computing and technology landscape. However, just like classical hardware, quantum hardware can be hacked. I will share some of my (successful) attempts to break the security of quantum key distribution hardware with the biggest laser I could find!


  • Mohit Bhoite

    Building Free-Formed Circuit Sculptures

    I’ll be talking about building free-formed circuit sculptures, and how anyone with the right tools can get involved in this art form. We’ll explore ways to make these sculptures interact with the environment around them or with the user.


  • Thea Flowers

    Creating a Sega-Inspired Hardware Synthesizer from the Ground Up.

    What makes the Sega Genesis sound chip unique? I’ll share some short history about why the Genesis happened at a very specific moment to have this sort of chip. I’ll talk about designing and building a synthesizer around it and the challenges I encountered by trying to do this as my first hardware project.


  • Helen Leigh

    Sound Hacking and Music Technologies

    I will explore the ways in which music is influenced by making and hacking, including a whistle-stop tour of some key points in music hacking history. This starts with 1940s Musique Concrete and Daphne Oram’s work on early electronic music at the BBC, and blossoms into the strange and wonderful projects coming out of the modern music hacker scenes, including a pipe organ made of Furbies, a sound art marble run, robotic music machines and singing plants.


  • Adam Zeloof

    Thermodynamics for Electrical Engineers: Why Did My Board Melt (And How Can I Prevent It)?

    In this presentation I will provide circuit designers with the foundation they need to consider thermal factors in their designs. Heat transfers through on-board components and knowing how to characterize this means we can choose the right heat sink for any application. Learn about free simulation tools that can be used to perform these analyses and boost your knowledge of thermodynamics and heat transfer (although those who are already familiar with the subject will find some utility in it as well).


  • Samy Kamkar

    FPGA Glitching & Side Channel Attacks

    I will explore some of the incredible work that has been done by researchers, academics, governments, and the nefarious in the realm of side channel analysis. We’ll inspect attacks that were once secret and costly, but now accessible to all of us using low cost hardware such as FPGAs. We’ll learn how to intentionally induce simple yet powerful faults in modern systems such as microcontrollers.


  • Daniel Samarin

    Debugging Electronics: You Can’t Handle the Ground Truth!

    Root-causing quickly is all about having the right tools, having the right infrastructure in place, and knowing how to use them. Is it the firmware, the circuit, a bad crimp, or backlash in the gears? I will outline strategies for finding out what the issue is, so that you can focus on fixing the right thing.

You Miss It, You’ll Miss It

If there’s any way you can make it to Supercon in person, you should. One of the two talk stages will be live-streamed, and the other recorded, but there is no substitute for hanging out with these eight awesome people, plus five hundred of our closest friends. Anyone who’s made it to the conference before can tell you that the intimate atmosphere is packed with opportunities to meet new people, connect with those you’ve only seen on the internet, and learn about the newest developments happening in the world of hardware creation. See you in November!

Supercon CFP Extended By Two Weeks

August 1, 2019 by 6 Comments

Need a bit more time to submit your talk proposal for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference? Okay, but we can only do this once. You now have until August 16th to submit your proposal.

Supercon is the ultimate hardware conference. Take all the best conversations you’ve had about electronics, firmware development, industrial design, art, music, and culture and pack them into three incredible days in Pasadena. That’s the start of what you’ll find at this event. There is no substitute for experiencing it in person.

What makes this so unique is the people who show up. We are forever on the search of people with clever, compelling, delightful, and bizarre stories about hardware creation… and that means you. Yes, you! Supercon is a great place to give your first-ever conference talk. Package up the details of your recent hardware adventures and send them in as a proposal. The biggest mistake we see people make is assuming nobody wants to hear about what’s going on in their workshop or lab. Long talk or short talk, we want to hear your talk!

Take the plunge, the water is warm the so are the soldering irons which run constantly in the Hacker Village that forms during Supercon. There are still tickets available, but of course, speaker receive our undying gratitude and of course, free admission.

Brett Smith Makes Your Life Easier With Hidden Microcontroller Features

June 27, 2019 by 37 Comments

There was a time when microprocessors were slow and expensive devices that needed piles of support chips to run, so engineers came up with ingenious tricks using extra hardware preprocessing inputs to avoid having to create more code. It would be common to find a few logic gates, a comparator, or even the ubiquitous 555 timer doing a little bit of work to take some load away from the computer, and engineers learned to use these components as a matter of course.

The nice thing is that many of these great hardware hacks have been built into modern microcontrollers through the years. The problem is you know to know about them. Brett Smith’s newly published Hackaday Superconference talk, “Why Do It The Hard Way?”, aims to demystify the helpful hardware lurking in microcontrollers.

Join us below for a deeper dive and the embedded video of this talk. Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware con — don’t miss your chance to attend this year, November 15-17 in Pasadena, CA.

Continue reading “Brett Smith Makes Your Life Easier With Hidden Microcontroller Features” →

Hackaday Superconference Tickets And Proposals Are Live Right Now

May 28, 2019 by 14 Comments

Stop what you’re doing and get your ticket to the Hackaday Superconference. This is the ultimate hardware conference, November 15th, 16th, and 17th in Pasadena, California. It will sell out, especially the early bird tickets which are certain to be snapped up before the end of this day. (Edit: Early Bird tickets are already sold out, but you can still get the Early Bird price by submitting a talk).

Supercon is all about hardware creation. From prototypes and manufacturable designs, to one-off hardware art and products that have sold thousands, this is where you meet the people and hear the stories behind new and interesting feats of engineering. It’s a weekend filled with fascinating talks and mind-expanding workshops, but Supercon is so much more.

This is a Hacker Village where the greenest beginner and the grayest veteran sit shoulder to shoulder to solder, to code, to dream of the future, and to share stories of the past. We want you here, and you need to make it happen. Whether it’s professional development (yes! ask your boss to make this a business outing) or your hard-earned vacation, Supercon will recharge your batteries and top off your inspiration for the year to come.

Your Talk Here

The Call for Proposals is now open. We want you to speak at Supercon!

Yes, I’m talking to you. Core to the mission of the Hackaday Superconference is to encourage more people to speak publicly about everything that goes into designing and manufacturing hardware. This means we want first time speakers just as much as we want seasoned presenters. You will be celebrated at Supercon; the ethos of this community is warm, welcoming, and thankful that you took the time to help everyone learn something interesting.

Don’t stop to ask yourself if you should… yes, we want to read your talk proposal. No topic is too big or too small for consideration. This is your chance to give back as a thank-you to so many people who have helped you gather your own skills over the years. We stand on the shoulders of giants, it’s your turn to be giant.

True Believer Tickets

We like to think of our Early Bird tickets as a nod to the true believers out there. We haven’t published the speakers, the workshops, or really anything else. That info will be public as everything comes together, but by then it may be too late to get a ticket. Right now all we can tell you for certain is that there will be a big celebration to name the grand prize winner of the 2019 Hackaday Prize, there will be a ton of badge hacking on a mind-blowing hardware badge being designed by Sprite_TM (Jeroen Domburg), you will have way too much fun and get far too little sleep, and tickets will sell out. In other words, this will be awesome.

Competitive soldering
Hackaday Prize winners
Opening ceremonies were packed tight!
Workshops in full swing
Badge hacking throughout the weekend
Standing room only as Ben Krasnow gives the last talk of the conference on Sunday

Need more convincing? You can watch the recap video from 2018, or dive into the weekend overview, badge-hacking, and competitive soldering roundups. I’ve never met anyone from the first four years of  Supercon who regretted buying early bird tickets. I’ve met plenty of people who regretted missing out. Don’t miss out on year five of the movement. This is your community, there is truly something for everyone, and Pasadena is a beautiful place to be in the middle of November. See you at Supercon!

Understanding Math Rather Than Merely Learning It

February 15, 2019 by 46 Comments

There’s a line from the original Star Trek where Khan says, “Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold.” Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron have the same idea about improving education, particularly autodidacticism or self-learning. They share what they’ve learned about acquiring an intuitive understanding of difficult math at the Hackaday Superconference and you can watch the newly published video below.

The start of this was the pair’s collaboration on a book about 3D printing science projects. Joan has a traditional education from MIT and Rich is a self-taught guy. This gave them a unique perspective from both sides of the street. They started looking at calculus — a subject that scares a lot of people but is really integral (no pun intended) to a lot of serious science and engineering.

You probably know that Newton and Leibniz struck on the fundamentals of calculus about the same time. The original papers, however, were decidedly different. Newton’s approach was more physical and less mathematical. Leibniz used formal logic and algebra. Although both share credit, the Leibniz notation won out and is what we use today.

Continue reading “Understanding Math Rather Than Merely Learning It” →

Inventors Chasing Their Dreams; What It’s Like To Quit Your Job And Hack

January 18, 2019 by 13 Comments

The phrase “Hindsight is 20/20” is one of those things that we all say from time to time, but rarely have a chance to truly appreciate to the fullest. Taken in the most literal context, it means that once you know the end result of a particular scenario, you can look back and clearly see the progression towards that now inescapable endgame. For example, if you’re stuck on the couch with a bad case of food poisoning, you might employ the phrase “Hindsight is 20/20” to describe the decision a few days prior to eat that food truck sushi.

Then again, it’s usually not that hard to identify a questionable decision, with or without the benefit of foreknowledge. But what about the good ones? How can one tell if a seemingly unimportant choice can end up putting you on track for a lifetime of success and opportunity? If there’s one thing Michael Rigsby hopes you’ll take away from the fascinating retrospective of his life that he presented at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference, it’s that you should grab hold of every opportunity and run with it. Some of your ideas and projects will be little more than dim memory when you look back on them 50 years later, but others might just end up changing your life.

Michael Rigsby’s electric car in 1971

Of course, it also helps if you’re the sort of person who was able to build an electric car at the age of nineteen, using technology which to modern eyes seems not very far ahead of stone knives and bear skins. The life story Michael tells the audience, complete with newspaper cuttings and images from local news broadcasts, is one that we could all be so lucky to look back on in the Autumn of our years. It’s a story of a person who, through either incredible good luck or extraordinary intuition, was able to be on the forefront of some of the technology we take for granted today before most people even knew what to call it.

From controlling his TRS-80 with his voice to building a robotic vacuum cleaner years before the Roomba was a twinkle in the eye of even the most forward thinking technofetishist, Michael was there. But he doesn’t hold a grudge towards the companies who ended up building billion dollar industries around these ideas. That was never what it was about for him. He simply loves technology, and wanted to show his experiments to others. Decades before “open source” was even a term, he was sharing his designs and ideas with anyone who’d care to take a look.

Continue reading “Inventors Chasing Their Dreams; What It’s Like To Quit Your Job And Hack” →

No Moving Parts: Phased Array Antennas Move While Standing Still

January 11, 2019 by 15 Comments

If you watch old science fiction or military movies — or if you were alive back in the 1960s — you probably know the cliche for a radar antenna is a spinning dish. Although the very first radar antennas were made from wire, as radar sets moved higher in frequency, antennas got smaller and rotating them meant you could “look” in different directions. When most people got their TV with an antenna, rotating those were pretty common, too. But these days you don’t see many moving antennas. Why? Because antennas these days move electrically rather than physically using multiple antennas in a phased array. These electronically scanned phased array antennas are the subject of Hunter Scott’s talk at 2018’s Supercon. Didn’t make it? No problem,  you can watch the video below.

While this seems like new technology, it actually dates back to 1905. Karl Braun fed the output of a transmitter to three monopoles set up as a triangle. One antenna had a 90 degree phase shift. The two in-phase antennas caused a stronger signal in one direction, while the out-of-phase antenna canceled most of the signal and the resulting aggregate was a unidirectional beam. By changing the antenna fed with the delay, the beam could rotate in three 120 degree steps.

Today phased arrays are in all sorts of radio equipment from broadcast radio transmitters to WiFi routers and 5G phones. The technique even has uses in optics and acoustics.

Continue reading “No Moving Parts: Phased Array Antennas Move While Standing Still” →