Hackaday Supercon 2024 Call For Participation: We Want You!

May 15, 2024 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

We’re tremendously excited to be able to announce that the Hackaday Supercon is on for 2024, and will be taking place November 1st through the 3rd in sunny Pasadena, California. As always, Supercon is all about you, the Hackaday community. So put on your thinking caps because we’d like to hear your proposals for talks and workshops! The Call for Speakers and Call for Workshops forms are online now, and you’ve got until July 9th to get yourself signed up.

Supercon is a fantastic event to geek out with your fellow hackers, and to share the inevitable ups and downs that accompany any serious project. Like last year, we’ll be featuring both longer and shorter talks, and hope to get a great mix of both first-time presenters and Hackaday luminaries.

Honestly, just the crowd that Supercon brings together is reason enough to attend, but then you throw in the talks, the badge-hacking, the food, and the miscellaneous shenanigans … it’s an event you really don’t want to miss. And as always, presenters get in for free, get their moment in the sun, and get warm vibes from the Hackaday audience. Get yourself signed up now!

2023 Hackaday Supercon: The Rest Of The Talks

October 19, 2023 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

The 2023 Hackaday Superconference is only two weeks away, and we’re happy to announce the second half of the slate. As always, this is a great mix of well-known Hackaday faces, and folks we haven’t yet met. Whether they’re fixing up the Apollo Guidance Computer, building their own airplanes, trapping rubidium atoms, or teaching robots to sail, this is another super interesting round of talks.

Tickets are sold out, the badges are almost done, and we’re in the home stretch! We can smell the tacos from here. If you’re joining us, we hope you’re excited. If you’re not able to, we’ll stream as much as we can.

All that remains is the mystery of the keynote speaker. Stay tuned! Continue reading “2023 Hackaday Supercon: The Rest Of The Talks” →

Hackaday Superconference 2023: First Round Of Speakers Announced!

October 5, 2023 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

Hackaday Supercon 2023 is almost upon us, and looking over the roster of fantastic talks gets us in the mood already. We hope that it has the same effect on you too.

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll announce the rest of the speakers, the workshops, and give you a peek at the badge over the next couple weeks. Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for the next round of reveals on Tuesday! Continue reading “Hackaday Superconference 2023: First Round Of Speakers Announced!” →

To Give Is Better Than To Receive

September 2, 2023 by Elliot Williams 24 Comments

Better to give a talk at a hacker event, that is. Or in your hackerspace, or even just to a bunch of fellow nerds whenever you can. When you give the talk, don’t be afraid to make it too “easy” to understand. Making a tough topic comprehensible is often the sign that you really understand it, after all, and it’s also a fantastic service to the audience. And also don’t be afraid that your talk isn’t “hard core” enough, because with a diverse enough crowd, there will absolutely be folks for whom it’s still entirely new, and they’ll be thankful.

These were the conclusions I got from talking to a whole range of people at Chaos Communication Camp the weekend before last, and it’s one of the great opportunities when you go to an event like this. At Camp, there were a number of simultaneous stages, and with so many talks that new ones are still being released. That meant that everyone had their chance to say their bit, and many many did.

And that’s great. Because it’s obvious that getting the work done, or diving deep into a particular topic, is part of the hacker experience, but it’s also equally important to share what you’ve gained with the rest of the community. The principle of spreading the knowledge is a cornerstone of our culture, and getting people up to talk about what they’ve learned is the manifestation of this cultural value. If you know something, say something!

Of course, when you’re not at a conference, you could be writing up your hacks and sending them in to the tips line (hint, hint!). That’ll work too.

Hackaday Berlin Was Bonkers

March 27, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

In celebration of the tenth running of the Hackaday Prize, we had a fantastic weekend event in Berlin. This was a great opportunity for all of the European Hackaday community to get together for a few days of great talks, fun show-and-tells, and above all good old fashioned sitting together and brainstorming. Of course there was the badge, and the location – a gigantic hackerspace in Berlin called MotionLab – even had a monstrous laser-eye octopus suspended from a gantry overhead. Everyone who came brought something to share or to show. You couldn’t ask for more.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the talks, so we’ll run down the highlights for you here. [Jenny List] is writing up a bunch of the badge hacks as we speak, so we’ll skip that for now. For the full experience, you just had to be there, but we’ll share with you what pictures we got. Enjoy!

Continue reading “Hackaday Berlin Was Bonkers” →

Hackaday Berlin: First Round Of Talks

March 7, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

We’re super excited to announce the first round of speakers for Hackaday Berlin! We’re set to convene on Friday night, March 24th for an evening warm up before the main show on Saturday, March 25. Featuring the triumphant return of Voja’s 4-bit badge, a crew of awesome speakers, lightning talks, workshops, music, food, badge hacking, and all the best of the Hackaday community, this will be a day to remember. And then we’ll chill out Sunday morning with a Bring-a-Hack brunch.

So without further ado: the first round of speakers!

Jiska Classen
Hacking Closed-Source: Reverse Engineering Real-World Products

Closed-source software is prevalent in our everyday lives, limiting our ability to understand how it works, which privacy implication it poses to the processed data, and addressing potential issues in time. Despite the growth of open-source movements, users often have no choice but to rely on closed-source solutions, e.g., for medical devices and IoT products. We’ll discuss key techniques to help you get started with reverse engineering. Hacking your own devices can be challenging, bricking a device is not uncommon, but so is celebrating the moments of a revived and modified device.

James Bruton
Being a Full-Time YouTuber

YouTube is my full-time job and has been for four years. I create STEM education content using everything from 3D printing, CNC, Welding, to Microcontrollers and Coding. Find out how I got started, how I make money, what goes on in the background, and what my future plans are. I’ll tell you how you can do it too!

Trammell Hudson
Hacking your dishwasher for cloudless appliances

Why does your dishwasher, laundry or coffee-pot need to talk to the cloud? In this presentation, Trammell Hudson shows how he reverse engineered the encrypted connections between Home Connect appliances and the Bosch-Siemens Cloud servers, and how you can control your own appliances with your self-hosted MQTT home automation system by extracting the devices’ authentication keys and connecting to their local websocket ports. No cloud required!

Bleeptrack
Oops, my project ended up in a museum

Parameterized design allows for the adaption of projects to different needs but can also change the aesthetic to a persons liking. Bleeptrack will walk you through the creation process and tools of her generative projects, talk about her experience manufacturing unique pieces and explains how to cope when your freshly finished project gets locked up in an art exhibition for a few months.

Ali Shtarbanov
Creating Hardware Development Platforms for Real-World Impact: FlowIO Platform

What does it really take do create and deploy a development platform for real-world impact? Why do we need development platforms and how can they democratize emerging fields and accelerate innovation? Why do most platform attempts fail and only very few succeed in terms of impact? I will discuss the key characteristics that any platform technology must have in order for it to be able to useful for diverse users. FlowIO was the winner of the 2021 Hackaday Grand Prize as well as over a dozen other engineering, research, and design awards.

Come join us!

You!

Whatever you’re up to.

We want you to bring your current project, world-changing ideas, or simply fun hacks for a 7-minute lightning talk!

2022 Hackaday Supercon: Final Talks Announced

October 20, 2022 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

The third and final round of the 2022 Supercon talks announcements brings us closer to a complete picture of the full spectrum of hacking awesomeness taking the stage in just a few weeks. (And we haven’t even announced the keynote yet!)

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops over the next couple weeks. Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for the next round of talk reveals next week! Continue reading “2022 Hackaday Supercon: Final Talks Announced” →