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10:01
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Hack a Day
The tickets have sold out even as the list of incredible speakers grows. Today we bring you the third dose of talks you’ll see at the Hackaday Superconference in November — whether you were lucky enough to grab a ticket, or will be watching the livestream, these eight will be speaking on topics from algorithmically-augmented live music performance to the hardware that captures the real world for display in VR and from leveraging the power of lookup tables to harnessing our engineering talent in a way that truly enriches humanity.
If you missed the two speaker announcements that have already come out, go back and take a look at those as well as the workshops being held during Supercon.
The Talks (Part Three of Many)
Mitch Altman
The Pros and Cons of Tech. Can We Design Tech that Serves Humanity
Technology is truly awesome! It is also a lot of fun. With the tools we, as humans, have made through the eons, we’ve become top-dog on our planet. But, at a great cost. It is mostly accepted that we have only 5 years to reverse climate change. How long till we no longer have any privacy. We have little time for anything but work because of all of our addictive and alienating “time-saving” devices we voluntarily choose to have in our lives. People report being less happy each decade. Soon, only 2% of the world’s wealth will be concentrated in only 0.1% of the population. The military uses anything and everything we create to spy, destroy, and kill for profit. This is not a pretty picture. What can we do? Is it possible to create technology to improve our lives? In this inspirational talk I will use personal experience to explore aspects of this important discussion.
Sara Adkins
Creating with the Machine: Algorithmic Composition for Live Performances
In a live concert setting, the movement and energy of performers add an important emotional element to the audience’s listening experience. Computer-generated music can achieve unique sounds and precise technique not possible by human musicians, yet it can feel alienating and impersonal due to a lack of human connection and spontaneity. “Creating with the Machine” is a set of compositions that combine algorithmic and traditional methods of music composition into live performances to explore how interactive generative algorithms can influence creativity in musical improvisation, and create a compelling listening experience for the audience. In this talk, I will introduce techniques for creating a meaningful data representation of a musician’s performance, and methods for using this input data to control a closed loop algorithmic composition.
Kate Morris
Beyond Blinky – Retro-Game Development for Conference Badges
So, you’ve done some badge coding, maybe using Arduino, and are looking for the next step to write interactive games using a TFT screen and some buttons and sensors? Using the open-source for the Lunar Lander badge (built for DEF CON 27) I will explain how we created the framework and how you can adapt it to write your own games for this badge or for your own conference badge. We’ll step through the process for developing a new game, and discuss some of the challenges we had in creating the Lunar Lander game.
Dave Young
Scrounging, Sipping, and Seeing Power
Powering low power and ultra-low power systems is more about system design than circuit design. Selecting the right power source, using the power effectively, and then validating that the power numbers are as expected is critical at an early stage since changes may trigger a system redesign (or product failure). I will review some of the typical design decisions to make, some general back-of-the-envelope figures, and some techniques on how to plan the power use and validate a prototype. We’ll discuss questions like: How can I decide if I should be on a primary battery, solar, or kinetic energy system? How can I estimate the total usable energy from a solar panel given real-world conditions? Do I need MPPT? And how can I estimate my total energy consumption?
Ruth Grace Wong
How to become a manufacturing engineer in your spare time
It’s one thing to prototype something for yourself, and entirely another to productionize a product for manufacturing. This talk is about my quest to become a manufacturing engineer. In the summer of 2016, I decided that I would do software at scale at my full time job, and hardware and objects at scale in my spare time. Since then, I’ve worked on many personal projects to get the intuitive physical feel for how things are made while documenting what I’ve learned, started writing about manufacturing for Supplyframe Hardware allowing me to tour factories and interview manufacturers, and started working part-time as a manufacturing engineer.
Kim Pimmel
Beyond the Rectangle: Building Cameras for the Immersive Future
Ever since the earliest days of photography, we’ve tried to capture and play back the world around us. Today, immersive technologies like AR and VR are pushing beyond the 2D image, seeking to replicate more and more of the human experience. This is driving growth in new imaging, sensory, and display technologies.
- Learn about some cameras I’ve made, trends in camera technology, and how building the Matrix is hard.
Scott Shawcroft
Supercharge Your Hardware (Old and New) with CircuitPython
CircuitPython makes programming hardware easier than ever by bringing the popular Python language to modern, inexpensive 32-bit microcontrollers. This doesn’t need to be limited to modern hardware though. By pairing a modern microcontroller running CircuitPython and a vintage computer, such as a GameBoy or Yamaha piano keyboard, you can unlock the unique characteristics of these vintage devices. In this talk, you’ll learn the basics of how CircuitPython makes coding easy, how it works under the hood, and how to extend CircuitPython with C. As an example, we’ll supercharge a Nintendo’s GameBoy with CircuitPython. By the end of the talk, you’ll be able to supercharge your own hardware project with CircuitPython.
Charles Lohr
Accomplishing the Impossible with LUTs.
- I’ve done some very bizarre and extreme things with microcontrollers over the last several years. From bit-banging (Tx and Rx) Ethernet on an ATtiny85 broadcasting video from an ESP8266 GPIO pin to writing USB stacks for chips that don’t have them, the most insane and counter-intuitive projects that have been successes have all had one thing in common. At the heart of the project is one or more lookup tables (LUTs). In computer science classes, we study algorithms like Dynamic Programming and we hear about LUTs, but we rarely discuss the true power of this game-changing tool. In this talk I will explore how to reform complicated problems in such a way to do processing faster and on smaller processors than you ever thought possible.
See You at Supercon!
We’re so excited to see everyone at Supercon this year. As mentioned above, tickets are sold out so if something comes up and you can’t make it, please request a ticket refund so we can make your spot available to people on the waitlist.
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10:01
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Hack a Day
You’re going to love the talks at the Hackaday Superconference this November. The ultimate hardware conference is all about hardware creation. The ten speakers below join the talks we announced last week and that’s still not even half of what you’ll see on the stages of Supercon. Add to that the superb workshops we announced early this week and you begin to ask yourself just how much awesome can really fit into a single weekend. Well, it’s three full days and we’d recommend arriving the day before for the unofficial festivities too!
Of course, you’ll need a ticket to ride. At the time of writing there were some available (we’ve left the teens and are headed for single digits), but no guarantee there will be any left when this article is published. We’ll be maintaining a waiting list though, so if you’re sitting on a ticket you just can’t use, please return it so someone else can take your spot.
Enough delay, let’s see what talks await us at 2019 Supercon!
The Talks (Part Two of Many)
Shelley Green
Pressure connections: crimping isn’t as simple as you thought.
Crimping is generally defined as the joining of two conductors by mechanical forces. At first, the process appears to be rather simple. However, deeper investigations reveal complex dynamics that operate at macroscopic, microscopic, and nanoscales. I will cover the basic theory for pressure connections, examine the role of mechanical properties for both conductivity and tensile strength, look at oxides and surface films, and consider the design challenges for tooling, testing, and validation of crimp quality.
Mike Harrison
Everything I’ve Learnt About LEDs.
LEDs are not all created alike. I will cover a wide range of practical techniques involved in using LEDs, in particular in the context of large-scale installations, hower much of it will be equally applicable to smaller projects. Topics include suitable LED types, drive circuitry, dimming techniques, gamma correction. There will be live demonstrations illustrating many of the areas covered.
Kerry Scharfglass
Basic Device Security for Basic Needs
It feels like every day we hear about an unbelievable new security vulnerability that allows an attacker to spy on your dog through a connected light bulb or program your toaster oven remotely. Some of these are quite elaborate, requiring researchers years to track down. But others are total no-brainers; “why didn’t the manufacturer just do X!”. In our IoT-ified world device security is more important than ever, but not every hardware product needs to be secured like an ATM inside a missile. I will discuss basic design practices and implementation tricks which are easy to incorporate into your product and provide a solid baseline of security against casual adversaries.
Sophy Wong
Made With Machines: 3D Printing & Laser Cutting for Wearable Electronics
Building tech for the human body is tricky! Whether it’s a fitness tracker or a costume, making hardware comfortable and durable enough to wear is a fascinating design challenge. I like to tackle this challenge with the help of machines! In this talk, I’ll share my recent projects that use 3D printing and laser cutting to create wearable tech with precision and high impact. I’ll talk about the design process and build techniques for using 3D printing and laser cutting to create custom parts that are comfortable and perfect for wearables.
Jen Costillo
The Future is Us: Why the Open Source And Hobbyist Community Will Drive Hi-Tech Consumer Products
Where did we the OSHW and hobbyist community come from and what have we accomplished? The truth is we are driving modern consumer electronics industry. From prototyping, to tools to media and training, we have changed it all. I’ll talk about the reasons why, our impact and our future, as well as how to avoid becoming what the older industry is: obsolete.
Timothy Ansell
Xilinx Series 7 FPGAs Now Have a Fully Open Source Toolchain!
You should be super excited about FPGAs and how they allow open source projects to do hardware development. In this talk I will cover a basic introduction into what an FPGA is and can do, what an FPGA toolchain is, and how much things sucked when the only option was to use proprietary toolchains. The SymbiFlow project changed this and I’ll discuss what is currently supported including a demo of Linux on a RISC-V core with a cheap Xilinx FPGA development board.
Chris Gammell
Gaining RF Knowledge: An Analog Engineer Dives into RF Circuits
Starting my engineering career working on low level analog measurement, anything above 1kHz kind of felt like “high frequency”. This is very obviously not the case. I’ll go over the journey of discovering and rediscovering higher frequency techniques and squaring them with the low level measurement basics that I learned at the beginning my career. This will include a discussion of Maxwell’s equations and some of the assumptions that we make when we’re working on different types of circuits. You will find this information useful in the context of RF calculations around cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth and other commonly available communication methods.
Shanni Prutchi and Jeff Wood
Adventures in Building Secure Networks from Blockchain Transactions
In our talk, we will show how we designed and built a message authentication system operating on ADANA (Automated Detection of Anomalous Network Activity) and Hyperledger (a “smart contract” form of Blockchain) all hosted on just two servers that were no longer being used by Rowan College. The system was built using Docker, syslog-ng, Hyperledger Fabric and Composer, and a beta version of Splunk. This system is accessible by nodes wired into the network which interact with the hyperledger through a web browser. We’ll present the infrastructure of the network, details of the hyperledger, an explanation of all the tools used by the system, a walkthrough of how the system works, reflections on the particular challenges of this project, and what we see in the future of this technology.
John McMaster
Replicating a Secure Telephone Key
The STU-III secure telephone was originally developed by the NSA for defense use in the 1980’s but also saw use in unclassified commercial products like the Motorola Sectel 9600\. However, they require difficult to find electromechanical keys. I will describe the process of creating a compatible key for the Sectel 9600 by reverse engineering the mechanical and electrical design and subsequently fabricating it. Along the way I’ll discuss low volume manufacturing issues and strategies to overcome.
We Want You!
Don’t miss out. One weekend as one of so many amazing people will inspire you and recharge your creative batteries for the coming year of hardware hacking. See you at Supercon!
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9:01
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Hack a Day
Build something cool and pick up new skills from the workshops at the Hackaday Superconference. But decide right now, workshops will sell out and tickets to the conference itself are nearly gone.
You must have a Superconference ticket in order to purchase a workshop ticket; buy one right now if you haven’t already. We think this is “The Year of the FPGA” and we hope you do too — the badge is based on an FPGA running a RISC-V core and using Open Source tools. Try your hand at FPGA for the first time, hone your skills in the advanced course, or design synthesizer circuits using all of those gates in workshops using the badge itself.
But of course it’s not all about the badge. Jump into quantum computing, learn how to use living hinges in your 3D printed designs, sharpen your low-level C, and sit down at the Scanning Electron Microscope. You can brush up on capacitive touch design, learn about rolling-your-own USB devices, hack together a malicious hardware implant, and get your projects connected to the cloud.
Space in these workshops is limited so make sure to sign up before all the seats are taken. The base price for workshops is $15 (basically a “skin in the game” price to encourage those who register to show up). Any tickets priced above that base is meant to cover the material expense of the workshop. Here’s what we have planned:
Introduction to FPGA Hacking on the Supercon Badge
Piotr Esden-Tempski, Sylvain Munaut, Mike Walters, Sophi Kravitz
In this basic FPGA badge workshop you will get a quick introduction on how to add and program new virtual hardware on your Supercon badge. While a microcontroller always has a fixed set of hardware, the badge has an FPGA that can be reprogrammed and the RISC-V microcontroller inside the FPGA can be changed. In this workshop you will learn how to synthesize an existing IP core to your RISC-V core on the badge and how to use that new added hardware.
(To include as many people as possible, this workshop will be held in a least four identical sessions, please choose one.)
Introduction to Quantum Computing
Kitty Yeung
You’ll learn the basic physics and math concepts needed to get started with quantum computing. There will also be coding so please bring your computers. Instructions on installing Quantum Development Kit will be provided prior to the workshop.
USB Reverse Engineering: Ultra-Low-Cost Edition
Kate Temkin & Mikaela Szekely
Interested in learning more about the inner workings of USB? In this workshop we’ll cover some of the basic, low-level details of USB, then go into detail on how you can interact with (and create!) USB devices as a hobbyist, engineer, or hacker.
SEM Scan Electron Microscope
Adam McCombs
Come get hands-on with an Electron Microscope! In this workshop you will get a chance to get on console on a JEOL JSM-840 Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) capable of resolving 5nm details. We’ll cover all aspects of running an SEM, be that setup and alignment, sample preparation, or imaging.
Logic Noise: Build Silly Synths in the FPGA Fabric of the Supercon Badge
Elliot Williams
Most FPGA programming classes start off with the basics of logic circuits and how they’re implemented in an FPGA, and then jump 30 years into the present where FPGA design consists of downloading someone else’s IP and ironing out the timing bugs. But not this one! We’re going to stay fully stuck in the past: playing around with the combinatorial logic possibilities inside the Superconference badge’s FPGA fabric to make glitchy musical instruments. If you followed Hackaday’s Logic Noise series, you know how to make crazy noisemakers by abusing silicon on breadboards. In this workshop, we’ll be coding up the silicon and the breadboard. Whoah.
Prototyping Malicious Hardware on the Cheap
Joe FitzPatrick
Alleged multi-million-dollar hardware attacks might catch headlines, but what can we DIY with limited time and budget? We’ll have all the tools you need to prototype, build, and test both the hardware and software of a custom malicious hardware implant.
Advanced FPGA Hacking on the Supercon Badge
Piotr Esden-Tempski
In this advanced FPGA badge workshop you will learn how to develop your own simple FPGA IP core. You already know how to program microcontrollers and how memory-mapped IO works, but you want to go beyond that and develop your own hardware? This class is an introduction on how to write, synthesize and add new hardware periphery on your Supercon badge.
Flexure Lecture: designing springy and bi-stable mechanisms
Amy Qian
Flexures are used all around us to provide simple spring force, constrain degrees-of-freedom of motion, make satisfying clicky sounds, and much more. In this workshop, you’ll learn about basic flexure design, see lots of examples of how you might use them in your future projects, and assemble your very own laser-cut gripper mechanism.
Microcontrollers the Hard Way: Blink Like a Pro
Shawn Hymel (sponsored by Digi-Key)
Registers, timers, and interrupts, oh my! Get those semicolon-punching fingers ready, because we’re writing some C. Arduino, MicroPython, CircuitPython, and MakeCode have been steadily making microcontrollers easier to use and more accessible for a number of years. While ease-of-use is thankfully making embedded systems available to anyone, it means that writing optimized code still remains somewhat of a mystery, buried beneath layers of abstraction. In this workshop, we’ll write a simple fading LED program using registers, timers, and interrupts in an AVR ATtiny microcontroller. This workshop will help you understand some of the low-level, inner workings of microcontrollers and start to write space efficient and computationally quick code.
DK IoT Studio Using the ST NUCLEO-L476RG Sensor Demo
Robert Nelson (sponsored by Digi-Key)
This workshop is about developing an end-to-end solution, from sensor to the cloud. Learn about all the different elements involved in the design, from the sensor, to the processor, to connectivity, cloud storage, and data visualization. Participants will learn to develop an IoT application using the ST NUCLEO-L476RG Development Board. Learn to use Digi-Key IoT Studio design environment to connect easily to the cloud and visualize your data in real time. The new tool has a graphical user interface that allows for easy drag-and-drop functionality. Participants will be able to send data to the cloud thru the development environment and visualize the data.
From Outdated to Outstanding: Easily Add a Touchpad to Your Next Design
TBD (sponsored by Microchip)
What if you could easily make your design more advanced, and let’s face it, cooler? You can, and we can show you how by replacing your old-school pushbuttons with capacitive touch buttons or touchpad! In this workshop, we will practice how to use Microchip’s graphic code generator to produce the code for a simple water-tolerant touchpad. The capacitive touch sensing expert from Microchip will also introduce some tips and tricks of how to lay out a touch button. Come and find out everything you need to know about adding a touch button to your next design!
Superconference workshops tend to sell out extremely quickly. Don’t wait to get your ticket.
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10:01
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Hack a Day
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!
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10:01
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Hack a Day
DEF CON has become the de facto showplace of the #Badgelife movement. It’s a pageant for clever tricks that transform traditional green rectangular circuit boards into something beautiful, unique, and often times hacky.
Today I’ve gathered up about three dozen badge designs seen at DC27. It’s a hint of what you’ll see in the hallways and meetups of the conference. From hot-glue light pipes and smartphone terminal debugging consoles to block printing effects and time of flight sensors, this is a great place to get inspiration if you’re thinking of trying your hand at unofficial badge design.
If you didn’t catch “The Badgies” you’ll want to go back and read that article too as it rounds up the designs I found to be the craziest and most interesting including the Car Hacking Village, Space Force, SecKC, DC503, and Frankenbadge. Do swing by the Hands-On articles for the AND!XOR badge and for [Joe Grand’s] official DC27 badge. There was also a lot of non-badge hardware on display during Hackaday’s Breakfast at DEF CON so check out that article as well.
Enough preamble, let’s get to the badges!
The DC27 Multi Pass badge has a beautiful E-ink display and is driven by an ESP32 and of course modeled after the official ID cards from the movie The Fifth Element. The reverse-mount LEDs also have capacitive touch areas on the top layer which are a neat trick of copper mesh rather than a solid pour. [CromulonB] set out to produce 200 of the badges, but netted just 170 in time for DEF CON. This is still a success as it was about 25% more than were claimed in the crowd funding campaign.
Another homage to the Sci-Fi movie, the Fifth Element Stones Badge is an incredibly ambitious undertaking that reaches into three dimensions and adds motion. The badge itself is just a platform with power and an ATtiny84 microcontroller. The stones are add-ons and have resistive dividers allowing the base to sense which one has been plugged in. Each stone lights up and the three shards near the top open up. The [GoonBoxBadge] team of two people hand assembled 200 of these over many months.
The Arc Badge was one of the most beautiful at the con this year. [Twinkle Twinkie] teamed up with [Wire Engineer] to complete the design. A PIC16F15344 programmed in assembly brings 32 color modes to an incredible PCB design that uses 0.8mm FR4 as a diffuser, and brass fasteners that sandwich a 3D printed spacer between that and the base PCB where all the components reside. 248 of these badges were produced.
The Stargate badge is based on a Kinetis KL27 microcontroller and five shift registers to drive 70 LEDs on the front layer, and 37 on the back layer (lighting up the glyphs around the circumference). [KeeperOfBits] built 120 of these badges.
This year’s DC Zia is a laser theremin synth badge. It uses a VL53L0X time of flight sensor for proximity sensing, powered by a BMD-340 module from Rigado. They made 75 of these badges.
The DC801 HCRN badge is inspired by The Expanse TV show. It’s a game where you walk around on the screen and fix broken parts of the ship/badge. Five people worked together on the badge design, but there was plenty of help packaging the 375 badges that were produced.
Saw the Badge is powered by one of Sean Hodgins’ HCC modules based around a SAM D21 chip. The diffuser is hot glue to give the rear-mount LEDs a nice look. The cheeks are 20 & 24 LEDs respectively and use and ISSI 36-channel LED driver to control everything. The cassette tape is an add-on and LEDs around the two tape reels are animated to mimic the tape playing. Twenty-five of these were all hand-placed by [MagicStoneTech].
The DC Shoot Badge is a reissue of the shoot badge from DC23 which is a personal electronics device for use at a shooting range. It has a microphone on board for shot counting, a shot timer, mechanical tilt sensor for screen orientation, and is all driven by a PIC16F1709. The design is by [Gigs] who produced 250 of them… the final assembly included 5,000 hand-soldered joints done the same week as the con.
The Tron Badge is based on a Recognizer from the movie. It has a completely integrated Bus Pirate that was demonstrated on Android phone terminal app. At the heart of the badge is an ATmega328 which reads data from the identity disk add-on to scroll a message on the 8 x 12 white LED matrix and drive the animation patterns for 16 RGB LEDs. [Sodium_Hydrogen] began production in June but problems with incorrect parts during assembly delayed completion until after the con.
The team behind the White Dragon Noodle Bar badge found some really neat ways to alter the look of LEDs. The faceplate is 3D printed and provides baffles that were filled with hot glue as a diffuser. This, combined with the white silk screen that helps reflect the light out through the faceplate, makes for a look worthy of the Blade Runner aesthetic that inspired it. Twenty of these badges were produced.
The Blueteam village badge is a WiFi honeypot. A Raspberry Pi zero provides the connectivity, running HoneyDB to collect and upload the data. The screen itself is a really clever use of a shell script menu. This project by [Jeff Yestrumskas] has been in the works for over a year, with 250 badges produced in total.
The Enterprise Badge showed off a very interesting take on using FR4 as a diffuser for reverse-mount LEDs. That trick is being done all the time, but if you look at the leading edge of the warp drives on this badge you’ll see that exposing the FR4 near an edge for this purpose give a new and interesting effect. 150 total badges were made, half of them kits, the other half populated with skillet reflow soldering. This is impressive because there are components on both sides of the board. To make this happen, Teflon blocks were used to hold the PCB up off of the skillet so as not to make direct contact with already-soldered bottom-side components.
Da Bomb badge is from the makers of last year’s Ides of DEF CON badge and uses the same beautiful screen. Board details are quite interesting as the red silk screen on matte black solder mask is something I haven’t seen before. The badge has an audio playback engine and can be used as a DTMF dialer.
The DEADPOOL mini badge gets its juice from a CR2450 coin cell. It has an MCP23017 constant-current LED driver that is commanded through I2C by the ATtiny85 that is also on the board. 200 of these were produced.
Sometimes you’ve just got to hack on what’s around. [Greymanhw] was given this green PCB by someone at DEF CON last year. He has no idea what it’s for but has repurposed it to host the 555 timer and shift register that drive 10 point-to-point wired LEDs.
Last year the DC Furs badge turned a lot of heads with their goggle-shaped LED array which looked spectacular. That concept returned to this year’s badge, but the host PCB for the electronics did away with the furry part of the furs badge. This opened up the doors for faceplate PCBs that sit right on top, acting as a diffuser for the LED array, and providing an artistic canvas to customize the look of your badge.
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Technically this is an addon, but with an OLED screen and its own EFM8 microcontroller, this certainly feels like a badge. The GAT Nametag (designed by [True] of the Whiskey Pirate Crew) will display your name on the screen, but also monitors the ADXL345 accelerometer and tilts each letter so that the name is always on the level.
The Internet of Batteries badge is another [True] design but this one is a bit backwards in most ways. With the style of a Duracell, its intent is to be a battery-source for either another add-on or for other badges themselves, feeding VCC on the add-on header. The image above was taken without a Lithium battery installed.
The Hack 4 Kids badge was originally designed for GrrCON and later went on to sell about half of the 200 badges produced through a crowd funding campaign. The ESP32 brings WiFi and Bluetooth for connectivity, and can be programmed in the Arduino IDE via a USB port on the badge to help get kids into hacking.
This is what this year’s Hack For Satan badge looks like. It’s coin-cell powered and has that popular Rigado module to give it interactivity. I didn’t catch up with the badge creators this year, but when I saw these in the wild they were being gathered in groups of five to trigger the interactive elements.
Using PCB as a medium for art is sometimes meh and other times mind-blowing. This is the latter. 125 Skully badges were made by [Nick Pisarro] who designed them as a one-sided circuit so the skull art wouldn’t be disturbed by the circuit itself. The pins are a commodity project that’s superglued to the back of the badge.
It’s always popcorn time with the Popcorn Bucket badge. The backlit kernels look spectacular nested into a plastic popcorn box cut down to size. Within the popcorn, there are twelve add-on headers but I think it looks better without the extras in place. These were built by [Kredence] and [Ajax_409].
The illuminati badge by [Kredence] was one of my favorites last year. Here’s the new version, which uses an interesting offset header and 3D printed baffles to keep the light in the center of the eye and not on the edges of the board. I can’t remember why I don’t have an image of this one lit up, but I think they just weren’t quite ready in time for DC27. Next year?
The monarch and sovereign badges are a nice middle-ground between electronic and non-electronic badges.
The DC614 badges is designed as a shield for the OrangePi Zero that powers it. This is a Logitech dongle spoofer, taking advantage of the Mousejack vulnerability in the dongle firmware that has been patched but is rarely upgraded by users and there are a ton of these dongles in the wild! There were 30 of this badge produced.
During Hackaday’s Breakfast at DEF CON meetup I ran into [Robert Ballecer] who I haven’t met before but am very familiar with through his appearances on the This Week in Tech network. He brought along his Lanyard Funk Unit badge that uses a Nano pro to light up a 24 RGB LED ring covered with a 3D printed diffuser. He made 10 of these in total.
The Cylon badge by [TeamBazooka] scans for humans using 48 LEDs driven by an STM32. Only three of these badges were ever made.
The TV3Y3 badge is meant to be a handy way to experiment with AR/VR thanks to the fiducials on the front and back of the board. 118 of these were made, with an ATtiny85 driving the charlieplexed matrix of twelve LEDs.
The Pixel badge is made to look like a really large WS2812b — the addressable RGB LEDs that cascade data along a string of the components. Anyone who has looked closely at these will immediately recognize the die bonding design of the add-on, and the LED strip design of the host board. For what it’s worth, I really like the arc of resistors around the coin cell holder on the back, it’s a great touch!
A few hundred of these Madlabs badges were made, but beyond that I don’t have more info for you.
And finally, the Terrible Ideas Badge, of which 200 were built for DEF CON 26. It has three capacitive touch pads connected to the ATmega328 but they’re not yet operational. This one is for blinky enjoyment.
The name comes from the fact that making the choice to build an unofficial conference badge is a terrible idea. I think that’s a fitting place to end the article. Yes, making many many badges is a terrible idea, but the payoff is an adventure into a lot of manufacturing challenges you would otherwise not face, and an introduction to a really fun world where electronics geeks try to outdo one another in a supportive way. It’s the demoscene of small-run electronics and so far, the biggest stage for this art form is DEF CON. You’d better get working on your design for DC28!
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Hack a Day
A badge modelled after the handle of a light sabre? Yes Please! This Star Wars themed hardware is the work of hardware designer Thomas Flummer for the 2019 BornHack conference held in Denmark last month. (Check out my roundup of the event if this is the first you’ve heard of it.)
It’s not a badge but a light sabre! The front of the BornHack 2019 badge.
It fits the hand nicely, and with clever side-on placement of the two AA battery holders (a trick we first saw with the 2016 Hackday Superconference badge) it also keeps any protruding solder joints away from clothing. In the centre of the badge is the 240×240 pixel colour display that also hides the Silicon Labs Happy Gecko processor and its surrounding components. Three buttons at the edge of the board to the left of the screen are a nice fit for your thumb when holding it in your left hand — a good choice if you happen to leave your right hand behind on a visit to the Cloud City of Bespin.
Between the battery holders lies a four-way joystick, two buttons, and a 6-pin add-on connector. Above it is a micro SD card socket and a micro USB socket, and above them are an IR emitter and receiver. All of the hardware is on the front of the PCB, with no components on the reverse (other than the solder joints for the batteries). But it is there you will find a set of exposed pads for serial and I2C interfaces.
A Lightweight Toolchain Makes Coding Easy
The badge from behind.
Inserting a pair of AA cells and pressing the power button brings up a BornHack logo to the screen, and pressing a button reveals a menu. As shipped there is an event schedule, a button test, a bitmap display, and an IR data dump app.
As you’d expect, this is a hackable badge for which owners can write their own software. It’s a development of previous BornHack badges, and the firmware developer Emil Renner Berthing has managed to pull off the impossible and make it accessible without resorting to an interpreted language such as MicroPython. A single apt-get quickly installs the arm-none-eabi-gcc toolchain, and building your own C apps and adding them to the menu is very straightforward. I did it in my tent at the event using a Chromebook, something that experience has taught me is usually very difficult indeed.
The Usual Teething Troubles
Some of my fellow BornHack 2019 badge production line workers.
The badge itself then is a simple and well designed one without too much complexity but with simplicity enough for easy development. There’s a further story to its development, which the pair were able to tell me over a drink at the Chaos Communication Camp a few days later in Germany. They are both veterans of badge production, but they still had tales of component supply issues and time constraints. In particular there were some components which could not be sourced in time for PCBA, leading to none of the boards being complete at the start of the camp. It’s not surprising that the community came out to help pull the project toward completion. The badge assembly crew included Danes, a substantial group from the Netherlands village, and I joined in the fun as well. On the first day we soldered a few surface mount parts, the display, battery, and SAO connector on nearly 500 badges, with fewer failures than fingers of one hand.
I asked about the badge hardware, for instance why it has no expansion capability beyond the SAO. The answer was simple enough, the Silicon Labs processor is a capable device but is limited in its number of pins leading to no spares being available. As it was some pins were shared, for example between SD card and infra-red. The IR is a little unusual, instead of using a subcarrier as your TV remote control does it is simply an LED and phototransistor hooked up to GPIOs. This lends it a very short range, but in practice this does not matter as transactions are intended to be made at close proximity.
In conclusion then, the BornHack badge is a simple design that does its job well and is easier to program than you might expect. It benefits from its heritage in previous BornHack events, and makes a handsome aesthetic addition to a badge collection.
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Hack a Day
This is a fantastic summer for hacker camps and I was very happy to make it to BornHack this year. This week-long camp attracts hackers from all over Europe and the mix of a few hundred friends and soon-to-be friends who gathered on the Danish island of Fyn delivered a unique experience for the curious traveller.
The camp takes place at the Hylkedam Danish scout camp, located in a forest amid the rolling Danish famland not too far from the small town of Gelsted. It’s a few kilometres from a motorway junction, but easy enough to find after the long haul up from the UK via the Channel Tunnel. As an aside, every bored cop between France and the Danish border wanted to stop my 20-year-old right-hand-drive Volkswagen on UK plates, but soon lost interest after walking up to the passenger side and finding no driver. It seems Brits are considered harmless, which is good to hear.
Hylkedam is at the end of a long dirt track, which opens out into a spacious campsite with good quality permanent facilities. At a guess it is a former sand quarry or similar as it seems to be set below the level of the forrest, as well as having what appears to be a former railway cutting that conveniently housed the bar.
![The hot tub in its woodland surroundings became a popular place to unwind. Thanks [Jesper] for the image.](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/bornhack-2019-hot-tub-1.jpg?w=800)
The hot tub in its woodland surroundings became a popular place to unwind. Thanks [
Jesper] for the image.
A wellness area was placed in the forest, including a wood-fired hot tub for a unique experience among hacker camps. There were three camping zones separated by trees, the main site, with noisy and quiet fields on opposite sides of it. With only a few hundred attendees who by no means filled the available space there was plenty of room for expansion here. As one of very few Brits I pitched myself between the Labitat Copenhagen hackerspace village and the Netherlands village, and threw my lot in with my Dutch friends.
A Less Frantic Pace Of Life Means More Time For Important Stuff
This should give a flavour of the rural atmosphere of the Hylkedam site.
The larger camps are very high-energy affairs, in which everyone is busy showing of their work and in which it feels impossible to catch everything. By contrast this smaller camp was much more relaxed, with an emphasis on hanging out and more time to get to know people. My impression was that more of the attendees were from a software or infosec background than a hardware one, so some of the builds such as EMF Camp’s Hacky Racers or CCCamp’s home made trains were absent. This did not detract from the experience for the visitor because there was still plenty with which to keep occupied in the talk schedule, and if that was not enough there were still the sights of Denmark to provide plenty of distraction.
Talks on Physical Keys, Sustainability, and Retrocomputing
The
Star Wars styled BornHack 2019 badge I’ll be covering in an upcoming article.
BornHack has a full talk programme and videos of each are ready to watch online. There were many highlights for me beginning with [Mike]’s retrocomputing talk which leaves me wondering if I’m more amazed by the depth of his knowledge or the extent of his retrocomputing collection. One of the evening activities was a Hacker Jeopardy event over three nights during which he set a series of retrocomputing rounds, I’m pleased to say that the Hackaday community had educated me enough that I was able to answer most of those that came my way.
[Igor Nikolic] had a much more serious talk subject, that of sustainability in an uncertain future, and how the hacker community can play a part in it. It’s a sobering prospect, that factors such as climate change could significantly undermine many of the things which we take for granted, and that our community’s skills could become useful as a matter of imperative rather than for our personal edification.
[Jos Weyers]’ talk on the ease of duplicating keys from photographs was both entertaining and sobering. Any of us who have spent time around our community’s locksport enthusiasts will know how little faith to place in locks and padlocks, but he gives an extra dimension by taking us through a series of high-profile incidents in which pictures of sensitive keys have been shared with the public. We find that there are commercial services that will store images of your keys in the cloud, and he ends with a warning that we should all be more responsible in how we expose our physical keys. A couple of days later during my trip to Legoland in nearby Hylkedam, I was amused to notice the keys to a ride on the table next to a staff member, where any passing hacker could snap a picture of it.
A seven-day camp has a very different flavour from the shorter camps I am used to, and coupled with the smaller number of attendees it raises the promise of a camp in which you can get to know most of the attendees. I found the Danish way of running a camp to be entirely to my taste, and It’s an event that I’ll certainly consider returning to even though it’s a bit of a trek. It’s as much a relaxing camping holiday in the Danish countryside as it is a hacker camp. Will I see you there in 2020? I hope so!
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Hack a Day
While wandering through CCCamp last weekend, in between episodes of forcing Marmite on the unwary, I ran into the well-known Hackaday.io user [Prof. Fartsparkle]. In a last-minute sprint leading up to the con he built himself the Numberwang badge to join in the colorful after-dark festivities with beautiful board artwork and remarkably enjoyable backlit LED display.
The Numberwang badge itself is a clone of the Adafruit Itsy Bitsy sporting an ATSAMD21G18 CPU and running CircuitPython. It has an LED strip on the reverse shining through the bare FR4 as a diffuser, and the Numberwang effect of selecting random numbers is achieved by a host of random touchable numbers sprinkled across its front. For something he freely admits was a last minute project, we think he’s done a pretty good job!
For those mystified by Numberwang, it is a fictional gameshow from a BBC TV comedy programme that involves contestants answering the quizmaster with random numbers. It joins a rich tradition of such hilarious nonsense, and has as a result become cult television.
If you’re really getting into Numberwang, don’t forget that it’s inspired a programming language.
If you happen to be at CCCamp19 next week. I will be there, wearing this with a little name badge shitty addon.
(has sound)#badgelife pic.twitter.com/ml3S2m2Rhg
— Timon | was at #cccamp19 (@timonsku) August 16, 2019
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Hack a Day
We’ve reported on the world of electronic badges here at Hackaday since their earliest origins in [Joe Grand]’s work for DEF CON 14 in 2006. In that time we’ve seen an astonishing variety of creations, covering everything from abstract artwork to pure functionality in a wearable device. But it’s not been quite so often that we’ve looked at the other side of the BadgeLife coin, so it’s fascinating to read [John Adams]’ account of the work that went into the production of this year’s 500-piece run of the Da Bomb DEF CON indie badge.
In it, [John] goes over scheduling worries, component sourcing issues, PCB assembly delays, and an in-depth look into the finances of such a project. In case anyone is tempted to look at Badgelife as the route to millions, it rapidly becomes apparent that simply not losing too much money is sometimes the best that can be hoped for. There were a few design problems, one of them being that the SAO I2C bus was shared with the LED controller, resulting in some SAOs compatibility issues. In particular the AND!XOR DOOM SAO had its EEPROM erased, creating something of a headache for the team.
A surprise comes in the distribution: obviously shipping is expensive, so you’d think badge pick-ups at the con would be straightforward alternative. Unfortunately, they became something of a millstone in practice, and organising them was a Herculean task. Astoundingly, some paying customers didn’t bother turn up for their badges. Which was especially infuriating since the team lost valuable conference time waiting for them.
Some of you are BadgeLife creators and will nod sagely at this. Still more of you will wish you were BadgeLife creators and find it a useful primer. For everyone else it’s a fascinating read, and maybe makes us appreciate our badges a bit more.
The images may have departed, but just to return to the origins of BadgeLife, here’s our coverage of that first [Joe Grand] badge.
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Hack a Day
What do hackers do on vacation? What do hackers do whenever they have free time? What do you love to do? That’s right. But how much more fun would it be if you could get together with 5,000 other hackers, share your crazy projects and ideas, eat, drink, dance, swim, and camp out all together for five days, naturally with power and Internet? That’s the idea of the Chaos Communication Camp, and it’s a once-in-four-years highlight of hacker life.
Held not too far outside of Berlin, the Camp draws heavily on hackers from Europe and the UK, but American hackers have been part of the scene since almost the beginning. (And Camp played an important role in the new-wave hackerspaces in the US, but that’s another story.) It’s one thing to meet up with the folks in your local hackerspace and work together on a project or brainstorm the next one, but it’s entirely a different thing when you’re drawing on hackers from all over the world. There was certainly more to see and do at Camp than you could in a month, not to mention in only five days, and this could be overwhelming. But if you dig in, the sense of community that came from shared effort and shared interests was the real take-home. And nearly everything at Camp should have its own article on Hackaday.
A Five-Day Rave
First, let’s clear up any misconceptions about the word “camp” here. This is not your Ralph Waldo Emerson solitude-of-nature type camping. CCCamp is an intentional mix of early 90s open-air techno parties with computer dorkery. A high-power disco ball turns a stand of trees into an enchanted forest. The outdoor laser show down by the marina had a fantastic liquid sky laser effect, and I have no idea how much fogging fluid was being used. There were more than a few bars, a couple clubs, a room full of pinball machines, and blinking lights that can surely be seen from outer space.
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But there was also a lake for swimming, trees under which one could sit to get out of the sun and recompile GNURadio, and some fantastic kids’ playgrounds and equipment. Mike and I needed someplace quiet to record a podcast episode and we took refuge in a clay pre-processing plant. (The park where Camp was held is an abandoned brick-manufacturing plant, now a museum and recreational area.) There were dedicated quiet zones, both for camping and hacking. In short, you could escape the rave if you wanted to. What little sleep I got, though, I got with earplugs.
Sitting Around the Electric Campfire
Anecdote time! After a moderately long evening of wandering around, drinking, dancing, and talking, our small troop ended up back at the hardware hacking area. Ole had just finished a badge-hacking workshop, and had electrodes attached to his temples so that you could track his left-right eye movements on the badge from the muscle activity. Kliment was cleaning up from a day of surface-mount soldering classes. Felix was there with his awesome self-aware network synthesizer that had drawn us into conversation the day before over lunch. It turns out he knew some of the other folks in our group, and they spent some time reminiscing. We finally got the lowdown on the autonomous techno-making cart that we’d been hearing around camp for the last few days, and I was pouring grappa shots. Next door, the Belgian Embassy was making absolutely delicious fries and handing them out to all comers, following their super-secret recipe (160 °C pre-cook, rest two minutes, 180 °C until golden brown).
Everyone has their own Camp stories, but that one hour of one night sums it up for me. And this, or something like this, was happening everywhere all around Camp, all the time. Everyone brought things to share, or to work on together, or to teach. (Which is really the same thing, right?) I got to meet people whose work I respect greatly, but whom I’ve never gotten the chance to meet in person. Old friends mixed with new friends over good food and drink. One project completed inspired two or three more for the future. It was like good idea overflow, and that’s the point. How would you rather spend a vacation?
Participatory
Before Camp starts, there’s a big empty field and off in one corner by the lake is a small playground for kids who visit the brickworks museum. Over a few days, hundreds of tons of material were shipped in, transforming the entire area into a playground for slightly older kids. Have you always wanted to play around with trains? Here’s a narrow-gauge railroad for you to work with. Want to climb ridiculously high towers? Someone has to attach the microwave antenna to the top of the old smokestack. Want to learn to solder surface-mount parts like a pro? There’s a workshop for that. High voltage? You’re covered at Camp.
But the younger kids weren’t left out either. There was a kids zone to make the adults jealous, where they also got to work on projects or play all day, with food and live children’s bands, naturally. Last time, in 2015, one of the kids’ projects was to build a wood-fired brick oven to make pizza in. It was still useable this Camp, so they had to make air rockets and POV poi instead, but at least they got to eat good pizza. As a father myself, it makes me tremendously happy to see the little hackers running around getting dirty with duct-tape stickers and their parents’ phone numbers on the back. I’m bringing my son next time.
The most amazing aspect of Camp is that it’s almost entirely volunteer run. The Angel system was largely the same as at the Chaos Communication Congresses, which take place every year just before New Years. People volunteered their time, running shifts as varied as tending bar, recording or translating the talks, or providing medical assistance when needed. In exchange, Angels got a sweet t-shirt and a place in “Heaven”, where there’s full catering and other perks. Angel shifts could also be made up on the fly: if something needed doing, a quick trip to Heaven sorted that out. For instance, driving the old diesel locomotive around the tracks turned out to require some real training, not to mention sitting next to a hot engine in the mid-day sun. It became an Angel shift. Problem solved. If something needed doing at Camp, someone would do it. And if something didn’t go smoothly, you can bet that there are already plans to make it work better next time.
Communication
Returning back to the “middle C” in Chaos Communication Camp, one of the most vital projects at camp is the phone infrastructure. In Europe, wireless phones — the kind that plug into a base station that plugs into the wall — all use the DECT standard. If you’ve still got a landline in Europe, you have one or two of these kicking around. And due to some amazing open-source hackery by the Osmocom team long ago, and backend database and services from Eventphone, you could bring your phone from home, register it on the network, and you’re good to go. If a cell phone is more your style, Phone Ops were also selling SIM cards for a few euros that could get you GSM through 4G on the completely open-source base stations. Everyone who registered got a four-digit number, and that was undeniably the easiest way to reach people at Camp.
Meanwhile, the telephone exchange provided a low-tech but truly fun telephony experience. The Chaosvermittlung is an antique switchboard connected to an uncountable number of WWII-era field telephones — the kind in a metal box that you crank to ring the operator and then push to talk. They also hooked into the camp’s DECT and GSM systems, so you could place a call from a hand-cranked box, through the operator, to LTE. As far as I could tell, they had someone operating the switchboard all the time. Two friends of mine even had a line run directly to their camper. It was glorious. Incidentally, even though a phone only requires two wires, Ethernet cable was used just because it’s cheap.
Chaos Post was in full swing as well. You could mail postcards both within camp and to the outside world. The CCC even got a deal with the German post office and got custom stamps made. You had your choice between high tech and low tech: you could swing by the Post office and type out a card on one of two manual typewriters, or you could fill in a form online that would generate a physical postcard. An ad-hoc volunteer operation, chances were good that if you came by the post office you’d get put to work delivering mail to someone near your tent. Addresses read like “the green tent near the Polish village” and somehow postcards got delivered. Besides getting to wear the cool yellow Post hat, delivering mail was a great way to meet people.
Oh, and the talks! Throughout the camp, formal presentations were live-streamed to the world, and have since been edited, translated, subtitled, and made available for you on the media server. I can’t think of another conference that does video as well and as seamlessly as the Chaos crew, and their Video Operations folks were at the top of their game.
Never too much blinkie!
All of this was done by hackers who were doing it all just for the fun of it, though some of them also do the same for their day jobs. How often do you get to be video editor, or help run a cellphone network? Play around in the infrastructure? Wouldn’t that be cool? You’ll need training, but that’s half the point.
See You in 2023!
An event the size of Camp simply can’t take place every summer. And that’s probably okay because it makes it more special, like the Olympics or the World Cup. I was a little bit surprised when I started doing the math: this is the 20th anniversary of the Chaos Communication Camp, and it occurs every four years. That means there have been only six Camps, and yet it feels like a tradition, and it’s a beautiful tradition.
I have no idea what else is going to happen to the world in the next four years, but I can tell you where I’ll be in August, 2023. See you at Camp!
Banner photo CC-BY 4.0 by Hanno Sternberg. Thanks!
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10:01
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Hack a Day
Last weekend 5,000 people congregated in a field north of Berlin to camp in a meticulously-organized, hot and dusty wonderland. The optional, yet official, badge for the 2019 Chaos Communication Camp was a bit tardy to proliferate through the masses as the badge team continued assembly while the camp raged around them. But as each badge came to life, the blinkies that blossomed each dusk became even more joyful as thousands strapped on their card10s.
Yet you shouldn’t be fooled, that’s no watch… in fact the timekeeping is a tacked-on afterthought. Sure you wear it on your wrist, but two electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors for monitoring heart health are your first hint at the snoring dragon packed inside this mild-mannered form-factor. The chips in question are the MAX30001 and the MAX86150 (whose primary role is as a pulse sensor but also does ECG). We have high-res ADCs just waiting to be misused and the developers ran with that, reserving some of the extra pins on the USB-C connector for external devices.
There was a 10€ kit on offer that let you solder up some electrode pads (those white circles with gel and a snap for a solid interface with your body’s electrical signals) to a sacrificial USB-C cable. Remember, all an ECG is doing is measuring electrical impulses, and you can choose how to react to them. During the workshop, one of the badge devs placed the pads on his temples and used the card10 badge to sense left/right eye movement. Wicked! But there are a lot more sensors waiting for you on these two little PCBs.
Card10 is made up of two circuit boards separated by standoffs just tall enough to hide the 200 mAh lithium battery between them. The user interface is a color LCD screen, four extremely tiny buttons actuated at 90 degrees off the left and right side of the top PCB, and numerous LEDs — some obvious and some less so.
Hardware on Top of More Hardware
When it comes time to hack on this badge, the hardware is a gift that keeps on giving. Is there an accelerometer? Oh, very much yes — and here’s where it gets crazy. I’ve been playing around with the BHI160 which is both accelerometer and gyroscope, and in looking up the part number while writing I find there also a BMA400 accelerometer that I didn’t know was there. Hey, guess what? There’s also a BME680 for temperature, humidity — ho-hum those are both common — oh yeah it does air pressure and air quality too. What?!? How is there room on the board, much less in the budget for this?
Hey, you know that MAX32666 Cortex-M4F processor running at 96 MHz with 512 kB of RAM at the center of this thing? One core runs all of the critical functions, while the second core handles the MicroPython layer and all of the user code. Oh, and there are eight megabytes of external flash to augment the one megabyte provided by the microcontroller. In keeping with the smartwatch theme, there’s a vibration motor on the board. And along either side of the bottom board are breakout pads meant for adding your own hardware to the watch band using conductive thread.
This is a wolverine in sheep’s clothing, ready to shred badges that mistake this for pedestrian.
Assembly is Both Easier and More Difficult Than You Think
The watch band itself is a surprisingly clever part of the design. Two flexible steel plates span the board between the bottom screws used or the standoffs. They sandwich the soft synthetic watch band, which is the least-dense neoprene I’ve ever encountered. This is great as it never felt hot in the sweltering August sunshine. A simple piece of hook-and-loop fastener — I’d never dare to call this by the brand name Velcro (we already made that dire mistake) — acts as the clasp.
First off, bravo to the packaging team. Everything was in a nice zipper envelope and all of the smallest parts are themselves inside of a tiny paper envelope. There are printed instructions a-la Ikea to help with assembly.
At first glance the kit feels like it will involve a lot of work; it does not. Deciphering the pictograms requires a bit of head-scratching and will have the polarizing effect of either making you feel smart or foolish. If the pictures don’t give you challenge, the very tiny screws certainly will. I was lucky enough to be in the Hardware Hacking village when I put mine together and they had the exotic tiny Torx wrench for the screws.
I’m not complaining… it’s a wrist-mounted ECG, and space matters. The imperceptibly thin double-sided tape for attaching the battery worked great after some fiddly peeling, and my fears of catapulting the tiny screws when flexing those steel watch band clamps were only calmed by knowing extra screws were provided in the kit. The only real head-scratcher for me is why one of the standoffs is nylon while the other three are all brass?
Choose Your Own Bling
When you first turn it on, card10 doesn’t light up the LEDs on top of the board by default. But isn’t that a good thing? When you see the row of eleven RGB LEDs doing something on this watch it’s because the wearer took action to make it so. Yes, the top layer goes to eleven, but there’s more… dig in and you’ll find parts of the board with the CCC rocket logo illuminated by LEDs from the board below. It took me several hours of digging through the documentation before I discovered the design for a side-firing “flashlight” LED. Unfortunately, a layout error means this was never populated, but it would have been so useful at camp as locating your flashlight in a dark tent at 3 AM is a treat. (Who am I kidding, everyone has a cellphone flashlight, but still.)
Who Let the (Micro)Python Out?
I suspect that on my death bed I will still hold a deep love for the C programming language. Don’t get me wrong, I love Python too, but for desktopy/webby things like OAuth and text manipulation. (n embedded platforms, Python feels like using a sonic toothbrush when a hammer is called for.
Testing out code live on the badge in a serial terminal window
Thus I’m still undecided upon this. I do think MicroPython is the future for embedded electronics. We will always need embedded engineers, but in the same way that electronic design trended away from analog and toward digital, engineer-focused electronics will trend toward higher level languages and I think Python has already managed to vanquish its challengers.
I struggled with some strange things on this badge. It seems the accel/gyro will sometimes return an empty value — my C sensibilities expect this to be erroneous data and not a showstopper, but Python throws and exception and my code wasn’t ready to catch it. On the other hand, Python provides a live interpreter via the USB-C jack on the badge so you can try out each command and discover problems along the way. It’s also a printf dream come true to have Python’s uber-powerful print() statement piped out to /dev/ttyACM0. My verdict on this is that it’s just different — C would have taken longer to pick up, but much of that time was lost again dealing with MicroPython (which I’m much less familiar with) quirks.
Picking My Jaw Up Off the Floor
Like a fine Scotch, the first sip was not what I was expecting, but over time I became addicted. Documentation for the card10 badge is the best I’ve ever seen (specifically the firmware docs) outside of a major Open Source software project that already has extensive adoption. The sensor array is a dev-board dream come true. There’s even an established app repository in the form of the badge.team hatchery so you can see what tricks your fellow hackers are up to. But most important of all, this thing makes sense attached to your arm rather than as a pendulum around your neck. (Although without a battery-backed RTC the clock does need to be set to the current time via Bluetooth using the smartphone companion app.)
My fear is that five thousand badges made it out into the wild, but few will realize what they have. My plea to all the amazing people at camp: what you’re holding is special and deserves so much more than one weekend of fun… don’t let this get lost in your parts bin! Don’t take my word for it, check out the badge talk from the con to bring you up to speed:
Once you’ve started developing, join the conversation on IRC at freenode #card10badge.
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Hack a Day
In a stiflingly hot lecture tent at CCCamp on Friday, Adam Harvey took to the stage to discuss the huge data sets being used by groups around the world to train facial recognition software. These faces come from a variety of sources and soon Adam and his research collaborator Jules LaPlace will release a tool that makes these dataset searchable allowing you to figure out if your face is among the horde.
Facial recognition is the new hotness, recently bubbling up to the consciousness of the general public. In fact, when boarding a flight from Detroit to Amsterdam earlier this week I was required to board the plane not by showing a passport or boarding pass, but by pausing in front of a facial recognition camera which subsequently printed out a piece of paper with my name and seat number on it (although it appears I could have opted out, that was not disclosed by Delta Airlines staff the time). Anecdotally this gives passengers the feeling that facial recognition is robust and mature, but Adam mentions that this not the case and that removed from highly controlled environments the accuracy of recognition is closer to an abysmal 2%.
Images are only effective in these datasets when the interocular distance (the distance between the pupils of your eyes) is a minimum of 40 pixels. But over the years this minimum resolution has been moving higher and higher, with the current standard trending toward 300 pixels. The increase is not surprising as it follows a similar curve to the resolution available from digital cameras. The number of faces available in data sets has also increased along a similar curve over the years.
Adam’s talk recounted the availability of face and person recognition datasets and it was a wild ride. Of note are data sets by the names of Brainwash Cafe, Duke MTMC (multi-tracking-multi-camera), Microsoft Celeb, Oxford Town Centre, and the Unconstrained College Students data set. Faces in these databases were harvested without consent and that has led to four of them being removed, but of course, they’re still available as what is once on the Internet may never die.
The Microsoft Celeb set is particularly egregious as it used the Bing search engine to harvest faces (oh my!) and has associated names with them. Lest you think you’re not a celeb and therefore safe, in this case celeb means anyone who has an internet presence. That’s about 10 million faces. Adam used two examples of past CCCamp talk videos that were used as a source for adding the speakers’ faces to the dataset. It’s possible that this is in violation of GDPR so we can expect to see legal action in the not too distant future.
Your face might be in a dataset, so what? In their research, Adam and Jules tracked geographic locations and other data to establish who has downloaded and is likely using these sets to train facial recognition AI. It’s no surprise that the National University of Defense Technology in China is among the downloaders. In the case of US intelligence organizations, it’s easier much easier to know they’re using some of the sets because they funded some of the research through organizations like the IARPA. These sets are being used to train up military-grade face recognition.
What are we to do about this? Unfortunately what’s done is done, but we do have options moving forward. Be careful of how you license images you upload — substantial data was harvested through loopholes in licenses on platforms like Flickr, or by agreeing to use through EULAs on platforms like Facebook. Adam’s advice is to stop populating the internet with faces, which is why I’ve covered his with the Jolly Wrencher above. Alternatively, you can limit image resolution so interocular distance is below the forty-pixel threshold. He also advocates for changes to Creative Commons that let you choose to grant or withhold use of your images in train sets like these.
Adam’s talk, MegaPixels: Face Recognition Training Datasets, will be available to view online by the time this article is published.
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Hack a Day
[Steffen Pfiffner’s] tent during the Chaos Communication Camp is full of happiness delivered by something greater than alcohol alone. He’s brought a robot bartender that serves up a show while mixing up one of about 50 cocktail recipes.
The project is the work of five friends from Lake Constance (Bodensee) in southern Germany, near the borders with Switzerland and Austria. It started, as many projects do, with some late night drinking. The five were toiling to mix beverages more complex than your most common fare, and decided to turn their labors instead to robot making.
Since 2012, the project has gone through five revisions, the most recent of which the team calls Uba BOT. Delightfully, the cup tray which moves left and right on the front of the machine is connected using a strain gauge. This provides a way for the robot to sense the presence of a cup to avoid dispensing ingredients all over the bar itself. It also provides a feedback loop that verifies the amount of liquids and volume of ice added to the cup. Once everything’s in the cup, a rotary milk frother lowers itself into position to stir things up a bit.
A Raspberry Pi is in control of eighteen pumps that dispense both liquor and mixers. The team is still trying to work out a way to reliably dispense carbonated mixers, which so far have been a challenge due to over-excited foam. The software was originally based on Bartendro, but has since taken on a life of its own as these things often do. The first time you want a drink, you register an RFID tag and record your height, weight, and age which keeps track of your estimated blood alcohol content based on time and your number of visits to the robot. The firmware also tracks the state of each ingredient to alert a meat-based bar attendant of when a bottle needs replacing.
Join us after the break to see an explanation of what’s under the hood and to watch Uba BOT mix up a Mai Tai.
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10:01
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Hack a Day
Engineering creativity comes to life when you have to design around a set of constraints. We can do just about anything with enough time, talent, and treasure, but what can you do when shackled with limitations? Some of the most creative electronic manufacturing tricks spring to life when designing conference badges, as the ability to built multiples, to come in under budget, and most importantly to have the production finished in time are all in play.
This happens at conferences throughout the year and all over the globe, but the highest concentration I’ve seen for these unique pieces of art is at DEF CON every year. I loved seeing dozens of interesting projects this year, and have picked a handful of the coolest features on a badge to show off in this article. I still love all the rest, and have a badge supercut article on the way, but until then let’s take a look at an RC car badge, a different kind of blinky bling, and a few other flourishes of brilliance.
Oh No They Didn’t: Car Hacking Village Badge
Far and away the craziest badge at DEF CON 27 was the Car Hacking Village badge. It’s a functional car that you can connect to via Bluetooth and drive around to the delight of the child in each of us.
It’s a toy car, so what? The difference here is the economy of scale. If you’re going to ship 10,000 of them it’s no problem to build an injection molded enclosure and house the electronics to control it wirelessly. But this project set the production run for just 350 SUV-shaped badges. At this scale, injection molding is prohibitively expensive, nonetheless they forged ahead.
The enclosure itself is laser-cut and laser-etched acrylic that fits together to house everything. There is a DC motor to drive the rear wheels using a worm gear. You can just catch a glimpse of this in the video below. Steering for the front two wheels is taken care of by a very small hobby servo that uses an acrylic lever.
Feats of mechanical design aside, the electronics themselves are really clever. There is a main PCB carrying the huge NXP processor at the front of the vehicle, and another for battery management near the back. The two are connected by a pair of long, narrow PCBs mounted at 90 degrees to the other boards which carry the RGB LEDs that illuminate the badge. Where the boards meet at right angles, pads on each line up so that the circuit boards can be soldered together, carrying the signals necessary for everything to work. There is a spare tire on the back (also acrylic) that doubles as a rotary encoder with a button next to it. This is the user input, with feedback shown on the OLED screen that makes up the windshield.
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There seem to be pain points everywhere in what must have been a grueling assembly process. I’m told that hand assembly ended up netting about 4 hours per badge! Thus is the legacy of #Badgelife, and I’d say it paid off that they started this the day after DC26 as the hardware was ready on time, to the delight of everyone who laid eyes on them.
Doing More With Less: Space Force
At first glance you may wonder why I’ve included the Space Force badge in the Badgies this year. It does what a badge should — hangs around your neck, blinking and acting as a name tag. But there are so many brilliant details that had this design turning heads in a major way. That’s not surprising as badges from the Whiskey Pirate Crew have a legacy going back several years.
The face of this badge has one purpose: to look stunning. [True] went to great lengths to ensure there were no traces on the top layer; it only took one jumper wire, and this is just a two layer board! The backlit letters are FR4 without copper or solder mask and use normal LEDs mounted backwards. I soldered this one and it’s tricky to bridge the ~3mm gap between pad and part. I managed to fry at least four of them in the process.
The OLED module mounting method is really neat. The 4-pin header was removed and those traces soldered directly to the pads on the badge. On the other side, a mis-used right-angle surface mount header is acting as a mechanical fastener. The hole cut in the badge fits the glass screen perfectly as a bezel. Look closely and you’ll see there is also an IR transceiver mounted in a board cut out. There are also three capacitive touch pads on the front, mostly invisible to the eye.
Turn the badge upside-down (a natural gesture if you’re wearing it around your neck) and the accelerometer detects it, putting it into WiFi AP mode via the ESP32 so that you can customize the name on your badge. I’m a big fan of the Lithium 18650 which can be recharged with the badge, but also removed an used in another project. Contrast this to pouch batteries which never see another use.
Let There Be Light… And Depth: SecKC Badge
Here’s proof that you don’t need multi-colored LEDs to achieve the ultimate in bling effects. This SecKC DC27 badge does it with a combination of green LEDs and negative space. The group produced a total of 150 badges after having reached a presale of around 90. Each badge contains 645 (!) LEDs. Yield was an issue with every badge having one or two that needed rework (placed backwards, etc) and about 50% needing more attention than that.
What makes this badge look so amazing is the use of a second board mounted on top of three connectors. Here you can see the larger LED with that silhouette-shaped board removed. This does two things: gives your eye some depth which adds a lot more interest than you might think, and provides a place between the boards to hide the battery. These badges are driven by an ATmega328 programmed via the Arduino IDE, and uses an EEPROM to store animation patterns.
Careful Where You Touch It: Frankenstein Badge
Nixie Tubes, they become rarer by the day, they’re fragile, and you need high voltage to light them up. But they look spectacular so why not build a badge around them! The Frankenbadge is the creation of Dr.n0psl3d who took the concept of a Nixie tube clock and brought it to life.
The high voltage bits on the back are somewhat safely sealed inside of a 3D-printed case, or covered by copious amounts of hot glue, complete with a warning on the silk screen to stay out. The serial number technique for the badge is a fun one. Three 7-segment digits have been printed in white on the silk screen; just paint the segments you don’t need black.
Surprisingly, this was n0psl3d’s first Nixie build and he chose to go with IN-12B tubes. He brought enough parts for 50 badges to the con, but this is a DIY badge and assembly is up to you. My only concern on this one is that the tube might fall out. Dropping ice cream out of your cone makes for a sad day, but dropping a Nixie out of your badge is sure to ruin your Hacker Summer Camp.
We Don’t Need to Build a Badge: DC503
Badge building is hard, especially one with a lot of something, like including enough buttons for a full keyboard. (We order something like 20,000 momentary switches for last year’s Supercon badge, also see the SecKC badge yields mentioned above.) This ups the complexity and every bump along the way raises the threat that you won’t have the production run finished in time for the con. The DC503 group side-stepped all of the manufacturing challenges this year by simply purchasing a consumer good and making it their own.
We’ve featured the SMART Response XE a couple of times over the past year on Hackaday. Originally retailing at $100 for use by every student in classrooms, you can grab one of these on the secondary market for a handful of bones. It uses an ATmega186rf and communicates on the 802.54 MHz band. The team repurposed the badges to act as one big chat room. What I like most is that they were able to drill through a part of the case that is normally hidden by the battery cover to get at the pads used to reflash the microcontroller.
More to Come
Last year I spent all of my time at DEF CON trying to find every badge maker for an inside look at what they’d been up to. Although I made it to more of the talks this year, I still managed to find 50 or so original creations. The Badgies is just of small set whose creative take on the art form caught my eye. But the rest are equally worth a look. Stay tuned to Hackaday for rest in an upcoming article!
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Hack a Day
Badgelife culture is our community’s very own art form, with a plethora of designs coming forth featuring stunning artwork, impressive hardware, and clever software tricks. But sometimes a badge doesn’t need a brace of LEDs or a meme-inspired appearance to be a success, it just needs to be very good at what it does.
A perfect example is [Gavan Fantom]’s Hello mini badge. The hardware is fairly straightforward, it’s just a small square PCB sporting a LPC1115 microcontroller, 8Mb Flash chip, piezo speaker, and an OLED display. Its functionality is pretty simple as well, in that it exists to display text, images, or short animations. But the badge hides a very well-executed firmware that provides a serial terminal and zmodem file upload capability as well as an on-device interface via a small joystick. Power comes from a 500 mAh lithium-polymer cell, for which the badge integrates the usual charger and power management hardware.
There’s a variety of possibilities for the badge, but we’d guess that most owners will simply use it to display their name with perhaps a little animation. A bit of nifty processing of some video could perhaps get something approaching watchable video on it though, opening up the entertaining possibility of displaying demos or other video content.
[Gavan] will have some of the Hello badges at the upcoming CCCamp hacker camp in Germany if you’re interested, and should be easy enough to find in the EMF village.
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Hack a Day
We had our biggest Breakfast at DEF CON ever on Sunday. So big, in fact, that the carefully laid plans went awry immediately.
This is the fifth year we’ve hosted the event, which kicks off the final day of DEF CON with some hardware show-and-tell. We really thought we had it all figured out, since this time we actually booked a space in Paris hotel. For the first three years we were just banditing the space — asking everyone to show up at this place and it’ll become an event. Last year we planned to have it in the Hardware Hacking Village, but the casino stopped us from bringing in pastries that morning and we ended up camping out in a dining area that wasn’t open until the afternoon.
Last weekend we had a cafe booked, with pastries and coffee on order. The only problem is that you are all too awesome. We had a couple hundred people show up and the cafe didn’t want us standing, which limited our space to the number of booth seats available. No worries, as is the tradition we spilled out into a lounge area on the casino floor and enjoyed ourselves!
Here’s some of the hardware that showed up at this gathering.
Best Badge Bandolier Banywhere!
My favorite creation of DC 27 is this badge bandolier built by [LqqkOut]. Those who are bitten by the #Badgelife bug spend much of their time at DEF CON trying to acquire all the badges. this is obviously the best way ever to wear them all at the same time. The leather bandolier has a mesh layer where the badges may be hung using zip ties so they cannot fall off. Grommets allow power to be passed from the inside of the bandolier, where a set of huge lithium batteries feed multiple regulators that can be tuned to the desired voltage.
Black Badge in the Wild
When you win one of the elite-level challenges of DEF CON you are awarded a black badge that grants you free DEF CON admission for life. I’ve very rarely seen these in the wild and it was a delight to see this black badge which was acquired by [compukidmike] upon winning the 2017 Car Hacking Village CTF at DC24.
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The killer detail on this is that one of the illuminated eyeballs is able to telescope out of the head of the skull. But wait, it gets even better! Once extended, that eye can look around in all directions. The badge is the work of [LosT], the long-time DEF CON puzzle master, who did the smart thing with this build: the back is clear acrylic so you can see what’s going on. A series of Bowden cables connect the eyeball to some servo motors. It’s an incredible mechanism and a delightful surprise to see it in real life!
Business Cards, Belts, Cubes, and Panels
Hackaday’s own [Brian McEvoy] showed up and brought the best Hackaday business cards I’ve ever seen. It’s PCB with matte black solder mask. [Brian] leveraged the trick of using the copper layer as a second tone of black. This makes the use of white silk screen really stand out. The business card detects NFC and RFID reader fields; hold it up to the back of your phone and the LED comes alive.
One of the members of the Whiskey Pirate crew came down to the meetup with a very special fanny pack. Make fun of the form factor all you want, but with two huge power banks and two USB charging strips, this utility belt can power 24 devices. It makes him the belle of the ball at the end of a long conference day.
[Piotr Esden-Tempski] has been crisscrossing the globe to promote his recently released FPGA platform called iCEBreaker. The demo hardware is an animated RGB cube with incredible pitch. I was happy to get a look inside to see how [Bob Miller] meticulously built the thing. Haven’t seen it running yet? You should be following @Hackaday!
My friend [Scotty Allen] (you know him from Strange Parts) showed up with the largest PCB panels at the meetup. Both of them are “art”, but it’s meme art so… anyway, he was also wearing a huge grumpy cat around his neck. Are memes the ultimate target for circuit boards?
Anyone on the hunt for awesome badge add-ons came to the right place. People were making it rain with small circuit boards. I particularly enjoyed this entire box of 1Up, Kirby, Megaman, and Mario add-ons.
A Cameo From the Hackaday Hackaday
I always get a jolt of excitement to see Hackaday shown off by the incredible people that make this a community. [James Wigglesworth] has been all over the place this year doing live demos of Dexter, the robot arm that won the 2018 Hackaday Prize. But I thought it really cool that he showed up at the breakfast with the trophy itself, which very few ever get to see!
There’s no perfect place to hold this event. It’s much more fun to have it somewhere near the con, but not in a hotel ballroom. We’ll keep trying to refine our methods for the perfect location, but as you can see, it’s the people that matter and we’re honored at the excitement and energy that made the fifth-annual Breakfast at DEF CON so much fun!
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Hack a Day
Year over year, the Queercon badge is consistently impressive. I think what’s most impressive about these badges is that they seemingly throw out all design ideas from the previous year and start anew, yet manage to discover a unique and addictive aesthetic every single time.
This year, there are two hardware badges produced by the team composed of Evan Mackay, George Louthan, Tara Scape, and Subterfuge. The one shown here is nicknamed the “Q” badge for its resemblance to the letter. Both get you into the conference, both are electronically interactive, but this one is like a control panel for an alternate reality game (ARG) that encourages interactivity and meaningful conversations. The other badge is the “C” badge. It’s more passive, yet acts as a key in the ARG — you cannot progress by interacting with only one type of badge, you must work with people sporting both badge types so that Queercon attendees who didn’t purchase the Q badge still get in on the fun.
The most striking feature on this badge is a custom membrane keyboard tailored to playing the interactive game across all badges at the conference. But I find that the eInk screen, RJ12 jack for connectivity, and the LED and bezel arrangements all came together for a perfect balance of function and art. Join me after the break for a closer look at what makes this hardware so special.
How Many Badges Have a Custom Keyboard?
At first glance it’s easy to miss how special that keyboard is. It takes up the circular area on the face of the badge and three things catch my eye, challenging what I thought these membrane keyboards could be. First, the full-color printing and surface finish are both incredibly well-done. Second, this is not a boring key layout (okay, the direction keys are slightly boring) but one custom tailored to the ARG. And finally, there are LEDs lurking behind this keyboard!
Evan MacKay says he warmed to the idea of using a membrane keyboard when he discovered they can be printed in CMYK full color. The process is actually rather easy, requiring a mechanical drawing and the art for the printing process, both sent as a PDF file. The manufacturer gave them samples of the spacers used to incorporate LEDs under the membrane — these come in 5, 7, or 10 mils. Looking at the underside of the keyboard you can see the spaces for both LED and the domes of the buttons. The stackup was delivered with adhesive layer already installed. Just peel off the backing and stick it to your PCB.
These keys are embossed into the membrane which means there is not a separate mechanism to spring them back. This caused an occasional failure of a stuck button, but usually the button could just be popped back out again. The next level up would have been to include metal domes that pop back after pressing, but of course this adds to the cost.
A stunning 2.9″ 128×296 eInk display delivers a hi-res playground for displaying your name and playing the ARG. It delivers a lot more versatility than the character LCD screens used in last year’s badge (but I must say I loved that idea too!).
On the two long sides of the screen you’ll find six side-view RGB LEDs. Originally these were not meant to have bezels, but early testing proved too much light was leaking on the top side of the parts so black 3D printed brackets were added. The outer edge of the PCB has twelve more full-color LEDs, six on top (top view style) and six on bottom (side-view style).
The badges are powered by a TI CC2640R2 which has an ARM Cortex-M3 core and brings Bluetooth to the party. Control of the LEDS is provided by a Holtek HT16D35B LED controller which is a 28×8 constant current driver. A pair of AA batteries powers the badge using Evan’s favorite Skyworks voltage regulator which keeps the badge running even as the cells droop down as low as 1.2 V — I think it’s the AAT1217.
The C Badge and the ARG
This is the C badge available to all Queercon attendees who chose not to purchase the Q badge. The Crew badge pictured here is unpopulated, but on the attendee version you can see a jack that looks like Ethernet or telephone. It is neither, and I’m amused by the silk screen on the back that reads “DO NOT PLUG INTO PHONE JACK PLZ!”. It’s an RJ12 6P6C connector that works with the cable provided with each Q badge. It is the method for connecting between badges to further the ARG.
People pursuing the interactive game must seek out holders of both Q badges and C badges to exchange digital tokens. The Q badges hold locks, coins, and cameras while the C badges hold keys, cocktails, and flags. As the game progresses, missions can be downloaded from handlers (the staff badges). There’s even a base station in the chill out room that can report your progress. Each time someone checks at one of these pillars, their overall progress is added to the sum total and the pillar begins to change color — it’s a scoreboard for the common good.
The overall presentation for the Queercon 16 badge is a home run. Tara Scape headed up the art design for this year’s conference and incorporated it into the badge, from the PCB art to the membrane keyboard, and even the inside of the box. It’s a total package that feel like you’ve been given a gift and will be cherished by everyone who got to unwrap this colorful little gem that helped guide their experience at the conference.
Evan has been on the badge team for seven years now and I asked if it was taking its toll. He gave me an emphatic, no. It seems he has plenty of energy for the next big build. I can’t imagine how to top this excellent example of small-run hardware done right, but I’m sure they’ll pull it off somehow. From the first QC badge I ever saw (the floppy disk) to the swooping lines of the squid the brilliant cube of QC14, clever use of old-stock displays, and now onto the “Rainbow Blade Runner” motif this year, the back catalog from this badge team is a gilded tome of inspiration.
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Hack a Day
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5 has been around since 2016 with the most recent version 5.2 published just this year. There’s not much hardware out there that’s using the new hotness. That didn’t stop [Damien Cauquil] from picking apart BLE 5’s new frequency hopping techniques and updating his BtleJack tool to allow sniffing, jamming and hijacking hardware using the new protocol.
As you can imagine, the BLE standard a complicated beast and just one part of it is the topic here: the PRNG-based frequency hopping scheme that is vastly different from BLE 4.x and earlier. The new standard, called Channel Selection Algorithm (CSA) #2 — uses 65535 possible channels, compared to just 37 channels used by its predecessor. Paired devices agree to follow a randomized list of all possible channels in sequence so that they remain in synchronization between hops. This was put in place to help avoid collisions, making it possible for many more BLE devices to operate in close proximity. This is important to note since it quickly becomes obvious that it’s not a robust security measure by any means.
To begin channel hopping the two devices must first agree on an order in which to hop, ensuring they’ll meet one another after each leap. To do so they both run the same 32-bit seed number through a PRNG algorithm, generating a list that will then be followed exactly in order. But it turns out this is not very difficult to figure out. All that’s needed is the access address whose top 16-bits are publicly available if you’re already sniffing packets, and the bottom 16-bits is the counter that increments the hop address list.
If you want to jam or hijack BLE 5 communication you need to establish which “randomized” channel list is being used, and the value of the counter that serves as an index to this list. To do so, [Damien] sniffs packets on two different channels. These channels will be used over and over again as it loops through the channel list, so calculating how much time occurs between each channel indicates how far apart these channels are on the list.
In practice, [Damien] first implemented a sieve (the same concept as the Sieve of Eratosthenes for finding primes) that starts with a list of all possibilities and removes those that don’t contain a matching timing between the two channels. Keep doing this, and eventually, you’ll whittle your list down to one possible channel order.
This certainly worked, but there were timing issues that sometimes meant you could learn the seed but couldn’t then sync with it after the fact. His second approach uses pattern matching. By measuring hops on 11 consecutive channels, he’s able to synchronize with target devices in a minute or less. From there, jamming or hijacking methods come into play. The randomization of this scheme is really marginal. A more robust technique would have used an internal state in both devices to generate the next hopping channel. This would have been much more difficult for an attacker to figure out. From the device perspective, CSA #2 takes very little computation power which is key for power-sipping IoT devices most often using BLE.
As mentioned before, [Damien] had trouble finding any hardware in the wild using the BLE 5 standard. His proof of concept is built on a pair of nRF52840 development boards. Because it needs more testing, the code hasn’t been merged into the main version of BtleJack, but you can still get it right now by heading over to BtleJack repo on GitHub.
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Hack a Day
Scarcity on the Internet is the siren song of bot writers. Maybe you’ve lost an eBay bid in the last milliseconds, or missed out on a hacker con when tickets sold out in under a minute — your corporeal self has been outperformed by a bot. But maybe you didn’t know bots are on a buying frenzy in the hyped-up world of fashion. From limited-run sneakers to anything with the word Supreme printed on it, people who will not accept any substitute in wearing the rarest and most sought after are turning to resellers who use bots to snag unobtanium items and profit on the secondary market.
At DEF CON 27 [FinalPhoenix] took the stage to share her adventures in writing bots and uncovering a world that buys and sells purchasing automation, forming groups much like cryptocurrency mining pools to generate leads on when the latest fashion is about to drop. This is no small market either. If your bots are leet enough, you can make a ton of cash. Let’s take a look at what it takes to write a bot, and at the bots-for-sale economy that has grown up around these concepts.
The internet is built with bots in mind and we have Google to thank for this. Their major innovation was moving us off of a curated internet to one that is machine crawled. Everyone wants good Google juice and that means building a site that is friendly to the Google bots that crawl and index the internet. This makes automation for your own purposes quite a bit easier. Namely, the monitor-bots that are used to detect when a retailer has the latest in stock. [FinalPhoenix] demonstrated a simple script that grabs the XML site map, parsing it for newly in-stock items, flagging them when found. But here’s the killer — if your monitor bot is a good one, you can turn it into a discord channel and sell subscriptions to others playing the reseller game, to the tune of $15-30 a month per subscriber.
Example slide of code used in a web-based buy-bot
Once your bot reports stock, the race is on to buy it before anyone else can. For this, you could use the APIs of the site, but that’s time-consuming and a lot easier for retailers to detect and block bot usage. For this part of her botting tools [FinalPhoenix] likes to use web-based bots that go through a browser framework like Chromium and allow obfuscation techniques like scrolling, clicking other items, random pauses, and other simple-minded actions that make your bot appear to be only human. In the examples for this talk, the Puppeteer framework was used for this purpose. In the end, the main role of this part of the bot is to use a verified account to complete the purchase as fast as robotically possible, which is why they’re called buy-bots. Retailers do have some tricks to combat these web-based attacks like adding secret keys in the DOM that need to be sent with the next post, but these are easy to discover and incorporate into the scripts.
This raises up another interesting part of the scheme, the verified accounts. For the best chance at profit, you need multiple accounts, each used just one time to avoid your buy-bot being detected by the retailer. For this, [FinalPHoenix] turns to services that sell accounts in packages of 500-10,000 and cost around just $5-10 per batch.
But wait, here’s where it gets really wild as recursion takes hold. Yes, these buy-bots are for sale (from sites like AIO Bot and usually around $300-1500), but they’re sold in limited quantities so that it’s harder for retailers to notice and take countermeasures. Just like how the clothing was limited release and incentivized bots-wielding resellers to enter the market, there is a secondary market for the bots themselves. [FinalPhoenix] reports that reselling one of these bots can yield $1000-1500 in profit. The same principles apply, and so what we’ve ended up with is bots buying bots to buy clothes. Who knows how many levels of bot-bot transactions there are, but it certainly feels like turtles all the way down.
Bot-based high-speed trading is the real way to make major bank on the securities market. Your average hacker is shut out of that “legitimate” business, but any enterprising programmer has the option of automating whichever reseller market they find most interesting. This breaks the public trust in commerce — buying quality products from a seller connected to their production for a reasonable price. If frustrates the manufacturer, alienates the consumer, but there appears to be little in place preventing it.
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Hack a Day
We’ve all stared at that button in the elevator with the phone icon on it, supremely confident that if the cab came to a screeching halt while rocketing up to the 42nd floor, a simple button press would be your salvation. To be fair, that’s probably true. But the entire system is not nearly as robust as most people think.
Friday at DEF CON 27, [Will Caruana] took the stage to talk about phone phreaking on an elevator. The call buttons first appeared on elevators in 1968 as actual phone handsets, eventually becoming a mandated feature starting in 1976. Unfortunately, the technology they use hasn’t come all that far since. Phone modules on elevators did benefit when DTMF (touch tones) and voice menu systems rolled around. But for the most part, they are a plain old telephone service (POTS) frontend.
[Will] spends his spare time between floors pressing the call button and asking for the phone number. It’s the lowest bar of social engineering, by identifying yourself as an elevator service technician and asking for the number he is calling from. His experience has been that the person at the other end of the phone will give you that number no questions asked nearly every time. What can you do with a phone number? Turns out quite a bit.
The keys to the castle are literally in the elevator phone user manuals. The devices, shipped by multiple manufacturers, come with a default password and [Will’s] experience has been that nobody changes them. This means that once you have the phone number, you can dial in and use the default password to reprogram how the system works. This will not let you directly control the elevator, but it will let you speak to the people inside, and even change the call-out number so that the next time that little button is pressed it calls you, and not the phone service it’s intended to dial. That is, if the system was even correctly set up in the first place. He mentioned that it’s not too hard to find elevators that don’t have their location set up in the system — if you do need help, it may be hard to figure out which elevator you’re actually in. There have also been instances where these call the 24-hour maintenance staff for the building, a bewildering experience for sleepy personnel who didn’t sign up for this.
Want to go beyond the call button and dig deeper into the secrets of pwning elevators? [Will] suggests watching the HOPE X talk from [Deviant Ollam] and [Howard Payne] called Elevator Hacking: From the Pit to the Penthouse.
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Hack a Day
Yesterday we published a first look at the hardware found on the DEF CON 27 badge. Sporting a magnetically coupled wireless communications scheme rather than an RF-based one, and an interesting way to attach the lanyard both caught my attention right away. But the gemstone faceplate and LED diffuser has its own incredible backstory you don’t want to miss.
This morning Joe Grand — badge maker for this year and many of the glory years of hardware badges up through DC18 — took the stage to share his story of conceptualizing, prototyping, and shepherding the manufacturing process for 28,500 badges. Imagine the pressure of delivering a delightful concept, on-time, and on budget… well, almost on budget. During the talk he spilled the beans on the quartz crystal hanging off the front side of every PCB.
Let’s Talk Gemstones
Wait, before you click away, believe me that the gemstone is at least as interesting as the electronics on this badge. Sure, you can go right now and order yourself a microcontroller, LEDs, and all the other bits shown on the circuit board. But you’ll have a decidedly harder time sourcing the disk of quartz that makes up the heft of this badge as its centerpiece and LED diffuser.
Joe made a lot of jokes about living in Portland, where there’s “a new-age crystal shop on every corner”. But his local vendors laughed when he approached them about sourcing 30,000 gemstones for the badge project. But they did give him the idea of swinging by the Tucson gem show, which is where his trip down the rabbit hole truly began. The gem con was full of wholesalers who themselves couldn’t supply the kind of quantity he actually needed, but they did hook him up with introductions to factories that were ready for a custom order.
The quartz is pulled out of the ground at a mine in Brazil as raw crystals about the size of a ridiculously heavy rugby ball. They’re shipped to a factory in China, where the labor-intensive process of turning them into a glossy coaster takes place.
The rough quartz is sliced to the approximately 5 mm finished thickness, before having the circle traced by hand. It’s then cut down to the lines on a wet saw, and hand-finished to final shape on a grinding wheel. A trip through a vibrating media polisher gives the surface a clear glass-like finish.
Joe had assumed this would be a much different process, possibly starting with a core-sample type of drilling process. But the nature of the stone itself seems to require a human eye for where to cut and where to place the final shape of the stone in each slice. General admission badges — known as Human — are used as-is. All of the “In-Human” badges (Speakers, Press, Goons which are the security staff) were dyed a color to match badge type.
These gems are a really special touch, even if the effort that goes into them is likely to be lost on most of the nearly 30,000 people at DEF CON this year. I’m glad that Joe Grand spent time in his talk to illuminate the backstory in this highly-involved little touch that literally makes every single badge unique. You can find the slides from his talk along with badge hardware info on the DEF CON media server.
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Hack a Day
The first big surprise Vegas had in store for everyone is that the DEF CON badge is an electronic badge this year. It’s traditionally been the DC practice to alternate years between electronic and non-electronic badges. Last year we had a fantastic electronic badge designed by the ToyMakers, so I had expected something more passive like the vinyl LP badge from a few years ago. What a pleasant surprise to learn otherwise!
Second up on the surprise list is the badge maker himself. The design is a throwback to days of yore as Joe Grand steps up to the plate once again. Veterans know him as Kingpin, and his badge-making legacy runs deep. Let’s jump in and take a look.
Hardware
There were 26,500 total badges manufactured with a 99% yield by a US-based fab house because of the complexities of the build. The timeline was incredibly tight, with Joe Grand’s turnaround from alpha prototype (no bodge wires!) to production in just seven days. He had to write and verify all low-level drivers in this time, and go to production without first testing the inevitable board revisions.
The shape of the badge is simple enough, just a small PCB disc about 3 inches in diameter. The defining visual factor for this badge is the thick diffuser. This is quartz crystal from Brazil, cut and polished specifically for the badges by a gem and jewelry company in China. For Human badges (the regular conference attendees) it’s just a white disc, but the rarer variants look a bit fancier.
On the back of the PCB you’ll find all the goodies. There’s a microcontroller and LED driver (Kinetis KL27, and TI LP5569) off to one side which power the reverse-mounted LEDs. To the other side of the board there’s a chip that provides badge interactivity. Place two of these badges near each other (about 2 feet away) and they’ll transfer data. You don’t need to physically connect them, which sometimes proved troublesome with last year’s badges as the connectors had an unpleasant tendency to break off.
Power is provided by a single CR2032 coin cell. Two LDOs on the board provide the 1.3 V and 1.8 V necessary to power all of the chips. There are six reverse-mounted LEDS (some are multicolor, some single color, depends on the badge variant) and Joe assures me there’s more than enough juice to keep them running all weekend long.
The Magic of Wireless that’s Not
Badge-to-badge communication uses a magnetic field, not radio frequency! The radio chip is something special, the NXH2261UK from NXP uses near field magnetic induction (NFMI) to both receive and transmit from the coil that’s on the board. This is wireless communications, but it’s not emitting radio frequency — you can’t listen in on it with an SDR. The concept is a rarity in consumer goods, most commonly you’ll find it incorporated in hearing aids. This chip-scale BGA is the smallest package Joe has used in a design.
A Lanyard Connector of a Different Color
Lanyard mounting example via
@joegrand
There’s a novel take on connecting lanyards this year. Rather than rely on a hole in the board, there are two lugs soldered onto the board. These parts are normally used as jumpers in high-voltage applications. You’re meant to thread the lanyards through these two lugs, leaving the actual hook on the lanyard for unofficial badges. Joe Grand may not have included a header for “shitty” add-ons, but he’s still managed to fully embrace custom hardware badge culture — of course he played a large part in the genesis of this culture.
Puzzle
The first obvious part of the puzzle is the unlocks you get by holding badges up to different varieties like those issued to Goons, Speakers, Artist, Press, etc. I assume this causes firmware unlocks that slowly reveal the puzzle.
People are already hard at work unlocking the secrets within. [charliex] discovered the serial pads which are an alternating footprint for SMD 0.1″ pin header. He reports a UART (1.8v logic levels) and reveals on his Twitter account some of the dump from the terminal. He’s also posted a dump of the firmware, which I’m told is the same on all badges, and excellent closeup images of the hardware on his GitHub.
Solve this Badge!
It takes a village to hack a badge. Click this magic link to automatically join the badge solving project on Hackaday.io. You can view the project here.
Make new project logs for each challenge you’re trying to solve on the badge. Jump into the public chat to discuss what’s going on. All are welcome, you don’t need to be here to take part. Ask for more info from people who have a badge in hand and tackle the challenges the come to mind! Just make sure you’re posting back new info as fast as you can find it.
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Hack a Day
Nurse your hangover with the Hackaday and Tindie crews as we host the 5th Annual Breakfast at DEF CON.
Everyone knows the days at DEF CON are long, and the nights are longer. Whether you’re just rolling out of bed, or walking straight in from the previous night of partying, we want to see you and your hardware show-and-tell projects this Sunday morning at 10:30 AM in Paris Hotel, Las Vegas.
We’re congregating at Le Cafe Ile St. Louis in the front part of Paris. Just walk through the doors coming off of Las Vega Boulevard and it’s in the big open area. A nice touch is that you don’t need to have a DEF CON badge to get in on the Hackaday breakfast.
Regular Breakfast at DEF CON attendees will remember that last year we were squatting in a restaurant space which isn’t open for breakfast. Thankful we’ve secured a location this year and you can score coffee and a pastry on us. We would like to have an idea of how many people to expect so please drop us an RSVP.
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Hack a Day
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.
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Hack a Day
If you’ve got an interest in technology, a penchant for that particular shade of yellowed plastic, and happen to be located in the California area, then we’ve got the event for you. The Vintage Computer Festival West is happening this weekend, August 3rd and 4th, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
The Vintage Computer Festival offers a truly unique experience for anyone with a passion for all the silicon that’s come before. Where else could you sit in on a roundtable of early Apple employees discussing the bevy of authentic ultra-rare Apple I computers that will be on display, or get up close and personal with a restored Apollo Guidance Computer? If you really want to dive in on the deep end, Hackaday’s own Bill Herd will be in attendance giving his lecture about the effects of heat and time on the internal components of decades-old pieces of hardware.
Still skeptical? Perhaps you’ll get a kick out of the exhibit that celebrates more than two decades of Quake by hosting a LAN game where the classic game is running on less common platforms like the RS/6000 series or the Sun Ulta. If you’re interested in seeing modern reconstructions of classic technology, there will be plenty of that on display as well. Eric Schlaepfer will be showing off his transistor-scale replica of the iconic 6502 microprocessor, and you won’t want to miss the Cactus in all its rainbow colored toggle switch and blinkenlight glory.
Of course, if you’re in the market for your very own piece of computing history, there’s no better place to be. The consignment area gives showgoers a chance to buy and sell all manners of vintage and unique hardware, harking back to the days where the best way to get your hands on a computer (or the parts to build one) was by attending a dedicated event. Plus, no shipping fees!
Put simply, there really is something for everyone at the Vintage Computer Festival. Even if you weren’t around to experience Apple II or Commodore 64 in their prime, these events are a rare opportunity to learn about the early days of a technology that today we all take for granted. Have you ever wondered how programs were entered into those early computers with nothing more than a bank of toggle switches and an array of LEDs? One of the passionate exhibitors at VCF will be more than happy to walk you through the process.
At the end of the day, preserving this technology and sharing it with future generations is really what it’s all about. Just as in previous years, Hackaday is proud to sponsor the Vintage Computer Festival and further their goal of ensuring this incredible shared heritage isn’t lost.
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Hack a Day
What has 256 full-colour LEDs, everyone’s favorite Lithium battery form factor, wireless connectivity, and hangs around your neck? It’s the CampZone 2019 badge that turns all attendees into a really fun billboard — but can the attendees hack themselves into one massive display?
One of Europe’s larger events for the gaming community, CampZone is hosted in Netherlands and runs from July 26th to August 5th. It’s a typical large summer camp, and caters for those who intersect gaming and hacking with HackZone, a decent sized hacker camp within a camp. I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on a CampZone 2019 badge, dubbed the I-Pane, let’s take a look at what they managed to pack into this electronic conference badge.
A Blinky Matrix For You To Command
The CampZone 2019 badge, front(top) and rear.
The package arrived in the UK sheathed in UK Border Force tape, evidently it had been flagged as suspicious and subjected to manual inspection. Nothing nefarious here, inside was a neatly bagged up badge with an information sheet, lanyard, and a couple of optional extra components; one is a capacitor for power supply smoothing when driving the LEDs from a USB source, and the other a six-way Shitty Addon connector for a footprint on the back of the board.
The badge PCB itself is a wide rectangle about 190x50mm (7.5″x2″) in size, and its party trick is that its entire front surface is an 8×32 matrix of 5mm multi-colour LEDs that make a bright full-colour pixel display. The trend has been for badges to cover their designs with as many LEDs as they possibly can, and the CampZone badge takes this to its logical conclusion. The display is driven by a brace of SM16106SC LED driver chips
Half of the SM16106SC LED drivers that supply the matrix of tri-colour LEDs.
The 18650 cell holder is located on the back of the back, along with a TP4056 lithium-ion charger and associated power supply components. It’s nice to see a common form-factor Lithum battery used as you hope it may find an alternative use after the con.
User interaction on the badge itself is provided by a set of buttons. There’s a 4-way direction pad on one end, and A and B buttons on the other. The interesting aspect here is that the buttons are on the opposite side of the board from the display itself.
A CH340C USB-to-serial chip was chosen for its low price, allowing the user to interface with the ESP32 WROOM module that is both running the show, and providing connectivity. When powered on, the badge first first tries to connect to the Campzone wireless network, then drops into a short menu including a Snake game and a Wi-Fi configuration application. Adding a network password is a slightly fiddly process of cycling through the alphabet. Once connected it automatically downloaded a firmware update which is a clever feature for last-minute bug fixes.
We can see why it’s called the I-Pane at this point as those LEDs are very bright, fortunately the brightness can be reduced to less searing levels via the Left and Right keys.
Talking To Your Badge, Made Easy
The software is based upon the badge.team project that originated with the SHA2017 badge. Like all their work it is fully open-source and comes with the usual app repository and suite of event apps.
The user-friendly serial menu.
The really interesting part that should open up new possibilities to any others wishing to adapt it for their own badge is how they have managed to make a usable interface with such a low-resolution display. It has a menu that can be navigated and read if you don’t mind waiting for scrolling text, but the clever stuff comes once you connect it via USB and fire up a terminal. It drops straight into a menu, from which you can easily access all app-related functions for running and installing apps, as well as perform an update or drop into a MicroPython prompt. Here you can very quickly paste and test entire apps as MicroPython code, and of course there are plenty of functions available to put graphics on those LEDs.
I’m told that there’s an online graphics editor in the works to will be released by the start of the event. This makes it easy to create pixel art for the LED matrix. All this makes the badge one of the the easiest on which to test software that we’ve seen, and once a piece of code has been perfected it becomes a simple task to share it with the world by creating it as a project in their “hatchery” app repository.
Though the LED matrix is impressive and a lot of fun to play with, this badge lacks a stand-out hardware feature such as EMF2018’s phone or CCCamp 2015’s SDR. It does score hugely though on two key points, in that it works out of the box and doesn’t require the user to wait for any patches, and the ease of getting software onto it is a level higher than so many others. There are as yet only a few apps for it in the hatchery but as always a lot more will appear over the course of the event and we look forward to seeing what people do with it.
A Hackaday colleague wondered whether anyone will succeed at hacking multiple badges to form a much larger screen. A huge billboard would be fun, but I’d be more excited to see it given multi-badge multiplayer games in which game objects are thrown between badges like the “Shoot My Valentine” hack from 2018 Hackaday Belgrade. Whatever is produced we can see it having a life beyond the event, if only as a very bright programmable display and wearable accessory.
You can find out more about CampZone and HackZone on the website. At the time of writing it appears that there are still tickets available, should you wish to attend.
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Hack a Day
The Hackaday Superconference is the highest density of the coolest hackers anywhere. Other events may be bigger, but we’ll be so bold to say that none are better. If you love Hackaday, and we know you do, you should really come join us in November in Pasadena, CA.
Far and away the best way to participate in a conference is to participate in the conference. This is your chance to give a presentation or a workshop and share your hard-earned knowledge, your crazy hacks, or entertaining tales of hardware heroism with a crowd that gets it. And you get free admission if we pick your talk for the big show.
One of my favorite tales from Supercon was meeting Jennifer Wang at her (and my!) first Supercon. She was a longtime Hackaday reader, and was honestly a little bit awed to meeting all of the great people there in person. By the next Supercon, she was giving a presentation about her IMU-based machine learning Harry Potter wand and inspiring the rest of us with her love of the cool things you can do with sensors and code. It’s one of the most honest and informative talks on machine learning I’ve seen!
You’ve got your story to share too, right? You’ve also got one week to put a proposal for a talk together. You can do this!
See you at Supercon!
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Hack a Day
Every August for the past four years, there has been a summer hacker camp on the Danish island of Bornholm, that may be a relatively new kid on the block but is slowly evolving into one of the summer’s essential stop-offs. This year for the first time they are moving to a larger site in an easier-to-reach part of the country, and in the usual build-up to the event they have released a teaser image of their badge.
Of course, you will want to know a little more about it than the picture can convey, so the BornHack folks were kind enough to give us a few more details. At its heart is a Silicon Labs Happy Gecko EFM32HG322F64G microcontroller, the same 25 MHz ultra-low-power ARM Cortex M0+ part that has featured in the previous BornHack offerings. Power comes from a pair of AA cells, and it sports a 240 x 240 pixel colour IPS display and an SD card holder. Connectivity is via USB and an infra-red interface for badge-to-badge communication, and human interface is via a mini joystick switch. Finally, it has a six-way v1.69bis Shitty Addon connector.
By some standards this is a relatively modest offering, but by using an evolution of their hardware from previous years as well as the same proven Geckoboot bootloader they are far more likely to deliver a satisfactory user experience than had they opted for a more ambitious design. We’ll be attending the camp, so we’ll report on the finished article once we have it.
BornHack will run from the 8th to the 15th of August, on the Danish island of Funen. There are a range of tickets still available, from single day visits to the whole week for 1200 DKK (about €160, or $181). Compared to some other events on our community’s calendar, we think that represents a bargain.
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Hack a Day
When you build a machine you can usually count on having precise dimensions for an organized and orderly set of parts, one fitting into the next exactly as you have designed them. You can count on cause and effect — when the user pushes a button or flips a switch a specific behavior will take place. But the She Bon project shows that adding the human body to the mix quickly turns an easy design into a challenging one.
During her Hackaday Superconference talk Sarah Petkus discusses her latest project that uses wearable technology to sense and react to her own body. She Bon is reminiscent of the French for “so good” and is a project whose aim transcends the technical challenges. Sarah uses engineering as a way to facilitate adults having healthy dialogs with one another about sex.
Depending on your profession, this discussion is likely not appropriate for work — it’s not sexual, but it’s fundamentally about sex — so don’t click through the video without thinking twice. But we respect Sarah’s courage for leading a project that wants to make sure there actually are places where it is possible to have these conversations and a way to get them started.
How Do You Begin an Intelligent Conversation?
Mixing an engineering challenge with a somewhat taboo topic works surprisingly well, as you can see in the video below. It’s a technical talk about sensing body temperature, heart rate, galvanic response, blush response, facial expression, and muscle tension. But it’s also a story of her attempt at creating a Suit of Amour, her tongue-in-cheek “Sexual Gundam”. Don’t be fooled, this is no gimmick. The discussions quickly leads to the real life challenges facing prosthetics designers and those developing wearable products. There’s a ton to be learned here.
Join me below for more on the hardware covered in Sarah’s talk. This out-of-the-ordinary hardware creation adventure made it a great entry in the 2018 Hackaday Prize and a particularly delightful talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference. We’re once again on the hunt for hardware creators to present at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference — and we can’t do it without you. Submit a talk proposal, or just grab a ticket and join us in Pasadena this November. Bonus points for those who have also entered their projects in the 2019 Hackaday Prize. Okay, now onto the hardware talk.
Hardware to Sense and React to Sensuality
The level of aesthetic Sarah is able to achieve in her prototype hardware is simply amazing. Throughout the talk she shows examples of her electronics and their enclosures, often through several iterations, and they’re both functional and beautiful to look at. If you learn nothing else from this talk you should leave with an appreciation for her habit of choosing an aesthetic at the beginning of the design so that it may evolve to perfection during hardware development.
Case-in-point is the backpack which serves as the brain for She Bon. It’s heat-shaped with a pixillated motif that provides plenty of places for Molex connectors to interface RJ45 jacks. From there, patch cables make a simple link with sensor and actuator modules elsewhere on the body. Sarah discusses three of those satellite units (which she calls augments), how they were conceived, designed, and the state of the prototypes.
Her Beat Box augment links heartbeat to a speaker that can playback audio. It’s a feedback loop for arousal — one of the “extra credit” goals she set for the project. The Propeller Pasties sense breast arousal with IR distance sensors and use propellers that spin as an external indicator. Spinning planetary gears were inspired by a toy and make granular speed control much easier. For control she has the wrist-mounted Pop Girl user interface — a nod to Fallout’s Pip Boy — that uses a Raspberry Pi and touchscreen inside a 3D printed enclosure. The Hot Spot augment is a temperature triggered buttocks winch that raises a particularly difficult challenge: how do you mount things to a living body and how do you ensure you don’t injure yourself in the process?
Sarah is the perfect speaker for this topic. She’s fun, she’s artsy, she’s scientific, she’s matter of fact with a flair of double entendre, and she has the technical chops to do the engineering. She makes you feel like you’re on the team and normalizes the conversation so anyone into tech feels both comfortable with the discussion and excited to see how the technical hurdles have been approached. In short, this talk shows the manifestation of her goal has already begun: for adults to have a healthy dialog about sex.
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Hack a Day
As hackers approached the dramatic stone entrance of Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Arts, a group of acolytes belonging to The Church of Robotron beckoned them over, inviting them to attempt to earn the title of Mutant Saviour. The church uses hazardous environments, religious indoctrination, a 1980s arcade game and some seriously funny low tech hacks to test your abilities to save humanity. This offbeat welcome was a pretty good way to set the tone for Teardown 2019: an annual Crowd Supply event for engineers and artists who love hardware. Teardown is halfway between a conference and a party, with plenty of weird adventures to be had over the course of the weekend. Praise the Mutant! Embrace Futility! Rejoice in Error!
For those of us who failed to become the Mutant Saviour, there were plenty of consolation prizes. Kate Temkin and Mikaela Szekely’s talk on accessible USB tools was spectacular, and I loved following Sophi Kravitz’s journey as she made a remote-controlled blimp. Upstairs in the demo room, we had great fun playing with a pneumatic donut sprinkle pick and place machine from tinkrmind and Russell Senior’s hacked IBM daisywheel typewriter that prints ASCII art and runs a text-based Star Trek adventure game.
It wouldn’t be much of a hardware party if the end of the talks, demos and workshops meant the end of each day’s activities, but the Teardown team organised dinner and an afterparty in a different locations every night: Portland’s hackerspace ^H PDX, the swishy AutoDesk offices, and the vintage arcade game bar Ground Kontrol. There also was a raucous and hotly-contested scavenger hunt across the city, with codes to crack, locks to pick and bartenders to sweet talk into giving you the next clue (tip: tip).
Join me below for my favorite highlights of this three day (and night) festival.
Expressive Robotics
One of my Teardown highlights was the hilarious and inspiring talk about designing interactions between humans and robots from Dr. Heather Knight, Robotics Professor at Oregon State University. Her work at the CHARISMA Robotics Lab (CHARISMA being an abbreviation of Collaborative Humans and Robotics: Interaction, Sociability, Machine learning and Art, of course) involves Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics. Knight took us through some of her body of work, including delivery drone interaction design, her Marilyn Monrobot theatre company, and lessons learned from working on a giant Rube Goldberg machine in that famous OK GO video.
Watch Knight’s talk on Expressive Robotics below, from 4:34:00 onwards:
Open FPGAs For Everyone
FPGAs were everywhere at Teardown this year. We especially loved the well-thought out workshop by Piotr Esden-Tempski for the iCEBreaker FPGA development kit. We have had access to open source toolchains for a little while now, but Piotr’s documentation is the clearest and simplest we’ve seen.
Our other FPGA highlight was getting to play with the ridiculously small (as in, entirely fits inside your USB port small) Fomu board led by hardware legends xobs, bunnie and Tim Ansell. After hours, xobs was showing off one of the tiny FPGA boards with an even tinier rework that he and bunnie somewhat implausibly managed to pull off — a truly awe-inspiring example of soldering!
Circuit Python All The Things!
FPGAs weren’t the only trend at Teardown this year. To really get into the spirit of the weekend, you needed to attempt to get Circuit Python running on at least one thing. Scott Shawcroft from Adafruit shared his custom GameBoy cartridge that brings Circuit Python to the iconic handheld gaming system. Shawcroft designed a circuit board with a SAMD51 microcontroller that fits snugly into a hacked cartridge, giving you access to the GameBoy’s hardware — including the ability to create retro sounds instantly from a Circuit Python program.
As well as sharing his GameBoy projects, Scott could be seen helping other hackers set up Circuit Python on their boards over the weekend, including a Doppler (another FPGA board, this time for music-specific applications) and a prototype of the Automat Mini, a board that turns MIDI signals into triggers for solenoids and LEDs.
See Scott Shawcroft’s full talk here, from 1:35:38 on.
Oregon’s Own Open Source Satellite
I was very impressed by the student aerospace engineering project from Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), who are launching a low-cost, open-source satellite into space with NASA. I had a great time opening up the casing of OreSat at Teardown and exploring what kind of technologies go into an ambitious project like this. Electronic and Mechanical Engineering students from Portland State University were on hand to show off the sensing and control systems they built, as well as an impressive array of open source projects that work alongside the satellite for scientific and educational aims.
One of my favourite projects designed to partner with OreSat is the handheld open-source satellite tracker, designed so that high schools across Oregon can follow the path of the satellite and receive live video beamed from orbit.
What makes this open source satellite project extra special — aside from the whole going into space part — is how well documented it is. Despite the number of different people, departments and technologies involved, PSAS have made it a priority to make sure their work is actually available on GitHub for other institutions or enthusiasts to replicate, tinker with or learn from.
Wearables for Space (or ComiCon)
Whether you’re trying to put a human into space or convincingly fake a moon landing, you’ll probably need something to wear. Sophy Wong’s talk on the broad spectrum of technologies that fall into the category of ‘wearables’ shared her experiences of designing technology for the human body. We learned why the writing on the front of astronaut suits are mirror images and that all clothes are basically a series of interconnected tubes. She also shared the technologies and techniques from some of her recent wearable projects, including an spacesuit inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and Prometheus, a Ghostbusters outfit, and an extremely funny hoodie hack that lets you play Flappy Bird by flapping your arms.
Watch Wong’s full talk here, from 2:05:26 onwards.
Cramming Linux into the Feather form factor
The Adafruit Feather is fast becoming one of the most popular form factors in the hacker world. In the demo room at Teardown we got to see a powerful new example: the Giant Board from groguard. The Giant Board squeezes a Linux computer into a tiny space by making use of the compact but powerful SAMA5D2, which saves precious board space with its built in memory. Aside from running Linux and being tiny, the Giant Board has 20 GPIOs, an SD card slot and impressively low energy consumption.
One of the advantages of using the Feather form factor is the wide range of other boards you can choose to interact with. We got to play with groguard’s cute quadruped robot, a great example of the advantages of Feather stacking. The robot itself was made of a satisfyingly tidy stack of Giant Board, servo FeatherWing and Wifi FeatherWing, with a Giant Board and Wifi FeatherWing combo making up the remote control. If you’re more into classic video games than robot athletics, you can also see this board running a handheld version of Doom, complete with authentically terrible audio.
The organisers behind Teardown 2019 — Crowd Supply and the Make+Think+Code department at PNCA — managed to pull off a vibrant and intelligent hardware hacking event that championed art tech and the indie electronics scene. The talk and workshop programming was impressive, especially given the relatively small size of the conference. We hope this event stays on the hardware conference calendar for years to come. We will certainly be back.
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Hack a Day
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.
Coming of Age In a World of Fast Computing
Today’s hardware hackers often did not arrive in the world of microcontrollers after an apprenticeship in the bare-metal world of 8-bit microprocessors, instead they are more likely to be of the generation who learned to code on a PC or Mac and who came to hardware through boards such as the Arduino. They are good at coding and for them computers have always been very fast indeed. What would have necessitated a hardware solution for those grizzled old engineers is for today’s engineers a problem that can be dealt with in software.
This is fine, until you find yourself using a platform with limited resources such as a low-cost microcontroller. Suddenly clock cycles matter just as they did years ago, and a few lines of code or a function call can make enough difference as to ruin a project.
What to Look For in Microcontroller Features
At this point those extra bits of hardware might come in extremely useful, but you don’t see much in the way of 74 logic or other chips surrounding a typical ATtiny or PIC. This is because many microcontrollers come with components such as comparators, timers, or basic combinational logic built-in, there to be enabled through software. These are not immediately apparent to someone who came to microcontrollers through software alone, and hence the point of Brett’s talk. Why do it the hard way when you can often pick a microcontroller that already contains the hardware to preprocess your inputs without extra code?
If you didn’t know this was already built-in, you could spend a lot of time doing the same job in code. From
the ATtiny48 data sheet(PDF).
The example he starts with sets the tone, a simple analog input to trigger once a certain level is reached. Using an analog read function followed by a compare does the job, but at the expense of those valuable clock cycles. The trick is in the discovery of the microcontroller’s built-in comparators that can do the job for free.
Brett exhorts us to study the data sheets for popular chips, and even takes us through a few examples. Features such as pin-change interrupts, or inbuilt quadrature decoders are mind-blowing, if you were unaware that they were on-board. Along the way he touches on entertaining annoyances such as different vendor’s names for them, to give you a head start on those data sheets.
In addition to the talk below you can check out Brett’s own blog post about on the topic. He’s also made his slides available as a .pptx file, if you are interested.
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Hack a Day
Vintage parts may be documented, but that doesn’t mean they’re particularly useful or accessible. If the phrase “eyestrain from unsearchable, badly-scanned PDF datasheets” makes your lower eyelid twitch in sympathy, read on.
While [Bald Engineer] was researching how he might make a portable Apple II, he was delighted to find that the vintage components he needed to examine were documented. However, he became frustrated with the seemingly endless number of poor quality PDF scans and the inability to search effectively. He decided to re-create the entire Apple IIgs schematic in KiCad, and in the process the Bit Preserve project was born. The goal is to act as a safe haven for modern and editable versions of vintage electronic schematics. The GitHub repository can be found here.
[Bald Engineer] talks a bit about his Apple II project, as well as the ideas behind the Bit Preserve project in his KiCon 2019 talk “Preserving History with KiCad”. KiCon was wild, and we have loads of photos of the projects and details so be sure to check it out.
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Hack a Day
Two of my friends and I crammed into a small and aged European hatchback, drove all day along hundreds of miles of motorway, and finally through a succession of ever smaller roads. We were heading for a set of GPS co-ordinates in the north of Scotland, along with all of our camping gear.
There’s nothing like the hacker camp we’re looking for. After heading down a lane barely wider than the car, we drove through a farmyard with a sheepdog lying in the middle of the road (the reclining mutt seemed unconcerned as we edge the car around). We had arrived at GampGND, one of Europe’s smallest hacker camps.
A Village Becomes A Camp For A Weekend
If you’ve ever been to one of the larger camps, you may have encountered the Scottish Consulate village. The Scottish hackerspaces come together with a characteristic irreverent humour, and from where I’m sitting they really get that hacker camps are about having fun. CampGND is their start-of-season shakedown, at which they assemble what is in effect the Scottish Consulate village on a farm in the depths of rural Aberdeenshire for a weekend of fun and hacks. We were lucky enough to be able to make it to the camp, and we are much indebted to them for the experience.
So how does a hacker camp of about twenty people work, in contrast to one of several thousand? There are no villages, no talks, and no attractions, for a start. Instead it’s a much more intimate and social affair, of communal sitting around the table working on projects — or catching up on a bit of Hackaday editing, in my case. It was fun watching the work of the GB1GND special event amateur radio station (I corrupted the youth with a deplorable piece of radio culture from the long-ago CB days, by reminding them that a DTMF keypad can be used to play “Yankee Doodle” — 4426462, if you are curious). And of course we spent much time sitting around the fire in the evening drinking Scottish beer, toasting marshmallows, and talking the usual tall tales and interesting stuff of a hackerspace conversation.
Coming from Oxford Hackspace and MK Makerspace in central southern England it was particularly interesting to share experiences with the folks from 57 North in Aberdeen and Edinburgh HackLab. The mechanics of running a space are universal wherever in the world you may be, and it is both refreshing to find the support of those with the same experiences, and interesting to hear their fresh perspectives. The catering was communal, for which we are again indebted, as we’d done the usual hacker camp thing of bringing along a few less palatable essentials.
Small Hacker Camps Are Not Just For The Few
We had an excellent time over the weekend, and though our drive required an unexpected Travelodge due to traffic congestion in the English Midlands it was very much a journey worth making. The point of this article though is not to urge you all to head for CampGND next year, while our hosts were very hospitable this is by its nature a small camp whose logistics would be taxed by a huge influx of Hackaday readers. Instead, it should be seen as a blueprint, a demonstration that you don’t need several thousand people and a huge venue to mount a successful hacker camp. If you can put on a hacker camp village for your hackerspace you can put together an event like CampGND, all you need is to find a field with the appropriate permission, bring in a few facilities, and assemble twenty of your friends. Every hackerspace should ask themselves whether they can do the same as the Scottish Consulate and prepare for their summer with a mini hacker camp, because it’s an experience worth having.
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Hack a Day
Throughout the six years of the Hackaday Prize we have seen a stream of projects tackling all manner of applications and challenges. Many of them have a goal of addressing issues faced by people in developing countries, and this was the topic upon which Rob Ryan Silva spoke at the Hackaday Superconference.
Rob’s perspective is an interesting one: he runs the maker lab at Development Alternatives Incorporated, or DAI, who are best described as a specialist contractor in the international development sector. Thus while many of the Prize entrants are hardware hackers who have become involved in development related projects, he is a development specialist who has made the opposite journey to becoming a hardware hacker.
Join me below for the video of Rob’s talk and a deep dive into it. Also of note, tickets for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference are now available, the Call for Proposals is now open, and of course, the 2019 Hackaday Prize is ready for your entry! Okay, now onto Rob’s talk.
Always Know Your Context
Knowing your context is key. We all design our work using our built-in knowledge of the world, which though we are well-meaning might not always be in sync with the environments in which it will eventually be placed. A device might fail and have no spare parts, or simply be ill-adapted to the needs and abilities of its intended users. The point Rob Ryan Silva drives home as a frequent gotcha is that the solution is not ready for the environment, rather than the environment not being ready for the solution.
The water level detector deployed to Cambodia.
Knowing the technology available to the target user is an important consideration. Rob used a sonar water level detector in Cambodia as an example. When it detects a high river level it triggers a recorded voice call rather than the SMS text message you might expect, because few phones in the hands of users support the Khmer character set.
Another example is the choice to use open source tools rather than proprietary ones. This allows other people to refine and adapt your work, which can be vital to keeping it relevant. A point that should be important in any situation is that the problem should drive the solution rather than the other way around.
Stakeholders Make All The Difference
Throughout his talk, Rob stresses the importance of understanding the stakeholders involved with the project. You can’t build a solution to a problem unless it is embraced and valued by people who are using it. This could mean working with government agencies or NGOs. But for the best chance of success, the people in the community need to buy into the project’s continued viability, and must have an incentive to keep it running. He suggests designing with rather than for the users. One of his examples was recruiting a local cafe owner next to the bridge holding the level monitor to keep kids from breaking the device’s solar panel with their slingshots.
Many of us have thought about projects which might answer a problem faced by people in developing countries. This talk provides a well placed insight into this kind of work from the rare standpoint of someone with a foot in both communities. If you follow that course it might help you avoid becoming an engineer saviour.
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Hack a Day
The sound a set of machined robot legs tapping on concrete make is remarkable. If for nothing more, the video after the break is worth watching just for this. It’s what caught my attention when I first wandered by the Mech Warfare area at Maker Faire, as one of the competitors had their bot out wandering around as a demo during the setup day.
This is truly a hacker’s robotics competition. There are constraints, but there’s also a lot of room for freedom. Meet a dozen or so requirements and you be as creative as you want with the rest. My favorite part is that this is not a destructive event like many the battle-based robot TV shows that tend to turn my stomach. Instead, these robots each carry an electric AirSoft gun and seek to hit any of four target panels on their competitor’s robot.
Robot operators are behind a sheet and only view through the robot’s cameras.
These make me think of the Tachikoma, a huge four-legged tank from Ghost in the Shell. It’s not just the number of legs — limited to four or less — that bear that similarity. For each round, the robots are placed in a miniature model of a city, and operators use FPV hardware I’m used to seeing in flying drones. This setup gives them the effect of driving building-sized mechs, and the audience gets to follow along with monitors mounted next to the scoreboard for the competition.
I haven’t seen one of these events in person before, but this group has been competing for five years. And a little searching turns up coverage of similar events going back to 2011 and beyond. We’ve even seen build details for competition robots over on Hackaday.io that really show off the engineering that goes into these robots.
This is just a short clip that provides a glimpse of the fun. But you can get a much better feel for the sport by watching a full match. At multiple points around the arena, action cameras are running to capture each round of competition. Maker Faire footage has not yet been posted, but you can see dozens of battles from previous years on the RTEAM Robotics Club webpage.
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Hack a Day
Blade Runner showed us a dystopian megatropolis vision of Los Angeles in the far-off future. What was a distant dream for the 1982 theater-goes (2019) is now our everyday. We know Los Angeles is not perpetually overcast, flying cars are not cruising those skies, and replicants are not hiding among the population. Or… are they?
The LayerOne conference takes place in greater Los Angeles and this year it adopted a Blade Runner theme in honor of that landmark film. My favorite part of the theme was the conference badge modeled after a Voight-Kampff machine. These were used in the film to distinguish replicants from humans, and that’s exactly what this badge does too. In the movies, replicants are tested by asking questions and monitoring their eyes for a reaction — this badge has an optional eye-recognition camera to deliver this effect. Let’s take a look!
The Voight-Kampff Badge
The full Voight-Kampff machine is a suitcase-sized console impractical for wearing on a lanyard, so what every conference attendee received was a blinky LED circuit board creation. Aside from the LAYERONE2019 logo, its shape and front surface drew from the movie machine peripheral that stared down suspects with a sinister glowing center. Here the center is an array of six orange LEDs cycling through a hypnotic pattern under a clear plastic dome, accompanied by a slow-blinking blue LED and a rapidly flashing red one.
But that LAYERONE2019 logo is where we find an authentically 2019 expression of LED backlit PCB art, putting up a light show shining through the board substrate. Turning the badge over, we see the logo’s reverse side is surrounded by individually addressable side-emitting LEDs popular with PCB artists for this presentation. (The pads labelled “B+” and “B-” are to power an optional add-on module we’ll cover shortly.)
Zooming out from that detailed view, we find an ATtiny2313 directing all the lights from its centralized command post. Feeding its LED army is the job of an 18650 lithium ion battery cell, and we summon the light show with a tiny slider switch in the corner. I initially thought that IC near the power switch was a voltage regulator, but it is actually an APM4953 dual MOSFET which can handle the current of an 18650 better than a tiny switch. Apparently everything on board runs at battery voltage level.
This is a fun piece of conference bling, and if anyone wanted more, the organizers have prepared optional add-on kits. At LayerOne, each activity is designed to have a friendly introduction for beginners, with a ramp up in difficulty to challenge longtime veterans. This way we feel welcome to try something new for as little or as much as we like. In the case of electronics hardware, beginners join the blinky fun by inserting their battery and flipping the switch to turn the badge on. I was not content with this first step, so I heated up a soldering iron and got started on the camera add-on kit.
Eye-Recognition Camera Module
The camera add-on kit is built around the ESP32CAM module from M5Stack. It drew power from the conference badge with two soldered-on wires. A 3D-printed bracket holds the module in place, with help of two screws and a small wrench to fasten everything together. Once assembled, I was able to launch a companion iOS app which received the camera’s video feed and looked for an eye within view. If an eye is found, a square video of that eye is extracted and overlaid on top of a still frame from the film. Now the badge acts a lot more like a Voight-Kampff machine.
Logo Kit is an SMD Soldering Challenge
With the creepy eye-scanner completed, I moved on to the LayerOne logo pin.
This is a small blinky LED pin delivered in a ziploc bag containing all surface mount devices and a bare board. I was introduced to SMD soldering at last year’s LayerOne, and this proved to be a good review and test of skill.
The most difficult component is the ATtiny2313 in unforgiving MLF (QFN) package intended for machine placement. Many people including myself struggled to get it soldered correctly, but with patience and a steady hand it was eventually installed in place. After passing that gauntlet, everything else in the kit was relatively easy and success took the form of a simple LED binary counter.
Anyone who wishes to explore these projects in more depth can consult reference information posted to their Github repository. At the very minimum it would be fun to create a different pattern for the logo kit, and the ESP32 camera module has a lot of future project potential. And perhaps someone will take these Voight-Kampff inspired pieces and build a full-on reproduction unit!
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Hack a Day
It has been fascinating to watch the rise of the #BadgeLife community in North America, and a little sad when viewed from a European perspective that their creative vibrancy has not quite fully made it across the Atlantic. It’s pleasing therefore to report on something traveling in the opposite direction. We’ve found a #BadgeLife creation that’s as American as they come, but which hides a bit of European flavor under its shell.
The DC27 Multi Pass is a Def Con indie badge themed as a prop from the film The Fifth Element. That is not its only trick though, because under the hood it runs the ESP32-based badge.team, the badge software platform created by the team from the Netherlands who brought us the SHA 2017 and Hacker Hotel 2019 badges. Like those two it sports an e-ink screen and a set of touch buttons, which they’ve very neatly incorporated into the Multi Pass design. The badge.team ecosystem brings with it a fully-functional and stable hackable badge platform with MicroPython apps and an app library (We won’t call it a store, it’s all free!) referred to as the hatchery. There is even a Hackaday logo nickname, should you have one of these badges and wish to identify yourself as a reader.
The launch of a new #BadgeLife badge is always cool, but with the best will in the world it is not in itself news. Where this one does, however, get interesting is that it proves that badge.team is a viable route to getting full event badge functionality into an indie badge without the heartache of creating a software platform. It also serves as a fascinating perspective on why the USA has spawned its artistic badge scene while Europe has less diversity. The whole Def Con experience is extremely expensive, while European hacker camps are relatively not so. There is no need for a European hacker to finance their trip to EMF Camp by selling badges, so for many people, the impetus to create finds its outlet in other directions. It would be nice to think that European badge scene will in time evolve as far as the US one, but meanwhile, it’s good to see the Netherlands community supplying their platform to what we think will be a very interesting Def Con indie badge.
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Hack a Day
The artistic elite exists in a stratum above we hoi polloi, a world of achingly trendy galleries, well-heeled collectors, and art critics who act as gatekeepers to what is considered the pinnacle du jour of culture. Artistic movements that evolve outside this bubble may be derided or ignored as naive and unsophisticated, even in complete denial of their raw creative edge. When they are discovered by the establishment a few of their artists are selected and anointed, while inevitably the crucible in which they were formed is forgotten. On the streets of Bristol the incredible work of far more graffiti artists can be seen than just that of Banksy.
Our community has an art form all of its own, in the guise of PCB artwork and the #BadgeLife community. One day you will see electronic badges from darlings of the art world behind glass in those trendy galleries, but for now they live in glorious abundance in the wild. Here at Hackaday we are lucky enough to have in Brian Benchoff a colleague who is pushing the boundaries of PCB art, and at the Hackaday Superconference he took us through one of his more recent pieces of work.
Brian’s pad printer.
The colour palette of a typical printed circuit board is limited by the combination of fibreglass, copper, soldermask, plating, and silkscreen its designer selects. Thus while the variety of soldermask colours and plating materials can make for an eye-catching work, they have remained a colour-tinted near monochrome. The Holy Grail of the PCB artist has been to step into the world of full colour, and Brian has been pursuing that goal by exploring pad printing to produce extra colours beyond the sodermask..
It’s a subject he’s written about here in the past, and he introduces it in the talk with a look at existing badge artwork and a mention of an expensive commercial inkjet process before considering the type of printing you see daily on the sides of promotional pens. Those company titles are deposited on pens using pad printing, an offset process in which ink is first deposited upon a photo-etched metal plate before being picked up on a silicone rubber pad for transfer to the object to be printed. It’s not the panacea for all coloured-PCB tasks, but for adding relatively small blocks of pigment to an otherwise monochromatic board it can be very successful.
The eye-catching Kiss -themed Tindie badges.
Brian’s examples are a panelised set of Tindie badges as a homage to the rock band Kiss, and his Tide pod addon containing a serial number in an EEPROM that was part of a Blockchain-inspired game. The Kiss Tindie badges use black soldermask with extensive white silkscreen and a modest area of red pad printing for the stage makeup, while the Tide addon makes clever use of the same swoosh printed in alternate colours at 180 degrees to each other.
In both cases there is some labour involved in creating the prints, and as his detailed write-up of printing the Tide pods reminds us, the process of creating the printing plate is not exactly an easy one. But it remains the best way yet to add extra colours to a board without paying a small fortune for the inkjet process, and if you’d like to put your own designs at the bleeding edge of PCB art you might wish to read his writeups and watch the video below the break.
This is just one example of the kind of manufacturing techniques, and electronic design principles on display at the Hackaday Superconference. There’s another Supercon just around the corner, so grab your ticket and send in your own talk proposal right away!
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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 Tickers
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.
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!
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When Maker Faire Bay Area closed down early Saturday evening, the fun did not stop: there’s a strong pool of night owls among the maker demographic. When the gates close, the after-parties around San Mateo run late into the night, and Hackaday’s meetup is a strong favorite.
This year Hackaday and Tindie joined forces with Kickstarter and moved our combined event to B Street Station, a venue with more space for hacks than previous years. The drinks started flowing, great people started chatting, basked in an ever present glow of LEDs. A huge amount of awesome hardware showed up, so let’s take a look the demos and stunts that came out to play.
While we hosted many Maker Faire veterans as repeat visitors, we also gladly welcomed newcomers curious to see what people have created. [Sam Freeman] was one of many who were happy to break down their projects to beginner-friendly pieces. His LED goggles started from an Adafruit tutorial and continually evolved to the version today. [Daniel Young] was equally friendly explaining his magical Melty Cube spinning on the end of this LED wizard’s staff. It features two ESP8266 working together to avoid the need for an expensive slip ring: one lives inside the cube driving LEDs, the other handles the spinning motor. Being welcoming, approachable, and willing to explain is how we grow our community.
[Garrett] is a man with many ideas, judging by the number of illuminated light bulbs over his head. Built as a quick hack for a disco party, the sound-reactive electronics were repurposed from a pair of LED glasses. (Look at how the USB power enters the helmet.) WS2812 LEDs were wired inside plastic light-bulb-shaped party favors. It doesn’t get as hot as we might think, but it is heavier than it looks. In hindsight [Garrett] wished he hadn’t cut off the helmet’s original chin strap early in this project.
It’s not always about the LEDs, though! [Scorch] brought two of his String Shooters whose instructions have been posted online. Building one will depend on size of available traction material on the wheels. His large unit was built around a bicycle inner tube, and the smaller one (video) built around rubber bands used in dental braces. In addition to the two string shooters, he also brought an ultrasonic levitator based on instructions posted by Make. It’s one thing to read about them online, it’s quite another to see a small flake of aluminum foil actually float in the air in front of us.
Similarly, it was quite a treat to see tiny Femtobeacons in person. Yes, I can show you a picture of one next to a U.S. quarter dollar coin for scale, but it’s not the same as holding one in my hands hoping not to drop it on the floor of a dark bar. Creator [Femtoduino] documented the project on Hackaday.io and also sells units on Tindie. Other Tindie sellers were present, some brought their products for sale and others brought recent projects just for fun.
[Maniacal Labs] brought a large 7-segment display previously seen at KiCon. This single digit represents a conversation piece as well as proving concept for a project which will feature 12 of these digits.
[Luther Johnson] brought a full MakerLisp setup: a tiny portable embedded Lisp computer complete with USB keyboard and VGA monitor.
A pair of mostly 3D-printed Mars rover models were on display, one by yours truly (wearing a raincoat) and a success story of sharing online. [Marco] found the Hackaday.io project page and built his yellow rover incorporating his own customizations. Maker Faire was the first real world meeting of these rover siblings and their creators.
Our Hackaday Prize this year encourages participants to work through how their idea can scale beyond single prototypes to volume production. We believe putting them in people’s hands will multiply our collective ability to improve the world. So it was ideal for us to join forces with Kickstarter for this event, inviting product teams seeking funding via Kickstarter. These innovators have put a great deal of thought into their ideas, and this is an opportunity for us to learn from them.
One of the Kickstarter projects present is Kinazium, offering educators a construction set for building small robot mazes fit for palm-sized robots. Teachers in classrooms appreciate being able to get maze parts without scissors or knives, and put them together without tape or glue.
Another Kickstarter project team present is Chatterbox, offering the technology of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home but without the retail advertising surveillance baggage of those popular devices. A cute appearance appeals to children, and a COPPA compliant software stack protects them online. We think these features will also appeal to security-conscious adults.
These and many more projects adorned the tabletops of B Street Station, making it the best place to stop after Maker Faire Saturday. We would like to thank everyone who joined our party. A place to share our work, our curiosity, and our passion to make something cool. We all inspire each other to turn our ideas into reality, and we hope to see everybody (plus new faces too) next year!
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I spent a good chunk of Saturday afternoon hanging out at the Homebrew Robotics Club booth at Maker Faire Bay area. They have a ton of really interesting robot builds on display and I just loved hearing about what went into these two in particular.
It’s obvious where BugBot gets its name. The six-legged walker is the creation of [Mark Johnston] who built the beast in a time where components for robots were much harder to come by. Each leg is driven by a very thin strand of muscle wire which contracts when high voltage is run through it. One of the really tricky parts of the build was finding a way to attach this wire. It has a very low melting point, so trying to solder it usually results in melting right through. His technique is to wrap the wire around the leg itself, then slide a small bit of brass tubing over it and make a crimp connection.
At the heart of the little bug is a PIC microcontroller that is point-to-point soldered to the rest of the components. This only caused real problems once, when Mark somehow bricked the chip and had to replace it. Look close and you’ll see there’s a lot of fiddly bits to work around to pull that off. As I said, robot building was more difficult before the explosion of components and breakout modules hit the scene. The wireless control components on this were actually salvaged out of children’s RC toys. They’re not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it was the best source at the time and it works! You can find a demo of the robot embedded after the jump.
Ralph Campbell (left) and Mark Johnston (right)
An Android robot was on display, but of course, I was most interested in seeing what was beneath the skin. In the image above you can see the mask sitting to the left of the “Pat” skeleton. Ralph Campbell has been working on this build, and plans to incorporate interactive features like facial recognition and gesture recognition to affect the gaze of the robot.
Inside each of the ping pong ball eyes is a Raspberry Pi camera (actually the Adafruit Spy Camera because of its small board size). Ralph has a separate demonstration for facial recognition that he’s in the process of incorporating. But for me, it was the mechanical design of the bot that I find fascinating.
The structure of the skull is coat hanger lashed and soldered together using magnet wires. The eyes move thanks to a clever frame made out of paper clips. The servos to the side of each eye move the gaze up and down, while a servo beneath the eye takes care of left and right. A wooden match stick performs double duty — keeping the camera in place as the pupil of the eye, and allowing it to pivot along the paperclip track of the vertical actuator. It’s as simple as it can be and I find it quite clever!
Rovers on Parade
Since I’m on the topic of robots I want to give a shoutout to Hackaday’s own Roger Cheng. He was selected as a roaming exhibit for this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area. If you haven’t been following his Sawppy build you should be (20,000 people can’t be wrong)!
I thought this moment between Roger and a future robot builder was quite touching. To see a robot modeled after a Mars rover, driven wirelessly on Earth using the touchscreen of your smartphone, will surely have a big impact on what this boy thinks can be accomplished by one determined builder. Of course, it’s not just kids that Roger has been inspiring. This yellow rover was on display in one of the booths. It’s based on Roger’s design, as is this full-scale project that plans to use the platform as an arctic drilling test platform.
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Hack a Day
You can find all kinds of robots at Bay Area Maker Faire, but far and away the most interesting bot this year is the Self-Solving Rubik’s Cube built by [Takashi Kaburagi]. Gently mix up the colored sides of the cube, set it down for just a moment, and it will spring to life, sorting itself out again.
I arrived at [Takashi’s] booth at just the right moment: as the battery died. You can see the video I recorded of the battery swap process embedded below. The center tile on the white face of the cube is held on magnetically. Once removed, a single captive screw (nice touch!) is loosened to lift off the top side. From there a couple of lower corners are lifted out to expose the tiny lithium cell and the wire connector that links it to the robot.
Regular readers will remember seeing this robot when we featured it in September. We had trouble learning details about the project at the time, but since then Takashi has shared much more about what went into it. Going back to 2017, the build started with a much larger 3D-printed version of a cube. With proof of concept in hand, the design was modeled in CAD to ensure everything had a carefully planned place. The result is a hand-wired robotic core that feels like science fiction but is very, very real.
I love seeing all of the amazing robots on the grounds of the San Mateo County Event Center this weekend. There is a giant mech wandering the parking lot at the Faire. There’s a whole booth of heavy-metal quadruped bots the size of dogs. And if you’re not careful where you walk you’ll step on a scaled-down Mars rover. These are all incredible, out of this world builds and I love them. But the mental leap of moving traditional cube-solvers inside the cube itself, and the craftsmanship necessary to succeed, make this the most under-appreciated engineering at this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area. I feel lucky to have caught it during a teardown phase! Let’s take a look.
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Making an event badge is hard work. Making a single prototype badge is hard enough, but the whole process of sourcing components and coordinating manufacture for hundreds of badges on a shoestring budget with the looming deadline of the event and its expectant attendees is a Herculean task.
[Uri Shaked] is one who bears the scars of producing an event badge, and he’s written a fascinating account of his experience. The conference in question was Aramcon 2019, a private tech event in Israel, and the badge has an nRF52840 driving an e-ink display, multi-colour LED, and an audio codec, with a set of full-size keyboard keys as user input. Since the nRF chip supports mesh networking, the idea was to produce a badge capable of streaming audio across the entire event.
A clothes-pin as a programming jig, we like it!
We follow the team through nail-biting months of prototype boards, reversed connectors with last-minute cable bodges, compatible parts that didn’t turn out to be quite so compatible, and wrong footprints, and see them arriving at a badge which worked, but without the audio they’d hoped for. Along the way they came up with a clothes-pin-based programming jig which would surely have merited its own Hackaday write-up had they covered it on its own. Demonstrating the mesh networking by turning a whole auditorium’s worth of badges LEDs yellow was their reward, and we can see they’ve produced a very creditable badge. We particularly like the use of keyboard key switches, and we commend them for planning a life for the badge after the event.
Our Hackaday colleague [Brian Benchoff] is a veteran of badge production, read his write-ups of the genesis of our Superconference 2017 badge and the Tindie dog badge. Meanwhile the keen-eyed among you may recognise the nRF52840 as the guts of the latest generation of Particle boards.
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The Bay Area Maker Faire is this weekend, and this might be the last one. This report comes from the San Francisco Chronicle, and covers the continuing problems of funding and organizing what has been called The Greatest Show and Tell on Earth. According to Maker Media CEO Dale Dougherty, “it is ‘quite possible’ that the event could be the Bay Area’s last Maker Faire.”
Maker Faire has been drawing artists, craftspeople, inventors, and engineers for more than a decade. In one weekend you can see risque needlepoint, art cars meant for the playa, custom racing drones, science experiments, homebrew computers, gigantic 3D printers, interactive LED art, and so much more. This is a festival built around a subculture defined by an act of creation; if you do something with your hands, if you build something, or if you make something, Maker Faire has something for you. However you define it, this is the Maker Movement and since 2006, there has been a Maker Faire, a festival to celebrate these creators.
It’s sad to learn the future of this event is in peril. Let’s take a look at how we got here and what the future might hold.
Where is Maker Faire Bay Area Having Trouble?
In The Chronicle’s interview with Dale Dougherty, financial issues are at the forefront of the uncertain future. We had to ask ourselves why. Attendance is still quite high, and shows that there is demand, but is the cost an issue? For a family of four, a single-day pass costs $130. A bottle of water is six dollars. In terms of entertainment, Maker Faire isn’t terribly expensive; a single-day pass for a family of four to the Exploratorium, a children’s museum that’s the closest thing to Maker Faire that’s in the Bay Area, costs $100. While the cost of attending the Bay Area Maker Faire is an issue, it’s not something that is outrageously expensive — aside from the food vendors, of course — but it is an issue.
Nonetheless, attendance has fallen in recent years. 2015 saw 145,000 makers attend the Bay Area Maker Faire, a slight increase over 2014 numbers. In 2016, Make reported attendance of 150,000, and in 2017 it was listed at 125,000. The number for 2018 was a mere 100,000. That’s still a lot of people, but in less than two years, attendance at the Bay Area Maker Faire dropped more than 30%.
Makers exhibit and attend Bay Area Maker Faire at no cost. Individual makers who are trying to make a business of their craft, and non-profits with small budgets, can exhibit for $525 to $1,500 per booth. It’s harder to get numbers for ‘maker’ companies who fall somewhere in between the individuals and the large corporations. But anecdotally I have heard that rising booth prices have caused some of these companies to pass on having a booth at the faire.
While the economics of Maker Faire might not make sense for some small businesses in the DIY market, Maker Faire is still supported by large companies that headline the event. Even here, support is waning. Huge sponsors like Intel have exited the ‘maker market’ entirely.
It’s easy to see that the crunch between waning attendance revenue and falling sponsorships endangers the future of the event.
Is It The Economy?
Decreased attendance and a shrinking number of sponsorships are merely a symptom. Any one of these reasons is not enough to account for the possible shuttering of Maker Faire. The faire, at its core, is a do-it-yourself festival and there is a historical precedent of the rise and fall of this market.
Bob Vila, of This Old House fame, attributes the success of his show to the terrible economy of the 1970s. This was an era where homeowners would remodel instead of upgrading, and This Old House was there to teach people how to spackle. DIY appears to be inversely correlated with the economy, and right now the economy is doing great. Last December, unemployment in the US was at 3.9%, a rate not seen since the eve of the dot com bubble.
Many ‘maker’ companies who have been around long enough to go through a few economic cycles will tell you it’s a great, nearly recession-proof business to be in, but still long “booms” in the economy as a whole can kill a company that was already on shaky footing. There is a reason TechShop saw a massive explosion of growth around 2008, only to shut most of its locations in 2017. There’s a reason RadioShack died in 2015.
Maker Media itself has seen a series of layoffs, with the most recent round in March. Years ago, at the height of the Maker movement, twenty percent of the staff was laid off. There is a lot of speculation as to why this is happening, and unfortunately very little data to give a clear picture of what is happening.
Maker Faire is Not the Maker Community
If this is the last Maker Faire Bay Area — and it’s not entirely certain that this is the last Maker Faire quite yet — this isn’t a time to mourn. The ‘maker community’ — whatever that is — may have been branded by Maker Media, but we weren’t created by them. DIY and amateur engineering has been around since the invention of the lathe and the soldering iron. Crafting has existed since time immemorial. Tinkering is a long-standing tradition.
Maker Media and Make Magazine have done great things to bolster the community over the years, and we’ll be sad to see the Maker Faires come to an end, but we have other outlets too.
While in some peoples’ minds Maker Faire, Make Magazine, and Make Media represent the community, it’s worth remembering that they’re just a for-profit company that can fail for any number of economic and financial reasons. If this is the last Maker Faire Bay Area, that doesn’t mean that the community is to blame.
I’ll be at the Faire this weekend and I hope you will too.
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If you’re near San Francisco this weekend, this is what you should be doing. It’s The 6th Annual Hackaday x Tindie MFBA Meetup w/ Kickstarter.
Come hang out with the hardware hackers and bring along a project of your own to get the conversation going. We’re excited to move to a new, larger venue this year. All the good of the past five years will come along with us, plus many benefits of exclusively booking out an entire venue. You can catch up with people who have been on their feet all day running booths — and usually see the stuff they can’t show you at the Faire. The crew from Hackaday, Tindie, and Kickstarter will be on hand. And you’ll get a glimpse of a lot of the cool people and projects you’ve admired on the pages of Hackaday over the years. It’s fun, you should go!
First beer is on us if you RSVP using the link at the top of this article. But we’re mainly publishing this today to show off the poster art. Deposit your adoration for this exquisite illustration in the comments below.
Amazing Art by Joe Kim
We love all of the original art that Joe Kim creates for Hackaday articles. It’s impossible to look at his poster for this event and be anything but overjoyed. Here’s a link to the full size image, but be warned that the file is 14.4 MB
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We want to hang out with you at Maker Faire Bay Area! Put our after-hours meetup on your schedule with a Sharpie, because the 6th Annual Hackaday x Tindie MFBA Meetup w/ Kickstarter will be bigger and better than ever with a new venue that has plenty of room for everyone!
The hacker crowd descends upon San Mateo weekend after next to show off a year of creations at Maker Faire. On Saturday, May 18th, the Faire will close for the evening as our meetup heats up. Bring along some hardware to show off and get the conversation started. Whether you’re attending the Faire or staffing a booth all day, this is the perfect way to unwind.
New Place with More Space!
Every year we’ve been packed to the gills and it’s time to make room for more people. This year Hackaday and Tindie have teamed up with Kickstarter to rent out the entire B Street Station in San Mateo. It’s close by and has plenty of room to hang out with friends new and old. We’ll provide light food and the first drink is on us! Please RSVP so we know how many people to expect, and like we said, grab a project to bring along! This event is open to all who are 21 years of age or older.
Begin Your Weekend with HDDG on Thursday
Start the weekend off right with the HDDG meetup on Thursday night. In keeping with tradition, this special Maker Faire edition of the Hardware Developer’s Didactic Galactic is happen at the San Francisco Supplyframe office on May 16th. You’ll find a ton of people from out of town on hand to enjoy talks ranging from non-rectangular phone design and mitigating ESD in wearables, to getting your projects funded with PR stunts. Speakers include Christina Cyr, Mary West, and Mic Black.
Newsletter from the Editors
Stay caught up on the finest Hackaday articles and get info about event announcements like this one. Every week the Hackaday Editors put together a newsletter delivered directly to your inbox.
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This weekend is the premier vintage computer meetup on the East Coast. It’s VCF East, and it’s all going down this weekend, Friday to Sunday afternoon, in Wall, New Jersey.
2019 is a fantastic year for computer history, being the 50th anniversary of Unix, and the 40th anniversary of Atari. For that, there will be exhibits of dozens of systems running some sort of *nix, including systems from Apple, AT&T, DEC, IBM, NeXT, SGI, and Sun. For the Atari extravaganza, you’re getting the full line of Atari 8-bitters, some STs, and a Falcon 030. There will be other exhibits about POTS, so bring a landline phone, a progress update on a 1/10th scale, pulse-level simulator of the ENIAC, and someone will assuredly have Super Mario Brothers for the C64 running.
Keynotes reflect this great year of computer history with a keynote by the one and only Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix. On Sunday, there’s a talk with Joe Decuir, engineer who helped develop the Atari VCS and Atari 800. There’s also a Homebrew Computing Discussion Panel.
As always, there will be a flea market, an understated highlight of any Vintage Computer Festival. It’s like a museum you can buy. One time there was an LCD for an Apple IIc. Too rich for my blood, but technically the first Apple laptop.
As with all VCF East events, it’s held at the InfoAge Science & History Center the site of the Camp Evans Signal Corps R&D lab during World War II. It’s basically the site of what would become DARPA. You’ve also got the Silverball pinball museum just up the road in Asbury Park. There’s plenty to do and see on the Jersey Shore this weekend, and it’s not even Labor Day.
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Last weekend was KiCon, a gathering of hardware developers from all over the world who use KiCad open source EDA software. This included many of the software engineers who drive development, people who use KiCad in their business, and those who simply love it for being a professional quality tool available for anyone to use.
From hardware show-and-tell, to the lineup of talks, and the social events each evening, there was so much packed into two (plus) days. Join me after the break for a whirlwind tour of the people and the hardware found at 2019 KiCon.
The Community
Above: Side area at Hackaday afterparty
Top of Article: Main room at Hackaday afterparty
Chris Gammell organized this conference and he did a fantastic job. The event transcended the walls of mHub — the manufacturing-oriented co-working space where KiCon was held — and included social events for three nights during the event.
Everyone who arrived in town on Thursday night came out to Hardware Happy Hour Chicago for a long evening including many hardware demos. As the talks wrapped up on Friday night we hopped on the train and partied at Pumping Station: One, a huge hackerspace on the north side of the city. And the fun continued past the official end of KiCon as Hackaday helped host an afterparty. All three of these nights were packed and delivered a much needed dose of unscheduled time to meet everyone and catch up with what has been going on in their parts of the hardware universe.
The Badge
To my delight there was a hardware badge for KiCon designed by Maciej Sumiński. The simple board packs a lot of punch, with functionality as an 8-channel logic analyzer, a simple oscilloscope, USB-to-UART, and the ability to control GPIO via USB. The hardware design is based on the LQFP-64 Atmel/Microchip ATSAM4SD16BA, which includes a whopping 1 MB 160 kB of RAM and runs at 120 MHz. The user interface is an OLED display with four user buttons.
I added a bit of animation as my #KiCon2019 badge hack. (Axial resistors are a hack to keep portable power bank from sleeping) pic.twitter.com/HcvxE8j40Y
— Mike Szczys (@szczys) April 27, 2019
A small portable battery was the power source. The badge was too low-power to keep that battery awake but that could be fixed by soldering some resistors onto a decoupling cap, allowing me to display my own animations as my name badge during the con.
The Talks
How much can you say about EDA software? Like any good tool, the uses are endless and I enjoyed hearing as much about unique use cases as I did about how they were overcome. The talks were recorded and I will be watching for those to be made available because the two talk venues made it impossible to see everything. (Update: they will be published on the Contextual Electronics channel)
One talk I certainly didn’t miss was Wayne Stambaugh’s keynote as the KiCad project leader. This has been, and remains a labor of love for all involved. But the big news is that Wayne has been hired full-time to work on the KiCad project, an incredible contribution to the Open Source community by the company Wit. This news came at the end of the talk after discussing plans for version 6; new schematic and symbol library file formats, Python scripting for schematics, drag and drop from symbol library to schematic editor, hatch zone filling, SVG import to boards, ratsnest curving, coloring, and visibility support were among the mentioned efforts.
Top: Developers Panel
Bottom: Manufacturers Panel
The panels were what I enjoyed the most from the talks. These are sessions with multiple people on stage where the conversation is led by a moderator and the audience is free to ask questions. Coming from a very interested crowd, questions were thoughtful and considerate, and those questions guided incredible discussions during both the KiCad developers panel and the manufacturers panel.
The Hacks
KiCon turned out a lot of hardware designers and they didn’t leave their pet projects at home.
This ski goggle LED board is fascinating in itself, but the design process was also the topic of Uriel Guy’s talk at the con. He wrote a C# wrapper for KiCad which will do the repetitive work of placing the LEDs and the board cutouts that let you see through the matrix. But the real gobsmacker is the jig for the curved control board — that jig was auto generated and pretty much everyone who’s ever manufactured anything will be interested in that feature.
Morgan showed up at Thursday night’s meetup wearing a badge he made that is simply perfection. The top lid is a bezel of PCB with pink LEDs on the underside to illuminate the electronics and battery inside. The sides and back of the case are also PCB, notched together, with control buttons on the side. There’s a PCB lanyard eyelet on the top, and a USB charging port on the bottom.
I ran into the engineers behind Wayne and Layne who were both wearing their I can solder SMT boards. I enjoy these because they are programmed optically using the phototransistors along the top edge.
You’ve likely seen the incredible circuit sculptures Mohit Bhoite has been building. He brought along a gorgeous game of snake with a wooden handle, thumbstick, and air-wired LED matrix. He tells me he transports it in a Pelican case to keep it safe.
The wristwatch above is a fitness tracker design that Joel Murphy is working on. It has a step tracker (the silicon actually does the processing to detect steps) and a heart rate monitor. Joel’s technique for attaching the watch band is interesting, the lug hole is a castellation with a surface mount resistor on top and bottom to keep the lug in place.
Eric Carr showed up to the Hackaday meetup with a case of (protoype?) Pinebook laptops. Of course people started breaking out tools and doing a teardown! I also enjoyed seeing the Eurorack face plate shown here which is a PCB manufactured with aluminum substrate. Apparently this is a common option for PCB designs that use high-powered LEDs.
This conference brought together amazing people to celebrate hardware design using Open Source tools beyond just KiCad. I learned about 3D modelling, I heard some insight on what manufacturers go though to build the designs we send them, and I heard directly from the software engineers that drive KiCad. There was simply way too much to fit in two days of this conference — although we still all tried to do everything. I think I speak for all involved in saying this went off without a hitch and I can’t wait for the next KiCon!
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The recent Cyphercon badge featured a very clever integrated paper tape reader, and had the hidden feature of a party mode in which all its lights would flash. When [Gigawatts] discovered this after the conference had ended, it was too late to find the tape to activate it. The solution? Build a tape emulator with a microcontroller hooked into the badge’s tape sensors to send the data directly into it.
It was a Tweet from [AND!XOR] that revealed the flashing hidden mode, and in case you missed it you can find all about the amazing badge in our review. The emulator takes a TI Stellaris LaunchPad LM4F120 and a set of jumper wires soldered directly to the jumper wires on the badge’s reverse. Hex values are created from a tape through an in-browser HTML page with a checkbox interface, a sketch converts the hex to tape, and the badge runs the code. The GitHub readme includes a description of the paper tape format as well as some sample tapes including a badge reset one for when you tire of party mode.
Most of us weren’t lucky enough to make it to Cyphercon and receive a badge. But we’re still impressed by the ingenuity of the badge’s designer, and by the complexity of the CTF game of which it formed a part.
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Cyphercon is not particularly large, or in a glamorous part of the world — in fact most people who came in from out of town had to fight snow to make it. Yet when I stepped into the con last Thursday there was no doubt something awesome was in progress. People were camped out in small groups, working furiously on their computers, talks were packed with people who came alive in the Q&A, and everywhere you looked you found people deep in conversation with friends old and new. If you missed out on Cyphercon 4.0, you need to make an effort to be here for 5.0.
Join me after the break for the highlights of this two-day security conference nestled in the heart of Milwaukee.
Capture the Con
There were a ton of people working on Capture the Flag. This is a conference-wide challenge that lays out puzzles — some printed, Some digital, some like the IoT village encouraged hardware hacking — where you find a hash and enter them into a scoreboard to gain points for your team. I caught up with Trenton Ivey, who organizes this CTF and he shared the story of Capture the Con for the Hackaday Podcast.
The three gentlemen above came up with a fantastic idea. As I wrote about last week, the Cyphercon badge included a paper tape reader. You could unlock parts of the badge and gain flags by running tape through, but you were limited on how many tapes you could get the badge table to produce. These three brought a laser printer and transparency film. Since the reader is infrared, they printed black bars with empty spots for the “hole” and ran them through the badge to limited success.
There were a ton of people working on cracking the tape codes, and also asking everyone they could find to scan the QR code they received at registration (to score a quick 5 points). The other activity tons were working on was the Cypher Village challenge. You picked up a post card with the starter cipher on it. Once you got that you could go back and get a deck of cards. These cards are a visual puzzle, but you need more than one set to complete it and begin to discover and solve the puzzles within.
You Might Just Learn A Lot of Things
More and more I see hardware hacking finding a place at security conferences. Right off the bat I found myself at the hardware hacking village which had its own simple badge this year. Here’s the hook, you can have a badge if you take the workshop that teaches how to dump firmware and learn things from the disassembly. Neat!
It’s put together a bit like a stylophone. There is a bit of jumper wire with one end soldered to the board. The other end you use to touch the pads on the PCB to cause different behavior. With an ATtiny85, four LEDs, a single resistor, and a CR2032 coin cell holder, the BOM cost is low and all of them were assembled on an unmodified skillet.
I also gave the Hacking 101 table a try. This is an effort to help get people up to speed with basic hacking tools. There were a couple of staff on hand and a few computer stations. I worked my way through an intro to packet sniffing with wire shark.
Check out what was on display in the lock picking village. Most events have tables where you can learn lock picking. A cool thing I’m not used to seeing is a multiple locksets for safes. Most of them were just the dial assembly with no enclosure, but this acrylic enclosure was something special. Inside is a red badge — admission to Cyphercon for life for anyone who could crack the safe. It didn’t fall this year, but brush up on your skills for the next one. Looks like it did get cracked about 5 minutes before close ng ceremonies!
Talks, Art, and Badge Repair
What I’ve described is already a lot, but there were also three talk tracks going on all weekend. Conflicting schedules meant I didn’t get to see everything I wanted, but there were two I greatly enjoyed.
Michelle Meas presented a talk what impact future breaches of genome databases will have. You know, those kits people give as gifts that use your DNA to tell you where you came from? Something I hadn’t thought about is how close your DNA markers are to 3rd-cousins and closer relatives. If they’ve submitted DNA to one of these companies, it’s possible to infer a lot about you based on their results, even if you’ve never taken one of the tests.
Eric Escobar and Matt Orme gave a presentation on remote wireless pentesting. Their overview on hardware was fun — including the comment that if you run around with a laptop open sniffing networks people will get very curious, but if you do it on a smartphone nobody cares. They also had some stories about mailing packages with cell-connected pentesting gear… that’s more than just a FedEx box on your desk.
I really enjoyed seeing Cyphercon art on display. The large piece shown here is the work of Mar Williams. The art at the top of this article is from the conference program and is the work of Brian “Koyn” Van Stedum. I also wanted to give a shout out to Wire Engineer who, like a champion, spent the entire conference repairing broken badges. Yes, I managed to break mine when working on the article about the badge and he fixed it right up.
The Secret of the Not-A-Mega-Con
So what is Cyphercon’s secret? It’s special. Like all smaller conferences, it has traditions and tight friendships that are unique to this con. It’s welcoming, it’s fun, and it’s in a part of the country where people are hungry for more delightful hacking challenges.
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KiCad is the electronic design automation software that lives at the intersection of electronic design and open source software. It’s seen a huge push in development over the last few years which has grown the suite into a mountain of powerful tools. To help better navigate that mountain, the first ever KiCad conference, KiCon, is happening next week in Chicago and Hackaday is hosting one of the afterparties.
The two days of talks take place on April 26th and 27th covering a multitude of topics. KiCad’s project leader, Wayne Stambaugh, will discuss the state of the development effort. You’ll find talks on best practices for using the software as an individual and as a team, how to avoid common mistakes, and when you should actually try to use the auto-router. You can learn about automating your design process with programs that generate footprints, by connecting it through git, and through alternate user interfaces. KiCad has 3D modeling to make sure your boards will fit their intended enclosures and talks will cover generating models in FreeCAD and rendering designs in both Fusion360 and Blender. Dust off your dark arts with RF and microwave design tips as well as simulating KiCad circuits in SPICE. If you can do it in KiCad, you’ll learn about it at KiCon.
Of course there’s a ton of fun to be had as interesting hackers from all over the world come together in the Windy City. Hackaday’s own Anool Mahidharia and Kerry Scharfglass will be presenting talks, and Mike Szczys will be in the audience. We anticipate an excellent “lobby con” where the conversations away from the stages are as interesting as the formal talks. And of course there are afterparties!
- Friday 4/26 Pumping Station: One, the popular Chicago hackerspace now celebrating its 10 year anniversary, is hosting an afterparty (details TBA)
- Saturday 4/27: Hackaday is hosting an after party at Jefferson Tap from 6-8:30. We’re providing beverages and light food for all who attended the conference.
If you still don’t have a ticket to KiCon, you better get one right now. We’re told that you can count what’s left on two hands. Supplyframe (Hackaday’s parent company) is a sponsor of KiCon, and we have two extra tickets that came with that sponsorship. We like seeing a diverse community at these events and have saved these tickets for people from under-represented groups (such as for example women, LGBT+, and people of color) in the hardware world. Email us directly for the tickets, your information will remain confidential.
We’re looking forward to seeing everyone next week!
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Cyphercon 4.0 came to life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Thursday and the conference badge is a brilliant and engaging design. At first glance it looks like a fairly mundane rectangular badge. But a closer look reveals simplistic elegance wrapping around some clever mechanical design and the awesome interactive mechanism of being able to read paper tape.
That’s right, this badge can read the series of holes punched in the long paper strips you normally associate with old iron of 50 years ago.
This is a design by the @tymkrs, the team who designed last year’s DEF CON 26 badge and the previous Cyphercon badges. This one is made up of three different panels placed vertically. The top is the Semaphore panel (named so because it’s printed on the silk screen) which includes an array of 25 LEDs arranged in groups of five. Just above that you’ll see the horseshoe-shaped holes. These are consumables, parts of the substrate clipped off with angle cutters when you visit the paper tape punching machine — it limits the number of times you can get these tapes made to hack your badge. The next panel down is the one with “Cyphercon 4.0” on the front and the coin cell battery on the rear. The final panel is the tape reader and the logic circuitry.
Along the right edge of the tape reader you can see the array of IR emitters and sensors that make up the tape reader itself. Along the left edge there is a series of holes intended to act as a guide so you may punch your own tapes. On the back of the badge you’ll find the PIC16F15355.
The tape is fed through, with one hole in the center (smaller than the rest) serving as the clock signal. The other eight holes deliver the data.
The assembly technique for this badge is incredible. If you look along the edge you can see how the three panels rest on the carrier board. During fabrication some metal stock was used as a spacer to leave room for the paper tape to feed after the panel was reflowed — there are pads on the underside of the panel that mate with footprints on the carrier board.
I would be very expensive to manufacture this if you used a contract manufacturer. Luckily, the Toymakers are their own CM so they just splurged on custom processes by adding to their own labor. It’s really impressive to see the modular design and commitment to making this work. I like it that the depth of the carrier board helps to reduce how far the battery holder for the CR2450 coin cell sticks out.
Here are detailed views of the panels. The rear-mounted LEDs on the battery panel are red/green, and the LEDs on the semaphore panel are red only.
The conference is called Cyphercon, so it’s not surprising there’s a puzzle to be solved. You find tape patterns on the back of the badge and in the conference guide book. Badges for presenters and organizers are different and I assume you need to collect all the patterns and assemble them to unlock what’s hidden within.
It’s a beautiful badge, even if you’re not trying to solve the badge puzzle. But the interactivity is so enticing. So far I’ve seen one team who brought a laser printer and transparencies to make their own tapes, leaving the “holes” unprinted on the strips. And another person mentioned trying to connect directly to the IR sensors with another microcontroller to electrically spoof feeding tape through it. It’s a simple mechanism, and a hit for everyone trying to solve the puzzles at this conference.
Here’s a video about the badge made by Toymaker’s to explain the activities involving this badge.
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Dust off your rainbow tables and grab a burner laptop, this Thursday, April 11, Cyphercon 4.0 roars into Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It’s a security conference with all that entails, but there is a bit of emphasis on crypto. A founding principle of Cyphercon is to support a “free and open discussion …read more
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At Hackaday, we are nothing without our community. We meet up at conferences, shows, and camps, but one of our favourite way to congregate is with the Unconference format. It’s an event where you can stand up and give an eight-minute talk about what is important to you, and what …read more
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It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume that anyone reading Hackaday regularly has at least progressed to the point where they can connect an LED to a microcontroller and get it to blink without setting anything on fire. We won’t even chastise you for not doing it with …read more
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As we’ve seen time and time again, the word “hacker” takes on a different meaning depending on who you’re talking to. If you ask the type of person who reads this fine digital publication, they’ll probably tell you that a hacker is somebody who likes to learn how things work …read more
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At the climax of 1983’s “WarGames”, the War Operation Plan Response (WOPR) computer famously opines “The only winning move is not to play” when presented with a barrage of no-win scenarios depicting global thermonuclear war. While the stakes aren’t quite as high when it comes to putting on a …read more
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There was a time when owning a home computer was kind of a big deal. In the days before the popularization of the Internet, so-called “computer shows” were the best way to meet with others to swap advice, information, and hardware. Of course today, things are very different. The kind …read more
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The most iconic parts of computer history come alive next weekend in Seattle during the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest. It’s all happening March 23rd and 24th at the Living Computers Museum+Labs.
VCF celebrates the great hardware that has sprung up during the technological march of the last fifty years. …read more
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Imagine a weekend of opulence in which you meet your companion at the railway station and whisk away across the continent in a 190mph express train for a relaxing couple of days enjoying the ambience of a luxury resort hotel in the fresh surroundings of a woodland in midwinter. Break …read more
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Hackaday and Seeed Studio are hosting a meetup in Shenzhen on Friday, March 22nd and you are invited!
This meetup is happening at X.factory, a maker hub run by Seeed Studios. Sophi Kravitz and Mike Szczys will be in town for the meetup and will both speak, along with a …read more
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Hackaday is hosting a meetup in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on Sunday, March 24th. We’d love to see you there!
Sean Boyce lives in HCMC — you’ve likely enjoyed several of his articles detailing some of the culture, like keeping track of your scooter when parking in busy areas, …read more
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Hackaday would like to invite you to a Mini Unconference on Saturday 16th of March, hosted by our friends at Cambridge Makespace, UK.
One of our most successful engagements with our community over the years here at Hackaday has been the Unconference. A group of you our readers join us …read more
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Watch Justin McAllister’s presentation on simple antennas suitable for a zombie apocalypse and two things will happen: you’ll be reminded that everything antennas do is amazing, and their reputation for being a black magic art will fade dramatically. Justin really knows his stuff; there is no dangle-a-wire-and-hope-for-the-best in his examples. …read more
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We salute hackers who make technology useful for people in emerging markets. Leigh Johnson joined that select group when she accepted the challenge to build portable machine vision units that work offline and can be deployed for under $100 each. For hardware, a Raspberry Pi with camera plus screen can …read more
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ToorCamp is a five-day open air tech camping event held every two years somewhere around the northwest corner of Washington state. Think of it as something like Burning Man, except you can survive for three hours without water, there aren’t a whole bunch of scenesters and Instagram celebs flying in …read more
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Oh, what’s KiCon you say? KiCon is the first dedicated conference on our favorite libre EDA tool: KiCad, organized by friend of Hackaday Chris Gammell and scheduled for April 26 and 27th in Chicago.
Having stuffed ourselves full of treats through the holidays, followed by sleeping through the calm winter …read more
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When you go to a hacker conference, you always hope there’s going to be a hardware badge. This is an interactive piece of custom electronics that gets you in the door while also delighting and entertaining during the con (and hopefully far beyond it).
Hot off the presses then is …read more
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During the summer months it might be known as “America’s Playground”, but around this time of year, Atlantic City is generally the destination of choice for bus loads of seniors looking to burn up some of that fixed income. Of course, that was before the WOPR Summit came to town. …read more
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Firmware and software are both just code, right? How different could the code that runs Internet-scale distributed web stuff be from the code that runs a tiny microcontroller brain inside a personal hydroponics device? Night and day!
Ruth Grace Wong works in the former world, but moonlights as a manufacturing …read more
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Electronic conference badges are now an accepted part of the lifeblood of our community, with even the simplest of events now sporting a fully functional computer as an eye-catching PCB on a lanyard. Event schedules and applications are shipped on them, and the more sophisticated ones have app libraries and …read more
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Every year at Superconference, Editor-in-Chief Mike Szczys gets the chance to talk about what we think are the biggest, most important themes in the Hackaday universe. This year’s talk was about science and technology, and more importantly who gets to be involved in building the future. Spoiler: all of us! Hackaday has always stood for the ideal that you, yes you, should be taking stuff apart, improving it, and finding innovative ways to use, make, and improve. To steal one of Mike’s lines: “Hackaday is an engine of engagement in engineering fields.”
The obvious way that we try to push …read more
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Chris Gammell wants to know: What’s in your circuit toolbox?
Personally, mine is somewhat understocked. I do know that in one of my journals, probably from back in the 1980s, I scribbled down a schematic of a voltage multiplier I had just built, with the classic diode and capacitor ladder topology. I probably fed it from a small bell transformer, and I might have gotten a hundred volts or so out of it. I was so proud at the time that I wrote it down for posterity with the note, “I made this today!”
I think the whole point of …read more
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Voja Antonic designed this fantastic retrocomputing badge for Hackaday Belgrade in 2018, and it was so much fun that we wanted to bring it stateside to the Supercon essentially unaltered. And that meant that Voja had some free time to devote to a new hardware giveaway: the Cube. So while his talk at Supercon in November was ostensibly about the badge, he just couldn’t help but tell us about his newer love, and some of the extremely clever features hidden within.
It’s funny how the hardware we design can sometimes reflect so much on the creator. Voja designed then-Yugoslavia’s first …read more
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It’s fair to say that the majority of Hackaday readers have not built any hardware that’s slipped the surly bonds of Earth and ventured out into space proper. Sure we might see the occasional high altitude balloon go up under the control of some particularly enterprising hackers, but that’s still a far cry from a window seat on the International Space Station. Granted the rapid commercialization of space has certainly added to that exclusive group of space engineers over the last decade or so, but something tells us it’s still going to be quite some time before we’re running space-themed …read more
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If you want to build hundreds of a thing (and let’s face it, you do) now is a magical time to do it. Scale manufacturing has never been more accessible to the hardware hacker, but that doesn’t mean it’s turn-key with no question marks along the way. The path is there, but it’s not well marked and is only now becoming well-traveled. The great news is that yes, you can get hundreds of a thing manufactured, and Kerry Scharfglass proves that it’s a viable process for the lone-wolf electronics designer. He’s shared tips and tricks of the manufacturing process in …read more
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The Hackaday Superconference is all about showcasing the hardware heroics of the Hackaday community. We also have a peer-reviewed journal with the same goal, and for the 2018 Hackaday Superconference we got a taste of the first paper to make it into our fully Open Access Journal. It comes from Ted Yapo, it is indeed a tale of hardware heroics: what happens when you don’t want to spend sixty thousand dollars on a vector network analyzer?
Ted’s talk begins with a need for a network analyzer. These allow for RF measurements, but if you ever need one, be prepared: you …read more
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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 …read more
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There’s no single formula for success, but if we’ve learned anything over the years of covering cons, contests, and hackathons, it’s that, just like in geology, pressure can create diamonds. Give yourself an impossible deadline with high stakes, and chances are good that something interesting will result. That’s what Estefannie from the YouTube channel “Estefannie Explains It All” did when Bay Area Maker Faire was rolling around last year, and she stopped by the 2018 Hackaday Superconference to talk about the interactive Daft Punk helmet that came out of it.
It’s a rapid-fire tour of Estefannie’s remarkably polished replica of …read more
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Every year for the past 35 years, the German Chaos Computer Club has met just after Christmas for a few days of “Spaß am Gerät” — having fun with the machines. And that’s everything from trying to bring an old PDP-8 back into running condition to forging new software to replace the old and busted social media platforms that permeate our lives. The sum total of around 17,000 people doing the nerdy stuff that they love, and sharing it together, is both amazing and inspiring. Four days of little sleep and much socializing later, I bet there was still another …read more
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Medical imaging is one of the very best applications of technology — it allows us to peer inside of the human body without actually performing surgery. It’s non-destructive testing to the extreme, and one of the more interesting projects we’ve seen over the past year uses AC currents and an infinite grid of resistors to image the inside of a living organism. It’s called Spectra and it is the brainchild of [Jean Rintoul]. Her talk at the Hackaday Superconference is all about low cost and open source biomedical imaging.
We’ve seen some interesting medical imaging hacks in the Hackaday Prize …read more
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Writing device drivers is always a good start for a journey into the Linux kernel code. Of course, the kernel is a highly complex piece of software, and if you mess up your code properly, you might take down the entire system with you. User-space drivers on the other hand might not look as good on your CV, but they can help to work around some of the dangers and complexity of the kernel space. Plus, you don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to C to write them, especially if you are concerned about the usual C pitfalls and the …read more
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Oh, the hijinks that the early days of the PC revolution allowed. Back in the days when a 20MB hard drive was a big deal and MS-DOS 3.1 ruled over every plain beige PC-clone cobbled together by enthusiasts like myself, it was great fun to “set up” someone else’s machine to do something unexpected. This generally amounted to finding an unattended PC — the rooms of the residence hall where I lived in my undergrad days were a target-rich environment in this regard — and throwing something annoying in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Hilarity ensued when the mark next booted the …read more
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[Jiska Classen] and [Dennis Mantz] created a tool called Internal Blue that aims to be a Swiss-army knife for playing around with Bluetooth at a lower level. The ground for their tool is based in three functions that are common to all Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets: one that lets you read arbitrary memory, on that lets you run it, and one that lets you write it. Well, that was easy. The rest of their work was analyzing this code, and learning how to replace the firmware with their own version. That took them a few months of hard reversing work.
In …read more
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When you think of microcontroller development, you probably picture either a breadboard with a chip or a USB-connected circuit board. But Tim Ansell pictured an ARM dev board that is almost completely hidden inside of a USB port. His talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference tells that story and then some. Check out the newly published video, along with more details of the talk, after the break.
Tim is the creator of Tomu, the tiny ARM Cortex M0+ board that we first covered back in January. The board has a Silicon Labs EMF32 on one side, four traces to interface …read more
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A familiar spirit, or just a familiar, is a creature rumored to help people in the practice of magic. The moniker is perfect for Archimedes, the robot owl built by Alex Glow, which wields the Amazon Google AIY kit to react when it detects faces. A series of very interesting design choices a what really gives the creature life. Not all of those choices were on purpose, which is the core of her talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference.
You can watch the video of her talk, along with an interview with Alex after the break.
When the Unexpected Becomes
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There were plenty of great talks at this year’s Supercon, but we really liked the title of Dominic Spill’s talk: Ridiculous Radios. Let’s face it, it is one thing to make a radio or a computer or a drone the way you are supposed to. It is another thing altogether to make one out of things you shouldn’t be using. That’s [Dominic’s] approach. In a quick 30 minutes, he shows you two receivers and two transmitters. What makes them ridiculous? Consider one of the receivers. It is a software defined radio (SDR). How many bits should an SDR have? How …read more
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If there is a field which has promise verging on a true breakout, it is that of wearable electronics. We regularly see 3D printing, retrocomputing, robotics, lasers, and electric vehicle projects whose advances are immediately obvious. These are all exciting fields in which the Hackaday community continually push the boundaries, and from which come the astounding pieces of work you read on these pages daily. Of course the projects that merge textiles and electronics are pushing boundaries in the same way, except for that it’s often not obvious at first glance. Why is that?
Wearables are a field in which …read more
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When it comes to seeing in strange spectrums, David Prutchi is the guy you want to talk to. He’s taken pictures of rocks under long, medium and short UV light, he’s added thermal imaging to consumer cameras, and he’s made cameras see polarization. There’s a lot more to the world than what the rods and cones on your retina can see, and David is one of the best at revealing it. For this year’s talk at the Hackaday Superconference, David is talking about DIY Ultraviolet Photography. It’s how bees see, and it’s the bees knees.
The visible portion of light …read more
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If you were to invent a time machine and transport a typical hardware hacker of the 1970s into 2018 and sit them at a bench alongside their modern counterpart, you’d expect them to be faced with a pile of new things, novel experiences, and exciting possibilities. The Internet for all, desktop computing fulfilling its potential, cheap single-board computers, even ubiquitous surface-mount components.
What you might not expect though is that the 2018 hacker might discover a whole field of equivalent unfamiliarity while being very relevant from their grizzled guest. It’s something Scott Swaaley touches upon in his Superconference talk: “Lessons …read more
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Jeremy Hong knows a secret or two about things you shouldn’t do with radio frequency (RF), but he’s not sharing.
That seems an odd foundation upon which to build one’s 2018 Hackaday Superconference talk, but it’s for good reason. Jeremy knows how to do things like build GPS and radar jammers, which are federal crimes. Even he hasn’t put his knowledge to practical use, having built only devices that never actually emitted any RF.
So what does one talk about when circumspection is the order of the day? As it turns out, quite a lot. Jeremy focused on how the …read more
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Ground is an interesting topic when it comes to engineering. Either it’s the reference level for a digital circuit (not necessarily at zero volts, either), or it’s the return path for current, or it’s the metal chassis, which shouldn’t be the return path for current or else something’s terribly broken. Erika Earl’s talk at this year’s Hackaday Superconference is all about ground.
The first type of ground to talk about is the ground in your outlets and walls. The AC safety ground is the third pin on your plug that should be attached to the chassis of your washer/dryer on …read more
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Hack a Day
When it comes to reverse engineering silicon, there’s no better person to ask than Ken Shirriff. He’s the expert at teasing the meaning out of layers of polysilicon and metal. He’s reverse engineered the ubiquitous 555 timer, he’s taken a look at the inside of old-school audio chips, and he’s found butterflies in his op-amp. Where there’s a crazy jumble of microscopic wires and layers of silicon, Ken’s there, ready to do the teardown.
For this year’s talk at the Hackaday Superconference, Ken walked everyone through the techniques for reverse engineering silicon. Surprisingly, this isn’t as hard as it sounds. …read more
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Hack a Day
We live in a Golden Age of single-board computers. There was a time when a portable computer that was any good was a relatively rare and expensive device, certainly not something you could expect to replicate for yourself. A Psion, or later a Palm or perhaps a WinCE device would have been a lot more than an impulse purchase, and could not easily have been replicated using the components then available to the experimenter.
Thanks to spin-offs from technology developed for set-top boxes and mobile phones we can now buy any one of a pile of different boards that have …read more
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Hack a Day
When embarking on a career in the life sciences, it seems like the choice of which model organism to study has more than a little to do with how it fits into the researcher’s life. I once had a professor who studied lobsters, ostensibly because they are a great model for many questions in cell biology; in actuality, he just really liked to eat lobster. Another colleague I worked with studied salt transport in shark rectal glands, not because he particularly liked harvesting said glands — makes the sharks a tad grumpy — but because he really liked spending each …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackaday is going to be at the 35th annual Chaos Communication Congress (35C3), December 27th – 31st, and we’re putting together an assembly. If you’re coming to 35C3, come join us!
If you’ve never been to a Congress before, it’s an amazing scene. This year over 15,000 hackers will take over the Leipzig Congress Hall, bringing whatever they’re working on with them, and showing off their last-minute dazzlers. Congress is awesome in both senses of the word: simultaneously incredible and a little bit intimidating.
With the scale of the Congress approaching absurd proportions, it’s nice to have a home base. …read more
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Hack a Day
A normal life in hacking, if there is such a thing, seems to follow a predictable trajectory, at least in terms of the physical space it occupies. We generally start small, working on a few simple projects on the kitchen table, or if we start young enough, perhaps on a desk in our childhood bedroom. Time passes, our skills increase, and with them the need for space. Soon we’re claiming an unused room or a corner of the basement. Skills build on skills, gear accumulates, and before you know it, the garage is no longer a place for cars but …read more
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Hack a Day
Kelly Peng is an electrical and optical engineer, and founder of Kura AR. She’s built a fusion reactor, a Raman spectrometer, a DIY structured light camera, a linear particle accelerator, and emotional classifiers for likes and dislikes. In short, we have someone who can do anything, and she came in to talk about one of the dark arts (pun obviously intended): optics.
The entire idea of Kura AR is to build an immersive augmented reality experience, and when it comes to AR glasses, there are two ways of doing it. You could go the Google Glass route and use a …read more
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Hack a Day
Dexter, a really great robot arm project, just won top honors in the 2018 Hackaday Prize, and walked away with $50,000 toward continuing their project. As a hat tip to Hackaday and the community, Haddington Dynamics, the company behind Dexter, agreed to open-source their newest version of Dexter as well. As James Newton said when accepting the trophy during the award ceremony, “because of your faith in us, because of this award, we have been moved to open-source the next generation of Dexter.” Some very clever work went into producing Dexter, and we can’t wait to see what further refinements …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackaday’s parent company Supplyframe is at Electronica in Munich this week — booth C5-223. On Thursday from 16:00 – 18:00, they’ll be hosting a Hackaday Happy Hour, with a beer and coffee bar, for everyone in the Hackaday community. They’d love to see you and hear what you’re working on, be it for your day job or your night job.
If you missed the #badgelife exhibit at Supercon, it’s here at Electronica. There will also be some of those mysterious cubes you may have heard about. Richard Hogben and Bogdan Rosu will be DJing fresh beats. Stop by and say …read more
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Hack a Day
Supercon badge hackers had to be ready to present their show-and-tell by 6 pm Sunday evening. This ruthless unmoving deadline meant every badge hack on stage represents an accomplishment in time management, and some luck, in addition to their own technical merits. But that deadline also meant a few fantastic projects lost their race against the clock. We were rooting for [Jac Goudsmit] to build an Apple I emulator as his badge expansion, but he wasn’t quite done when our badge hack ceremony began. After Supercon he went home, finished the project, and documented everything in a detailed writeup.
Our …read more
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Hack a Day
A weekend for people who love hardware, by people who love hardware. It’s a simple recipe and it makes a delicious event that we call the Hackaday Superconference. If you made it to Pasadena last weekend, I’m sure going back to work on Monday was difficult after three days of far too little sleep and way too much fun. (It was for me.) If you didn’t make it to the con, set a reminder for July 1st to start watching for next year’s early bird tickets. Don’t believe me? Okay, let’s step through the hype of a weekend we’ll all …read more
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Hack a Day
At the end of Hackaday Superconference weekend, we hold a badge hacking ceremony on the main stage where anyone who has done anything with their badge is invited to come on stage and show off their work. Yes, even if it’s just a blinking LED! It was a tremendous pleasure to see not only people taking us at our word and presented blinking LEDs, but that the community in the room welcomed these inductees to hardware hacking with cheers. Before the ceremony, though, there was a lot of frantic work by badge hackers armed with soldering irons and fueled by …read more
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Hack a Day
In addition to great speakers and enlightening workshops at Supercon, we have an area set aside for attendees to hack on their conference badges. There is no prerequisite beyond having a badge and a willingness to get hands-on. From hardware beginners to professional embedded system developers, we welcome all skill levels!
The image above is a free-form LED light sculpture by [4C1dBurn], who had just learned to solder and this is how a new skill was put into practice. In the background is the badge hacking arena: 7 tables set up in a row with 6 seats per table. The …read more
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Hack a Day
Dexter, an open-source, high-precision, trainable robotic arm has just been named the Grand Prize winner of the 2018 Hackaday Prize. The award for claiming the top place in this nine-month global engineering initiative is $50,000. Four other top winners were also named during this evening’s Hackaday Prize Ceremony, held during the Hackaday Superconference in Pasadena, California.
This year’s Hackaday Prize featured challenges with five different themes. Entrants were asked to show their greatest Open Hardware Design, to build a Robotics Module, to design a Power Harvesting Module, to envision a Human Computer Interface, or to invent a new Musical Instrument. …read more
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Hack a Day
The Hackaday Superconference is in full swing, and in addition to the greatest hardware hackers, a great gathering of tinkerers, awesome talks, badge hacking, and so much more, we’ve also got competitive soldering. This year, we’re making soldering competitive with the SMD Solder Challenge. It began Friday morning as hackers go heat to head, hand soldering frustratingly tiny parts.
The rules are simple: you’re given a light, a magnifying glass, some solder, wick, flux, and the standard Hakko soldering iron (with the standard tip). The task is to solder up our own special version of the SMD Challenge Kit from …read more
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Hack a Day
The Hackaday Superconference is happening right now and you can join in on the Livestream. Talks begin at 10 am Pacific time on Saturday and Sunday.
The live stream covers one of two stages at the ultimate hardware conference. Topics focus on hardware creation, ranging from silicon chip fabrication, drop-in circuit designs, firmware frameworks, and 3D printing orbital rockets, to abusing printer cartridges, placing circuits on odd substrates, lighter-than-air electronics, and better techniques for building tech in garments, jewelry, props, and other wearables. Saturday evening you can watch as the Hackaday Prize is awarded live on stage, and Sunday afternoon’s …read more
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Hack a Day
We tend to think of elaborate electronic conference badges as something limited to the hacker scene, but it looks like the badgelife movement is starting to hit the big time. Now even the “big boys” are getting into the act, and pretty soon you won’t be able to go to a stuffy professional conference without seeing a sea of RGB LEDs firing off. We’ll let the good readers of Hackaday determine if this means it’s officially post-cool or not.
[Noel Portugal] writes in to tell us about how he created the “Code Card” during his tenure with the Oracle Groundbreakers …read more
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Hack a Day
The Hackaday Superconference is this weekend and it’s the greatest hardware con on the planet. Tickets are completely sold out, but you can still get in on the fun by watching the livestream and joining Supercon chat.
For everyone who will be here in person, the entire Hackaday crew is busy as beavers preparing for your arrival. We’re assembling badges, rigging AV for the talks, stuffing goodie bags, calling caterers, and taping cables to the floor. This is by far the biggest Superconference yet.
Doors open at 9 am Friday at the Supplyframe HQ. This is your first chance to …read more
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Hack a Day
Over the weekend, the last available tickets to the Hackaday Superconference vanished. This will be the fullest, most exciting, hack-packed Supercon ever.
We’ve always had a stunning slate of speakers. It’s hard to objectively say we will top previous years, but yes this collection of talks is an insane concentration of hardware speakers that tops anything we’ve seen before. You can’t look at the schedule without feeling an electric jolt of excitement. The good news is you can still get in on those talks. Bookmark this Hackaday Superconference Live-Stream which begins at 10 am PDT on Saturday, November 3rd.
Of …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackaday Superconference is just a week away (precious few tickets remain), a celebration of all things Hackaday, which naturally includes creative projects making the most of their hardware. Every attendee gets a platform for hacking in the form of the conference badge.
To make the most of your badge hacking fun, plan ahead so you will have the extra components and the tools you need. At the most basic, bring along a serial to USB cable and a PIC programmer. These are common and if you don’t own them, ask around and you will likely be able to borrow …read more
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Hack a Day
Let’s play a guessing game. Shown here is a sneak peek at the rear view of a hardware demo being built specifically for the Hackaday Superconference in Pasadena this November 2-4. It’s sure to be a crowd pleaser when finished, but if you’re anything like us, studying what’s behind the finished face of a project like this is even more satisfying than seeing the final product.
If you think you know what it is, you can score yourself a free hardware badge from the conference! Leave a comment below with your best guess about what this is — we’ll pick …read more
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Hack a Day
Wiring is one of those things that we’ve all had to do on a project, but probably didn’t give a lot of thought to. It’s often the last thing that happens during the build, and almost certainly doesn’t get approached with any kind of foresight. You look at the components you need to connect, dig through the parts bins until you find something that looks like it should fit, and tack it in with a blob of solder and perhaps some hot glue if you’re feeling really fancy. We’re all guilty of it from time to time, but Bradley Gawthrop …read more
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Hack a Day
It is mind-boggling when you think about the computing power that fits in the palm of your hand these days. It wasn’t long ago when air-conditioned rooms with raised floors hosted computers far less powerful that filled the whole area. Miniaturization is certainly the order of the day. Things are getting smaller every day, too. We were so impressed with the minuscule entries from the first “Square Inch Project” — a contest challenging designers to use 1 inch2 of PCB or less — that we decided bring it back with the Return of the Square Inch Project. The rules …read more
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Hack a Day
It hangs around your neck, comes with the cost of admission, and would blow away a desktop computer from the 1980’s. This is the Hackaday Superconference badge and you can get your hands on one for the price of admission to the ultimate hardware conference.
Everyone through the door gets one of these badges featuring a 320 x 240 color display, a full qwerty keyboard, and limitless hacking potential! The stock firmware runs a BASIC interpreter, the CP/M operating system, and includes games and Easter Eggs. It’s a giant playground, and we want to see what you can do with …read more
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Hack a Day
Reverse engineering silicon is a dark art, and when you’re just starting off it’s best to stick to the lesser incantations, curses, and hexes. Hackaday caught up with Ken Shirriff at last year’s Supercon for a chat about the chip decapping and reverse engineering scene. His suggestion is to start with an old friend: the 555 timer.
Ken is well-known for his work photographing the silicon die at the heart of an Integrated Circuit (IC) and mapping out the structures to create a schematic of the circuit. We’re looking forward to Ken’s talk in just a few weeks at the …read more
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Hack a Day
Come one, come all, this is the megapost about the Hackaday Superconference. Join us in Pasadena on November 2-4 for the hardware conference you cannot miss. Get your ticket quickly as they will sell out!
These Are Your People
You get excited about cool hardware. We do too. This not the case at most conferences. Come to Supercon because these are your people. Experience the most excellent “Hacker Village” vibe, a siren song tempting you to skip the organized talks as you get sucked into fascinating conversations at every turn. Load up that hardware hack you’ve been putting off and …read more
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Hack a Day
This summer’s Electromagnetic Field hacker camp in a field in western England gave many of the European side of our community their big fix of cool stuff for the year.
Some lucky individuals can spend the year as perpetual travelers, landing in a new country every week or so for the latest in the global round of camps. For the rest of us it is likely that there will be one main event each year that is the highlight, your annual fill of all that our global community has to offer. For many Europeans the main event was the biennial …read more
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Hack a Day
There’s wealth of activities at the Hackaday Superconference but we’ve saved a few for today’s announcement that will inspire you to take on something new and different. Check out the eight talks below that will push you to try the unexpected, to look at old things in a new way, and to propel your hardware adventures for another year.
This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops as final confirmations come in. Supercon will sell out so grab your ticket now before it’s too late.
Samy Kamkar
Ultra Low
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Hack a Day
How can we fit so many impressive talks onto two stages at the Hackaday Superconference? We’ll be bursting at the seams in November as the hardware world gathers in Pasadena for this annual pilgrimage. This year’s Supercon will have more talks and workshops than ever before!
This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops as final confirmations come in. Supercon will sell out so grab your ticket now before it’s too late.
Ken Shirriff
Studying Silicon: Reverse Engineering Integrated Circuits
From the outside, integrated circuits are mysterious black boxes.
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Hack a Day
The drum beat of the Hackaday Superconference grows louder. Are you ready for it? We’re spending the week revealing the talks and on our third day we’re barely half-way through. Check out the incredible speakers who will be at Supercon to share tales of hardware creation.
This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops as final confirmations come in. Supercon will sell out so grab your ticket now before it’s too late.
Jeroen Domburg
Magic Paintbrush: Everyone Can Paint with Printer Cartridges
Always wanted to paint like Bob Ross,
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Hack a Day
Level-up your hardware chops at the Hackaday Superconference. We’re delighted to share more of the amazing speakers who are headed to Pasadena in just a few weeks. Scroll down for eight incredible talks that will inform, inspire, and excite the engineering muse inside of you.
This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops as final confirmations come in. Supercon will sell out so grab your ticket now before it’s too late.
Kitty Yeung
Tech-Fashion Designs and the Wearables Industry
Driven by creative designs, the wearables industry has tremendous opportunities
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Hack a Day
The Hackaday Superconference is taking on a life of its own. Speaker selection is done and invitations are on the way out. Below is a taste of the confirmed talks in store for you this November in Pasadena.
This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops as final confirmations come in. Supercon will sell out so grab your ticket now before it’s too late.
Ben Krasnow
Depositing copper circuitry and optical displays onto 3D-printed parts
Producing printed circuits on plastic mechanical parts can be accomplished with a standard laser
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Hack a Day
If you’ve been hanging around Hackaday for a while, you’ve likely seen a few attempts to bridge the real world with the voxel paradise that is Minecraft. In the past, projects have connected physical switches to virtual devices in the game, or took chunks of the game’s blocky landscape and turned it into a 3D printable file. These were interesting enough endeavors, but fairly limited in their scope. They assumed you had an existing world or creation in Minecraft that you wanted to fiddle with in a more natural way, but didn’t do much for actually playing the game.
But …read more
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Hack a Day
If someone suggests you spend time working on boring projects, would you take that advice? In this case, I think Kipp Bradford is spot on. We sat down together at the Hackaday Superconference last fall and talked about medical device engineering, the infrastructure in your home, applying Sci-Fi to engineering, and yes, we spoke about boring projects.
Kipp presented a talk on Devices for Controlling Climates at Supercon last year. It could be argued that this is one of those boring topics, but very quickly you begin to grasp how vitally important it is. Think about how many buildings on …read more
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Hack a Day
Today at the Open Hardware Summit at MIT, OSHWA, the Open Source Hardware Association has announced a huge revision to the Open Hardware certification process. The goal here is to design a better platform for creating Open Hardware.
While all hardware already certified as Open Hardware will remain Open Hardware, this revamp of the ‘hub’ of the certification process is greatly improved. There’s a new website. There are learning modules telling everyone what it means to be Open Source hardware. There are community examples — real-life walk-throughs of projects that have already been created. There’s a streamlined certification process, and …read more
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Hack a Day
The past few years have been all about electronic conference badges and this year is no different. Right now, we’re setting up at the Open Hardware Summit at MIT, and this year’s badge is nothing short of extraordinary. It’s a WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled e-paper badge, individually programmed for every attendee. The 2018 Open Hardware Summit badge is a work of art, and it was all created over on hackaday.io.
This board is based on the ESP trINKet designed by [Mike Rankin] with additional hardware design from [Alex Camilo]. The badge is based around the ESP32-wroom-32 module with a 2.13 inch …read more
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Hack a Day
You can build a Connect Four solver in software, but it won’t be all that much fun. Now apply that same automation to a 15-foot-tall plywood version of the classic board game and you’ve just created a smile-making-machine for everyone within eyesight. Behold the Mono-Purpose Automated Robot Versed In Connnect4 (Marvin) which Ben and Jonathan dreamed up on their way home from Maker Faire last year, and made into their exhibit this year.
On the physical side of things they got really creative in lifting the discs and sorting them into the column chosen by the software brain of the …read more
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Hack a Day
There was an unbelievable amount of stuff on display at the 2018 World Maker Faire in New York. Seriously, an unreal amount of fantastically cool creations from all corners of the hacker and maker world: from purely artistic creations to the sort of cutting edge hardware that won’t even be on the rest of the world’s radar for a year or so, and everything in between. If you’ve got a creative bone in your body, this is the place for you.
But if there was one type of creation that stood out amongst all others, a general “theme” of Maker …read more
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Hack a Day
This weekend Hackaday and Tindie will be trekking out to beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the greatest congregation of Open Source hardware enthusiasts on the planet. This is the Open Hardware Summit. It’s every year, most of the time in different places, and this year it’s back in the hallowed halls of MIT. Somebody put a car on the roof before we do.
The schedule for this year’s Open Hardware Summit is stuffed to the gills with interesting presentations sure to satiate every hardware nerd. We’ve got talks on Open Source Software Defined Radio, and the people behind the Hackaday Prize …read more
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Hack a Day
At this year’s World Maker Faire in New York City we’re astonished and proud to run into some of the best projects that are currently in the running for the Hackaday Prize. One of these is Programmable Air, from [Amitabh], and it’s the solution to pneumatics and pressure sensing in Maker and IoT devices.
The idea behind Programmable Air is to create the cheapest, most hacker-friendly system for dealing with inflatable and vacuum-based robotics. Yes, pneumatic robotics might sound weird, but there’s plenty of projects that could make use of a system like this. The Glaucus is one of the …read more
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Hack a Day
The Hackaday Superconference is rapidly approaching and you need to be there. The good news is, if you play your cards right you can get your boss to sign off on sending you to Supercon as part of your professional development.
This is the Ultimate Hardware Conference. This is your chance to recharge your batteries and come back energized for an amazing year ahead. You’ll be among hundreds of people who love to push the boundaries of what is possible. Dozens of talks and workshops take place over the backdrop of three days worth of a Hacker Village atmosphere focusing …read more
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Hack a Day
David Mills is as a research scientist at the cutting edge of medical imaging. His work doesn’t involve the scanners you might find yourself being thrust into in a hospital should you be unfortunate enough to injure yourself. He’s working with a higher grade of equipment, he pushes the boundaries of the art with much smaller, very high resolution CT scanners for research at a university dental school.
He’s also a friend of Hackaday and we were excited for his talk on interesting uses for CT scanners at EMF Camp this summer. David takes us into that world with history …read more
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Hack a Day
It is a golden rule of the journalist’s art, that we report the news, we don’t make it. But just occasionally we find ourselves in the odd position of being in the right place such that one of our throwaway comments or actions has the unintended consequence of seeding a story. This is one of those moments, so it’s a rare case of use of the first person in a daily piece as your scribe instead of Hackaday’s usual second person.
At the SHA2017 hacker camp in the Netherlands, [Matt “Gasman” Westcott] gave his presentation on composing a chiptune from …read more
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Hack a Day
Every year at Supercon there is a critical mass of awesome people, and last year Sophi Kravitz was able to sneak away from the festivities for this interview with Katherine Scott. Kat was a judge for the 2017 Hackaday Prize. She specializes in computer vision, robotics, and manufacturing and was the image analytics team lead at Planet Labs when this interview was filmed.
You’re going to chuckle at the beginning of the video as Kat and Sophi recount the kind of highjinks going on at the con. In the hardware hacking area there were impromptu experiments in melting aluminum with …read more
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Hack a Day
A large hacker camp is in microcosm a city, it has all the services you might expect to find in a larger settlement in the wider world. There is a telecommunication system, shops, bars, a health centre, waste disposal services, a power grid, and at some camps, a postal system. At Electromagnetic Field, the postal system was provided by the Sneakernet, a select group of volunteers including your Hackaday scribe under the direction of the postmaster Julius ter Pelkwijk. I even had the fun of delivering some chopped pork and ham. (More on that later.)
Yes, I’m talking about physically …read more
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Hack a Day
If you’ve been to a few hacker camps then you’re aware they are not the products of giant corporate entities but volunteer run community groups. You may even have volunteered yourself, and done all sorts of interesting tasks that go towards the running of the camp. But few of you will have been on the orga team of a camp, the people who put in the hard work of making it happen from start to finish. Julius ter Pelkwijk has, and at the 2018 Electromagnetic Field camp in the UK he gave us an insight into the experience.
Of course, …read more
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Hack a Day
It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this, but hackers and makers absolutely love LEGO. We think you’d be hard pressed to find a Hackaday reader, young or old, that hasn’t spent some quality time with the little plastic bricks from Billund, Denmark. So it follows that there’s a considerable community of individuals who leverage their better than average technical prowess to utilize LEGO in new and unique ways. But the activities and history of these LEGO hackers is not exactly common knowledge to those who aren’t heavily vested in the hobby.
During the recent FOSSCON 2018 …read more
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Hack a Day
A large hacker camp attracts attendees from all over the world, and at the recent Electromagnetic Field in the UK there were certainly plenty of international visitors. Probably one of those with the longest journey was [Sarah Spencer] from Australia, and she deserves our admiration not just for her work but also for devoting much of her meagre luggage space to the installation she’d brought over for the event. In the lounge tent you could find the Knitted Universe, a map of the night sky with light-up Neopixel constellations covering an entire wall, and among the talks you could find …read more
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Hack a Day
From a cockroach filled with LEDs, to an impressively dense 576 RGB LED display, and even a hunk of carpet, our final installment of the unofficial hardware badges at DEF CON 26 are beyond impressive. I tried to see every badge and speak to every badge maker this year. So far we’ve covered a ton of badges in volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3 of this series, and now it’s time to finish up!
If I didn’t get a chance to cover your badge in these articles, we still want to hear about it. What everyone wants is to …read more
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Hack a Day
Who among us doesn’t procrastinate from time to time? We can’t count the number of times that we’ve taken advantage of the Post Office staying open until midnight on April 15th. And when the 15th falls on a weekend? Two glorious additional days to put off the inevitable!
If you’ve been sitting on submitting your talk or workshop proposal to the 2018 Hackaday Superconference, we’ve got the next best thing for you: we’re extending the deadline until 5 pm PDT on September 10th.
The Hackaday Superconference is a singularity of hardware hackers: more of the best people in the …read more
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Hack a Day
At Hackaday, we’re constantly impressed by the skill and technique that goes into soldering up some homebrew creations. We’re not just talking about hand-soldering 80-pin QFNs without a stencil, either: there are people building charlieplexed LED arrays out of bare copper wire, and using Kynar wire for mechanical stability. There are some very, very talented people out there, and they all work in the medium of wire, heat, and flux.
At this year’s DEF CON, we opened the floodgates to competitive soldering. Along with [Bunny] from Hardware Hacking Village and the many volunteers from the HHV and Soldering Skills Village, …read more
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Hack a Day
I tried my best to see every badge and speak with every badge maker at DEF CON 26. One thing’s for sure, seeing them all was absolutely impossible this year, but I came close. Check out the great badges shown off in volume 1 and in volume 2 of this series. The game is afoot, and if you are headed to a hacker conference there’s never been a better time to build your own hardware badge — whether you build 5 or 500!
All right, let’s look at the badges!
Hack for Satan Badge
The Hack for Satan badge is …read more
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Hack a Day
It’s often said that necessity of the mother of invention, but as a large portion of the projects we cover here at Hackaday can attest, curiosity has to at least be its step-mother. Not every project starts with a need, sometimes it’s just about understanding how something works. That desire we’ve all felt from time to time, when we’ve looked at some obscure piece of hardware or technology and decided that the world would be a slightly better place if we cracked it open and looked at what spilled out.
That’s precisely the feeling Eric O’Callaghan had when he …read more
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Hack a Day
It’s time to submit your proposal for a talk or workshop at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference!
Yep, it’s easy to procrastinate with the late days of summer upon us, but don’t miss out on your chance to present at the Ultimate Hardware Conference. We’re hungry for great stories about hardware creation. Before you have the chance to ask “should I submit a proposal?” — YES! We’re talking to you!
Some of the general topics that have been really popular in the past include:
- Hardware custom built for research labs
- Clever methods for prototyping
- Engineering heroics that met a deadline, kept
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Hack a Day
There were so many amazing unofficial badges at DEF CON this year that I can’t possibly cover them all in one shot. I tried to see every badge and speak with every badge maker — like a hardware safari. Join me after the jump for about fourteen more badges that I saw at DEF CON 26!
If you missed the first batch, check those badges out too — there’s even a Badgelife Documentary that you need to add to your watch list. Okay, let’s dig in.
DC Furs Badge
With so many creative hardware badges it’s pretty impossible to narrow …read more
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Hack a Day
Last week, tens of thousands of people headed home from Vegas, fresh out of this year’s DEF CON. This was a great year for DEF CON, especially when it comes to hardware. This was the year independent badges took over, thanks to a small community of people dedicated to creating small-run hardware, puzzles, and PCB art for thousands of conference-goers. This is badgelife, a demoscene of hardware, and this is just the beginning. It’s only going to get bigger from here on out.
We were lucky enough to sit down with a few of the creators behind the badges of …read more
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Hack a Day
I was always a sucker for art classes in my early days. There was something special about getting personal instruction while having those raw materials in your hands at the same time. Maybe it was the patient voice of the teacher or the taste of the crayons that finally got to my head. Either way, I started thinking: “I want to do this; I want to teach this stuff.”
Last year at Hackaday Superconference I got my chance. Hardware workshops with real hardware were so rare; I just had to bring one to the table! What follows is my tale …read more
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Hack a Day
Every year we host Breakfast at DEF CON on the Sunday morning of the largest hacker conference in the United States. I think it’s a brilliant time to have a meetup — almost nobody is out partying on Sunday morning, and coffee and donuts is a perfect way to get your system running again after too much excess from Saturday evening.
This year marks our fourth Breakfast and we thought this time it would be completely legit. Before we’ve just picked a random coffee shop and showed up unannounced. But this year we synced up with some of our friends …read more
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Hack a Day
Two or three years back you would see a handful of really interesting unofficial badges at DEF CON. Now, there’s a deluge of clever, beautiful, and well executed badges. Last weekend I tried to see every badge and meet every badge maker. Normally, I would publish one megapost to show off everything I had seen, but this year I’m splitting it into volumes. Join me after the break for the first upload of the incredible badges of DC26!
Telephreak Eleven Badge
The Telephreak party at DEF CON is a gathering of a tight knit group of phone phreakers who spend …read more
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Hack a Day
There is an air of excitement among the hackerspaces of Europe, because this month is hacker camp season. In Denmark they have Bornhack beginning on Thursday, in Italy IHC was held earlier in the month, while here in the UK we are looking forward to Electromagnetic Field. We’re excited be at Eastnor Castle for Electromagnetic Field at the cusp of August and September for several days under canvas surrounded by our community’s best and brightest work. We’ll even have a Hackaday Readers’ Village this year!
If you’ve never been to a hacker camp before, this is one that’s not to …read more
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Hack a Day
Queercon is a conference within a conference. Taking place within DEF CON, Queercon is a social network of LGBT hackers that gathers each year to host events, talks, and a kickin’ pool party. Since 2012 they have also been building electronic badges as part of the fun and I can vouch that they’re contenders for most creative badge design every single year.
A total of 450 electronic badges were made this year, and the aesthetic is as close to a polished consumer product as I have ever seen in a badge, yet they also retain the charm and feel of …read more
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Hack a Day
To the delight of everyone, this year’s official DEF CON badge is an electronic badge chock full of entertainment. Of course there is blinky, the board is artistic, and everyone hopefully maybe gets one (it’s rumored 27,000+ were manufactured) if they don’t run out. But the badge contest at DEF CON is legendary — solve all the puzzles you are awarded the coveted black badge.
The creators of this badge are no strangers to the Hackaday community. Displayed proudly on the board and in the firmware, we discover that The Toymakers are the ones who have put it all on …read more
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Hack a Day
Nurse your hangover by having Breakfast at DEF CON this Sunday. You’re invited to this yearly ritual with Hackaday and Tindie. We’re celebrating the beginning of the end with coffee and pastries beginning at 10:30 am in the Hardware Hacking Village.
Head over to the Breakfast at DEF CON event page and hit the “follow event” button to keep on any new info about the event.
Extra internet points go to those who bring some hardware to show off… and especially for anyone who is making this the end of their Saturday rather than the beginning of Sunday. We had …read more
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Hack a Day
Someone walks into the Vintage Computer Festival and asks, ‘what’s new?’. It’s a hilarious joke, but there is some truth to it. At this year’s Vintage Computer Festival West, the exhibit hall wasn’t just filled to the brim with ancient computers from the Before Time. There was new hardware. There was hardware that would give your Apple IIgs even more memory. There was new hardware that perfectly emulated 40-year-old functionality. There’s always something new at the Vintage Computer Festival.
Some of the more interesting projects are just coming off the assembly line. If you want a modern-day Lisp machine, that …read more
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Hack a Day
Nowadays, if you want to transfer a file from one computer to another, you’d just send it over the network. In those rare occasions where that won’t work, a USB thumb drive will do. It wasn’t always this way, and it was much more confusing; back in the day when we had floppy drives. We had floptical drives. A single unlabeled 3.5″ floppy disk could be formatted as 360, 720, or 1440k IBM drive, a 400, 800, or 1440k Macintosh drive, an Apple II volume, or an Amiga, or an Acorn, or a host of other logical formats. That’s just …read more
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Hack a Day
When you think about vintage computers from the 1970s, the first thing that should spring to mind are front panels loaded up with switches, LEDs, and if you’re really lucky, a lock with a key. Across all families of CPUs from the ’70s, you’ll find front panel setups for Z80s and 8080s, but strangely not the 6502. That’s not to say blinkenlights and panel switches for 6502-based computers didn’t exist, but they were astonishingly rare.
If something hasn’t been done, that means someone has to do it. [Alexander Piersen] built The Cactus, a 6502-based computer that can be controlled entirely …read more
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Hack a Day
Badge·Life (noun): the art of spending too much time, energy, money, and creativity to design and produce amazing custom electronics and get them into the hands of those who appreciate incredible craftsmanship.
Brand new to DEF CON 26 is the Badge Life Contest to celebrate the creativity and ingenuity that gets poured into a custom badge.
For years, #BadgeLife has been flying under the radar at DEF CON. A growing movement of creative designers have put in late nights, emptied pocket books, and agonized over production, shipping, lanyards, boxes, batteries, programming woes, and every other kind of problem you …read more
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Hack a Day
Building things that fly is hard. The constraints on small, battery powered, radio-operated gear already presents a challenge, but adding weight, balance, and aerodynamic constraints takes it to a whole new level. Sophi Kravitz rises to the occasion and discusses each challenge of building a blimp from start to finish in her presentation at the 2018 Hackaday Belgrade conference.
One of the pleasures of writing for Hackaday comes through the incredible array of talent and experience to be found among our colleagues. We all do our own work, but one is humbled by that which flows from the benches of …read more
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Hack a Day
Strap on the jeweler’s loupe and lay off the caffeine for a few days. You’ll need to be at your peak for the SMD Soldering Challenge at this year’s DEF CON (number 26 for those counting).
It’s exciting to see that a Soldering Skills Village has been added to the conference this year. It will be in the same room as the Hardware Hacking Village. After all, who doesn’t want to solder at a conference? This soldering challenge is a great way to ring in the new village, and will take place in eight heats of six people for a …read more
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Hack a Day
This weekend it’s all going down at the Vintage Computer Museum in Mountain View, California. The Vintage Computer Festival West is happening this weekend
What’s going on this year at VCF West? Far too much. The exhibits include everything from floptical disks, a fully restored and operation PDP-11/45, home computers from the UK and Japan, typewriters converted into teletypes, a disintegrated CPU, and LISP machines. The talks are equally spectacular, with a keynote from [Tim Paterson], the creator of 86-DOS, the basis of MS-DOS. You’ll also hear about PLATO, the Internet before the Internet, PDP-1 demonstrations, and if we’re lucky …read more
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Hack a Day
Ecology is a strange discipline. At its most basic, it’s the study of how living things interact with their environment. It doesn’t so much seek to explain how life works, but rather how lives work together. A guiding principle of ecology is that life finds a way to exploit niches, subregions within the larger world with a particular mix of resources and challenges. It’s actually all quite fascinating.
But what does ecology have to do with Luka Mustafa’s talk at the 2018 Hackaday Belgrade Conference? Everything, as it turns out, and not just because Luka and his colleagues put IoT …read more
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Hack a Day
Free and open source software (FOSS) was a recurring theme during many of the talks during the HOPE XII conference, which should probably come as no surprise. Hackers aren’t big fans of being monitored by faceless corporate overlords or being told what they can and cannot do on the hardware they purchased. Replacing proprietary software with FOSS alternatives is a way to put control back into the hands of the user, so naturally many of the talks pushed the idea.
In most cases that took the form of advising you to move your Windows or Mac OS computer over to …read more
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Hack a Day
Prior to this weekend I had assumed making holograms to be beyond the average hacker’s reach, either in skill or treasure. I was proven wrong by a Club-Mate box full of electronics, and an acrylic jig perched atop an automotive inner tube. At the Hope Conference, Tommy Johnson was sharing his hacker holography in a workshop that let a few lucky attendees make their own holograms on site!
The technique used here depends on interference patterns rather than beam splitting. A diffused laser beam is projected through holographic film onto the subject of the hologram — say a bouquet of …read more
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Hack a Day
It’s easy to dismiss radio as little more than background noise while we drive. At worst you might even think it’s just another method for advertisers to peddle their wares. But in reality it’s a snapshot of the culture of a particular time and place; a record of what was in the news, what music was popular, what the weather was like, basically what life was like. If it was important enough to be worth the expense and complexity of broadcasting it on the radio, it’s probably worth keeping for future reference.
But radio is fleeting, a 24/7 stream of …read more
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Hack a Day
Saturday’s talk schedule at the HOPE conference was centered around one thing: the on-stage interview with Chelsea Manning. Not only was a two-hour session blocked out (almost every other talk has been one hour) but all three stages were reserved with live telecast between the three rooms.
I was lucky enough to get a seat very close to the stage in the main hall. The room was packed front to back. Even the standing room — mapped out on the carpet in tape and closely policed by conference “fire marshals” — was packed with people standing shoulder to shoulder. The …read more
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Hack a Day
I’ve been aware of the Social Engineering panels, talks, and villages at many conferences over the past few years. For some reason, be it the line to get in or conflicting schedules, I haven’t made it to one. Today was my day and I had a blast. The Social Engineering Panel at HOPE XIII is a great introduction to the dark(ish) art and a stroll through memory lane with some notables in the field.
Social Engineering (SE) is the pseudo-science of getting what you want by convincing people to share information, usually without them even knowing they’re doing so. This …read more
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Hack a Day
We’re still coming off the Hackaday Belgrade conference right now. If you were there, you know it was the greatest hardware conference ever. If you weren’t there, you missed out. Sorry. (Make sure you get in on the Hackaday Superconference in November.)
One of the many highlights of the Belgrade conference was, of course, the badge. The 2018 Hackaday Belgrade Badge is a masterpiece of hardware with a 55-key keyboard, RGB TFT LED, speaker, and a BASIC interpreter.
This badge is a masterpiece of electronic design by Voja Antonic. Just to take one small example from the design, check out …read more
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Hack a Day
This weekend is HOPE XIII. The Hackers on Planet Earth conference is a biennial event held in New York City.
Dating all the way back to 1994, HOPE is an excellent collection of people and ideas. I was lucky enough to attend two years ago (my first time) and had a fantastic time meeting Cory Doctorow after his rousing talk about DMCA 1201, I got to hear Richard Stallman discuss why all software must be free, the talent show was off the hook, and there were fun people to hang out with at every turn.
The Hackaday Crew is making …read more
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Hack a Day
Get your tickets now for the 2018 Hackaday Superconference. Join us November 2nd-4th 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, these are your people, and you need to be here. Supercon is your chance to experience all things involved in hardware creation — the weekend is filled with unparalleled talks and workshops — but the experience of Supercon transcends the organized event. We call it a conference but it’s …read more
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Hack a Day
We were lucky enough to get our hands on a hand-soldered prototype of the new Hacker Warehouse badge, and boy is this one a treat. It’s fashionable, it’s blinky, and most impressively, it’s a very useful tool. This badge can replace the Google Authenticator two factor authentication app on your phone, and it’s a USB Rubber Ducky. It’s also a badge. Is this the year badges become useful? Check out the video below to find out more.
This is the time of year when hardware hackers from all across North America are busy working on the demoscene of hardware and …read more
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Hack a Day
The keynote speaker at the Hackaday Belgrade conference was Rachel “Konichiwakitty” Wong presenting Jack of All Trades, Master of One. Her story is one that will be very familiar to anyone in the Hackaday community. A high achiever in her field of study, Rachel has learned the joy of limiting how much energy she allows herself to expend on work, rounding out her life with recreation in other fascinating areas.
There are two things Rachel is really passionate about in life. In her professional life she is working on her PhD as a stem cell researcher studying blindness and …read more
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Hack a Day
After this Spring’s Bay Area Maker Faire closed down for Saturday night and kicked everybody out, the fun moved on to O’Neill’s Irish Pub where Hackaday and Tindie held our fifth annual meetup for fellow Maker Faire attendees. How do we find like-minded hackers in a crowded bar? It’s easy: look for tables lit by LEDs and say hello. It was impossible to see everything people had brought, but here are a few interesting samples.
The team from Misty Robotics brought their namesake product to the meetup and carried Misty when there wasn’t enough room to let the robot run. …read more
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Hack a Day
There is joy in the hearts of British and European hardware and software hackers and makers, for this is an EMF Camp year. Every couple of years, our community comes together for three summer days in a field somewhere, and thanks to a huge amount of work from its organizers and a ton of volunteers, enjoys an entertaining, stimulating, and engrossing hacker camp.
One of the features of a really good hacker camp are the electric vehicles. Not full-on electric cars, but personal camp transport. Because only the technically inept walk, right? From Hitchin’s Big Hak to TOG’s duck, …read more
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Hack a Day
Are you around Philly, Baltimore, or DC, and looking for something fun to do this weekend? Great news, because Saturday sees the start of the first inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival in Bel Air, Maryland. Eh, we’ll grab some Bohs and boil up some crabs. It’ll be a great time.
Regular readers of Hackaday should have heard of MRRF, the Midwest RepRap Festival, and the greatest 3D printer convention on the planet. There’s a reason it’s so good: it’s not a trade show. It’s simply everyone in the business and a ton of cool people heading out to the middle …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackers, Designers, and Engineers flooded into Dom Omladine on Saturday for what can only be described as an epic celebration of hardware culture. This is the second time Hackaday has organized a huge conference in Belgrade, and lightning really did strike twice.
A Gathering of New Friends and Old
We got things started off with a meetup the night before the conference. The first Hackaday Belgrade was held in 2016 and we didn’t reserve a bar on Friday night — we ended up taking over one just through sheer numbers. This year we called ahead for a large outdoor space, …read more
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Hack a Day
The security conference LayerOne 2018 took place this past weekend in Pasadena, California. A schedule conflict meant most of our crew was at Hackaday Belgrade but I went to LayerOne to check it out as a first-time attendee. It was a weekend full of deciphering an enigmatic badge, hands-on learning about physical security, admiring impressive demos, and building a crappy robot.
Hello Conference Badge
Immediately upon checking in to the conference, attendees were handed a populated circuit board, a battery, then herded onward so other people can get checked in. This is sheer luxury compared to tales of years past, …read more
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Hack a Day
Good morning Hackaday universe! Hackaday Belgrade 2018 has just started, and we’re knee-deep in sharing, explaining, and generally celebrating our craft. But just because you’re not here doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take part.
- Watch the talks along with us on the livestream.
- Take part in the conference chat.
- Follow us on Twitter. We’ll be posting with hashtag #HackadayBelgrade
Come join us!
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Hack a Day
The tagline of Bay Area Maker Faire is “Inspire the Future” and there was plenty of inspiration for our future generation. We have exhibits encouraging children to get hands-on making projects to call their own, and we have many schools exhibiting their student projects telling stories of what they’ve done. Then we have exhibitors like Oakwood School STEAM Council who have earned a little extra recognition for masterfully accomplishing both simultaneously.
[Marcos Arias], chair of the council, explained that each exhibit on display have two layers. Casual booth visitors will see inviting hands-on activities designed to delight kids. …read more
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Hack a Day
Greetings from beautiful Belgrade! With the Hackaday crew arriving over the last couple of days, preparations are in full swing, and the excitement is building for Hackaday Belgrade 2018 on Saturday. Here’s all the news you need to know.
If you haven’t gotten tickets yet, you can’t say we didn’t warn you! We’ve sold out. But don’t despair: there’s a waitlist, so get your name in now if you still want to get in.
- The final conference schedule has just been released and it’s super.
- We’re having a meetup Friday night at 20:00 at the Bajloni Bar and Beyond, join
…read more
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Hack a Day
This year’s LayerOne conference is May 25-27 in Los Angeles and Hackaday will be there! Hurry and get your ticket now as today is the last day for pre-registration.
As the InfoSec community takes over the Pasadena Hilton next weekend you’ll wish you had a week instead of just three days to take part in all that is offered. There are organized talks and workshops on pen testing, being the bad guy, and DevOps Security. Learn or improve on your lockpicking skills in the Lockpicking Village. The conference hardware badge will be hacking in every direction in the Hardware Village, …read more
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Hack a Day
The hardware badge for the Hackaday Belgrade conference is a Retro Computer that you wear around your neck. I have one in my hands and it’s truly a work of art. It’s beautiful, it’s fun to play with, and it will be an epic platform for a glorious weekend of badge hacking! Check out the first look video, then join me below as I drill down into the details.
Get your ticket now for Hackaday Belgrade, our premier European hardware conference at the end of this month. It’s a day filled with talks, works, food, fun, and of course everyone …read more
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Hack a Day
Maker Faire Bay Area is this weekend, and the Hackaday and Tindie crew are getting ready to jack some cupcake cars. The Bay Area Maker Faire is one of the greatest gatherings of all the cool people we know, and five years ago we started host a meetup. This Saturday, we’re blowing the roof off our favorite joint in San Mateo yet again. Join us at O’Neill’s Irish Pub for the 5th annual Hackaday x Tindie BAMF Meetup!
This meetup is a well established tradition — it’s all the cool kids at Maker Faire, hanging out in a bar. …read more
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Hack a Day
In two weeks the Hackaday Community is gathering in Belgrade for Europe’s greatest hardware con, The Hackaday Belgrade Conference — an event not to be missed — but of course the city itself is a spectacular place to visit and has the perfect feel for those who like to build electronics. Why not join us for your own geek world tour to Serbia? Here’s a few of the things you’ll want to see while in Belgrade.
Aircraft, Inventor, Architecture
Belgrade is a tech center and a hidden jewel of Europe. Need proof? Fly into Belgrade, and you’ll land at Nikola …read more
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Hack a Day
Hone your skills at basic robot building. You’re invited to join Hackaday for a Beginner Robotics Workshop on Saturday, May 12.
For this workshop we’re pairing up with FIRST robotics mentors and students from the Bay Area. FIRST is an international high school robotics competition and you won’t believe what these teams can do. The workshop will start with an overview of the three major parts that go into a robot project: mechanical design, electronic design, and programming. From there, choose one of the three you want to focus on for the afternoon and let the hands-on fun begin as …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackaday Belgrade preparations have now passed the flash point and the hacker village that is set to descend on Serbia in a few weeks grows larger and more awesome by the day. Prepare for a massive data dump on what is in store. But before you go any further, make sure you have a ticket.
What is Hackaday Belgrade and What Comes with a Ticket?
Hackaday Belgrade is the best conference focused on hardware creation that you can find anywhere in Europe. Taking place in Belgrade, Serbia on May 26th, the schedule is packed with talks, workshops, and a hacker …read more
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Hack a Day
As a finale to our month on the road through parts of the British Isles, we’ll be at UK Maker Faire this weekend, and we’ll also be hosting our final bring-a-hack at Maker Space Newcastle this evening, Saturday the 28th of April.
For the rest of the weekend’s UK Maker Faire, held at Newcastle’s Life Science Centre, you’ll find both Hackaday and Tindie at our booth number M118, and if you’re lucky you might even snag one of the [Brian Benchoff]-designed Tindie blinkie badge kits.
A few familiar faces from the Brits among our wider community will have their own …read more
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Hack a Day
Blockchain Education Network Vietnam recently held an event titled “Building a Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem with Blockchain”. The title alone has three of my favorite things in it, so when a client of mine asked me if I could put together a little hardware demonstration for the event, I jumped at the opportunity.
I also thought I’d take a moment to write about it, because I haven’t seen much coverage of emerging technology events in the developing world, and the fact is that there’s a consistently high level of interest. I’ve yet to go to an event …read more
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Hack a Day
Sometimes the world of tech conference presentations can seem impossibly opaque, a place in which there appears to be an untouchable upper echelon of the same speakers who pop up at conference after conference. Mere mortals can never aspire to join them and are destined to forever lurk in the shadows, their killer talk undelivered.
Thankfully, our community is not like that. There is a rich tradition of events having open calls for participation, and the latest we’d like to bring to your attention comes from the British EMF Camp, to be held at the end of August. EMF, (standing …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackaday is hosting a full conference in Belgrade, Serbia, on 26 May. Today we’re excited to announce the workshops that will take place at Hackaday Belgrade. Workshop tickets are available now, but space is extremely limited and we expect these workshops to fill up fast so purchase your ticket right now!
Details of each workshop are listed below. Topics this year include bringing art to your PCB designs, learning the fundamentals of e-textiles, and getting up-to-speed with FPGAs.
You must have a Hackaday Belgrade ticket in order to purchase a workshop ticket. This is our premier European conference, with the …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackaday and Tindie are on the road in the UK and we want you to grab one of your projects and come hang out! We have three meetups scheduled over the coming week:
- Nottingham, 18th April
- Cambridge, 19th April
- Milton Keynes, 23rd April
Fresh from our Dublin Unconference and following our London meetup which is happening today, Hackaday and Tindie are staying on the road. We’ve already told you about Nottingham on the 18th, and Cambridge on the 19th, to those two we’re adding Milton Keynes on the 23rd.
We’ll be at convening at Milton Keynes Makerspace on the evening …read more
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Hack a Day
On Saturday, the Hackaday Community from across Ireland and other parts of Europe poured into the performance hall at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre for a massive collection of talks. From rediscovering century’s old technology, to cutting edge research projects, we heard talks from dozens of attendees on the technology that is interesting them most right now.
Choosing what to share about last weekend’s Uncon has been a particularly taxing process. So many and varied were the projects presented, and such was their high standard, that a writer faces a significant challenge to fit them into a single report. But we’ll …read more
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Hack a Day
When on the road, we love to stop by a local hackerspace and connect with the hacker community. On Friday, TOG Hackerspace in Dublin, Ireland opened their doors to host a Bring-a-Hack with Hackaday and Tindie.
The city center of Dublin is anything but a grid. The cobblestone roads meander every which way and are a puzzle of one-way and surprise construction, none of which seemed to faze Google’s navigation algorithms. I was happy to be operating the smartphone instead of the rental vehicle. A big thanks goes to Jenny List for taking on the stress of driving on our …read more
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Hack a Day
Hackaday and Tindie are coming to Dublin at the end of this week. Join us on Friday night as we host a meetup in the company of our friends at TOG hackerspace. Please RSVP to tell us you’re coming.
This is a Bring-a-Hack style event, so come out for a casual meetup and bring a project to show off. It’s a great way to get conversation started and often the most amazing projects are the ones whose creators imagine them to be inconsequential. Keep them to a manageable size though, space may be at a premium.
We’ll supply beverages and …read more
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Hack a Day
Scotty Allen has a YouTube blog called Strange Parts; maybe you’ve seen his super-popular video about building his own iPhone “from scratch”. It’s a great story, and it’s also a pretext for a slightly deeper dive into the electronics hardware manufacturing, assembly, and repair capital of the world: Shenzhen, China. After his talk at the 2017 Superconference, we got a chance to sit down with Scotty and ask about cellphones and his other travels. Check it out:
The Story of the Phone
Scotty was sitting around with friends, drinking in one of Shenzhen’s night markets, and talking about how …read more
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Hack a Day
What time is it? It’s Midwest RepRap Festival time, and it’s happening this weekend in beautiful Goshen, Indiana. It’s free, it’s open to everyone, and it’s the greatest 3D printer convention on Earth.
What’s so great about MRRF? This is where the latest products in the 3D printing space are launched. A few years ago, E3D announced their dual extrusion head at MRRF. This is where the world first got a look at the Bondtech extruder. This is where E3D announced their Titan extruder, and this is where the world got its first look at the Lulzbot Taz 6. If …read more
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Hack a Day
Try something a bit out of the ordinary with us on 7 April. Spend a Saturday with Hackaday in Dublin without really knowing what to expect. This is the Unconference format, and we’ve fallen in love with the spontaneity and consistently fascinating talks that come out of it.
We’ve booked a fantastic hall in the Temple Bar district of Dublin, lined up snacks throughout the day and dinner for all who attend, plus there’s an after bar and we’ll buy the first round. All of this is yours if you grab one of the rapidly disappearing free tickets.
What we …read more
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Hack a Day
On Saturday we saw a flood of interesting hacks come to life as more than 100 community organized meetups were held for World Create Day. Thank you to all of the organizers who made these events possible, and for everyone who decided to get together and hack.
Students Learning Hardware Design in Islamabad, Pakistan
The students at LearnOBots took on a slew of great projects during World Create Day like a smart medicine dispenser, electronics that control mains appliances, parking sensors, and a waste bin that encourages you to feed it. The group did a wonderful job of showing off …read more
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Hack a Day
We’re busy confirming speakers at the Hackaday Belgrade conference, taking place in Belgrade Serbia on 26 May. Now’s the time to grab a ticket and be part of something special. Here’s a teaser.
Asier Marzo // Build Principles of an Acoustic Levitator
Applications of acoustic levitation in mid-air chemistry, spectroscopy, and tissue engineering.
Vanessa Julia Carpenter // Designing for Meaningfulness in Smart Products
Creating new smart products which focus on value over function, self development, critical reflection, and behaviour change to enable meaningful experiences.
Marcel van Kervinck // Building a TTL Microcomputer without a Microprocessor
Building a small 8-bit homebrew …read more
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Hack a Day
Spend some time with the Hackaday Community in your area this weekend. There are more than 100 community organized meetups happening this Saturday for Hackaday World Create Day. Check the big map for one near you and click the “Join this event” button in the upper right of their events page to let them know you’re coming.
It’s always a blast to get together with friends new and old to work on a project you’ve been itching to build. Grab something from your work bench and have fun geeking out about it in the company of others. This is a …read more
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Hack a Day
Let’s face it, we all love DEFCON. Even if you’ve never been there before, we think it would be a huge struggle to find a reader who hadn’t been enchanted by at least one of the many hacks and talks that come out of the conference every year. We’ll prove it to you in a [...]
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Hack a Day
Head to head video game action can’t even compare to this use of a coin-op Sega Rally game to race actual RC vehicles. Take a close look at those screens and you’ll see there are no computer graphics, just a feed for a camera on each of the toy cars. The project was conceived for the Sapo [...]
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Hack a Day
This year for Halloween, The Geek Group, decided to take a very different approach to outreach. Instead of making animatronics, or converting their giant (seriously HUGE) space into a haunted house, they held an event called “Computers Not Candy” where they teamed up with a large local company to bring 100 tablet computers to 100 [...]
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Hack a Day
We discussed [Rob]‘s Tesla Gun in the past. At that time, the build looked very impressive, but had not been fired yet. Fortunately, [Rob] got the device working and brought it to Toorcamp. He took the gun out every night and demoed the handheld Tesla Coil by having volunteers catch the streamers with a knife. The [...]
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Hack a Day
The hardware hacking village at Toorcamp provided space and tools to work on hardware. It was interesting to see what hardware hacks people had brought to work on. One example is [Owen]‘s Nibble Node.js Widget. The widget combines the popular node.js platform and custom hardware to create a node for the “internet of things.” The hardware [...]
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Hack a Day
“Only 72 years until the Robotrons conclude that the human race is inefficient and must be destroyed. Only the mutant produced by a genetic engineering accident can save us now!” –Church of Robotron Doctrine Based on the 1982 arcade game Robotron: 2084, Dorkbot PDX’s Church of Robotron was an impressive installation at Toorcamp. Located in [...]
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Hack a Day
“Only 72 years until the Robotrons conclude that the human race is inefficient and must be destroyed. Only the mutant produced by a genetic engineering accident can save us now!” –Church of Robotron Doctrine Based on the 1982 arcade game Robotron: 2084, Dorkbot PDX’s Church of Robotron was an impressive installation at Toorcamp. Located in [...]
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Hack a Day
[Ari] and Jake from Noisebridge were out on the beach at Toorcamp when they saw some giant kelp and had an idea. Using a pocketknife, [Ari] cut a mouthpiece into the stem and cut the bulb in half. After some practice, they figured out how to play the kelp horn. [Jimmie], shown here, was able to get [...]
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Hack a Day
This is the biggest bug zapper we’ve ever seen. It’s called the Megazap as its zapping area is 1 square meter. [Eighdot] and [Sa007] combined their talents for the build in order to help reduce the insect population around the Eth0 2012 Summer festival. You may recall from our bug zapping light saber build that these [...]
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Hack a Day
The Open Organization Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) ran the lock picking village at Toorcamp. They gave great workshops on how lock picking works, provided a lot of examples of security flaws in popular locks, and let everyone practice with their locks and tools. Lock picking is a bit addictive, and I spent quite a bit of time at [...]
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Hack a Day
[Hao] from Noisebridge showed me their CNC mill being used to etch PCBs. Using copper clad board, this MAXNC 10 mill routes the PCB with decent accuracy. This makes for very rapid prototyping of single sided PCBs. [Hao] designed the PCB using the open source KiCad EDA tool. This was used to draw the schematic, layout [...]
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Hack a Day
Type A Machines designs and builds 3D printers in San Francisco. [Miloh], one of the founders, brought two of their flagship Series 1 printers to Toorcamp. He printed out a variety of models including water tight cups and quadcopter arms. The RepRap Arduino MEGA Pololu Shield (RAMPS) is used to drive the stepper motors for each axis, as well as the extruder. [...]
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Hack a Day
This is a big laser. [3ric] from Hackerbot Labs gave me a run down of their BattleYurt laser installation at Toorcamp. It’s built with twenty-four 1 Watt lasers taken from a Casio DLP projector. The laser is housed on top of a yurt, which contains the controls and cooling system. It was built with the [...]
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Hack a Day
We’ve shown [Tanjent]‘s Bliplace 1.0 in the past. He handed out a few hundred of the open source audio toys at Burning Man. At Toorcamp, he’s been showing off an improved 2.0 version of the project. This one has a more powerful microcontroller and many more RGB LEDs. The device uses the ATMega328 and an [...]
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Hack a Day
What happens when you combine a TI-84+ graphing calculator with an added bluetooth module, a 1 Watt Alfa wifi dongle, and a Parrot Wifi Quadcopter? You get a long range quadcopter that’s controlled from the TI-84+ directional pad. This TI-84+ looks like a standard issue school calculator, but [Owen] added an ATTiny13 microcontroller and a [...]
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Hack a Day
[Michael] built his own clone of the popular MaKey MaKey Kickstarter project. His implementation uses an ATMega328 and the V-USB stack to connect as a USB Human Interface Device. He was showing it off at Toorcamp wired up to a banana piano, which captured the interest of kids and adults alike. The digital inputs are [...]
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Hack a Day
This is the MC Hawking robot built by the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. It’s a robotic electric wheelchair outfitted with a PC, an XBox Kinect, and an Arduino. On the software side, it uses Ubuntu and the open source ROS platform. A few folks from Noisebridge were hacking away on the robot at Toorcamp to [...]
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Hack a Day
Toorcamp is all wrapped up after four great days of talks, hacking, and parties. Located in Neah Bay, Washington, Toorcamp was a four day event modelled after European hacker camps. This is the second time Toorcamp has been run, and it’s clear that both the organizers and attendees know how to throw an awesome stateside [...]
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Hack a Day
Last month, we lamented that Toorcamp was coming but we weren’t going to be able to attend. Since then, we’ve brought a new writer on board that will be going to Toorcamp! [Eric Evenchick] will be attending and supplying coverage for Hackaday. For those who haven’t heard yet, Toorcamp is a 4 day hacker event [...]
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Hack a Day
The people have spoken. Hackaday has won the Redbull creation challenge by popular vote. Despite a few bumpy spots in the voting process, our project, the Minotaur’s Revenge (gameplay footage around the 2min mark in the video), got the most votes from the public winning us $5000 for our hackerspace and a trip to the World [...]
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Hack a Day
The security flaws on this common hotel keycard lock are nothing short of face-palmingly stupid. Look closely at the picture above. This is a hotel room door swinging open. The device he holds in his hand is an Arduino connected to the OUTSIDE portion of the door lock. It takes approximately 200 milliseconds from the [...]
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Hack a Day
We hadn’t been at the MakerFaire long when we ran into a couple hackaday fans lugging around camera equipment and microphones. I agreed to a quick interview for their show greentechweekly.tv which was fairly painless, then we all went our separate ways. [EcoGeeco] later sent me the footage and I couldn’t help but think… these [...]
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Hack a Day
This section of the MakerFaire almost deserves an entire event of its own. I know I would happily attend a monthly match of the power racing series in my home town. To compete, you must have a modded Power Wheel. Yes, those electric kids vehicles that go really slowly across your lawn, those power wheels. [...]
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Hack a Day
Although I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to at the Faire, there was a ton of stuff that was interesting enough for a mention. Many of these could probably merit their own separate article, and I didn’t get to talk about everything, so feel free to comment, or better yet write in to [...]
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Hack a Day
Although I had no idea what to expect at the NC Maker Faire, I was pleasantly surprised to see several well made electrical vehicles. One of note was [Lab306]‘s Fox body electric Mustang. Although it would have been impressive by itself, it was made by a high school class and has been featured in several [...]
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Hack a Day
The Kansas City Hammerspace crowd really brought an amazing amount of stuff this year. Some stuff you’ve already seen, some stuff that is totally new. I’ll be sharing details on some of them individually as they really deserve the attention. Their booth, or booths were huge, taking up roughly 1/3 of the main hall. It was [...]
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Hack a Day
I’ve been seeing videos of ArcAttack all over the web for several years now and hoped one day I’d be able to cross paths with them. When I heard they were going to be at MakerFaire K. C., I was determined to grab them and ask a few questions. As it turns out, they’re fans [...]
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Hack a Day
I arrived at the Kansas City MakerFaire bright eyed and bushy tailed, excited to meet up with like minded people and see awesome projects. I was not disappointed in that respect. The building itself is quite beautiful with giant main rooms and decorated 40 foot tall ceilings. If you haven’t ever seen the Union Station [...]
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Hack a Day
There were quite a few 3D printers at the NC Maker Faire this year (like the [Fablicator], several [RepRap]s, and [MakerBot]s) as well as a few subtractive machining devices including a wood lathe, a [ShopBot] display (one of the sponsors), and my little CNC router. There was even a little [Eggbot] on display, which combines [...]
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Hack a Day
DEFCON 20 is on its way and if you want to put a team together to compete in the Tamper Evident competition now is the time! The idea of the contest is simple: your team needs to break into something without anyone every knowing. The payload is protected by the best of modern tamper evident [...]
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Hack a Day
Today, I’m heading out to Makerfaire Kansas City. I plan on covering this event quite extensively. If you see me, don’t hesitate to come up and introduce yourself. I may even have a custom cut vinyl hackaday sticker left for you. Since we are Hackaday, I plan on trying to get into the details and [...]
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Hack a Day
[Dino] has been featured here at [HAD] on many occasions, so I was excited to see some of his inventions in person and meet the man himself. [Dino] didn’t disappoint, bringing a display that included a working demonstration of his upcoming cover story for Make Magazine – an automatic doggie ball-thrower. Also there were some [...]
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Hack a Day
Robot combat has inspired makers probably since the first one was conceived. Whether it’s an epic struggle between two future superpowers, or simply a friendly match of robot hockey, it’s always fun to watch. NC Maker Faire 2012 was no exception as [Carolina Combat Robots] had a small arena with remote control robots going at [...]
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Hack a Day
As [Caleb] mentioned earlier, I attended the Raleigh Maker Faire this year as an exhibitor. Although the table was for my personal site, some of you might have noticed that I was wearing a sweet [HAD] shirt and dispensing our stickers (which seemed to fly off the table). The event was extremely fun from the “other [...]
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Hack a Day
This weekend, June 16th, the North Carolina Maker Faire will be happening. This is the 3rd year for this event and from what we’ve seen in the past, it should be pretty good. We realize that every site has its niche of event coverage that they should deliver. Engadget/Gizmodo need to show new phones and [...]
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Hack a Day
Hey, I like a good party like anyone else. I’ve been drooling over some of the projects coming out of burning man for years. However, the ratio of “gettin’ crazy” to “build awesome stuff” seems to be slanted in favor of the party experience. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, when I saw this, [...]
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Hack a Day
Here’s a pair of LayerOne Badge hacks that actually included the RC as intended by the badge designers. First up, we have the autonomous RC car built by [Arko]. He calls it Stanley Jr. as an homage to the Stanford DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. It uses an Arduino shield to add a servo with an [...]
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Hack a Day
Ham skills prevail in this year’s LayerOne badge hacking contest. [Jason] was the winner with this Morse Code beacon hack.He got a head start on the competition after seeing our preview feature on the badge hardware development. It got him thinking and let him gather his tools ahead of arrival. The hardware is segregated into [...]
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Hack a Day
We love badges. And we’ve really got to thank [Charliex] for taking the time to write a huge post about this year’s LayerOne badges, especially since they’ve got their backs up against the deadline for pulling everything together in time. Here it is, the stock badge on the left, with an add-on shield on the [...]
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Hack a Day
How we missed this one is anybody’s guess, but one of the presentations at DEFCON last year covers a DIY radar build. [Michael Scarito] talks about the concepts behind radar, and then goes on to show that it’s not too hard or expensive to build a setup of your own. We’ve embedded his 45 minute [...]
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Hack a Day
This year’s LayerOne Hacking and Security Conference is right around the corner. But it’s not too late to attend. You can still get a block-rate hotel room if you register by the end of April, and registration for the two-day event only costs a hundred bucks. It’s scheduled for May 26th and 27th in Anaheim [...]
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Hack a Day
It used to be that the contents of your pocket protector directly mirrored your geek level. But that just doesn’t cut it in our fast-paced digital age. We think [Jonathan] is headed down the right track though, by creating a scrolling LED name badge which he takes to conventions with him. With the right enclosure [...]
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Hack a Day
The 28th Annual Chaos Communications Congress just wrapped things up on December 31st and they’ve already published recordings of all the talks at the event. These talks were live-streamed, but if you didn’t find time in your schedule to see all that you wanted, you’ll be happy to find your way to the YouTube collection [...]
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Hack a Day
[Geekabit] wrote in asking if we’d seen the 2011 CCC badges yet. The answer is NO, we haven’t seen them because the image above is the only sneek peek we can find on their broken-certificate website. But we are glad that he shared the link with us, because it does tell the tale of what hardware [...]
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Hack a Day
We saw this one a few days ago when it was first bouncing around the interwebs but never took a close look at it. Today, when we ran across a direct link in the tips box it was the promo video (embedded after the break) that won us over. Once you dig into the particulars [...]
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Hack a Day
The Open Hardware Summit is gearing up for their second annual conference, which is to be held on September 15th, 2011 in New York City. The summit aims to be a venue where users can present, discuss, and learn about open hardware of all kinds. Hot on the heels of the Open Hardware definition announcement, [...]
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Hack a Day
Not every cool hack needs to involve microcontrollers, LEDs or other bling. We were initially drawn to the Bloxes display simply because we love a good multipurpose construction set, whether it be Lego, 80/20 aluminum, or in this case, a system of interlocking cubes formed from six identical pieces of corrugated cardboard, cut and scored [...]
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Hack a Day
It’s a madhouse already at the 2011 Bay Area Maker Faire. Though the show doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, Friday is “Education Day”, a special preview for local schools. As makers scramble to set up their displays, a thousand impressionable young minds seek the most cacophonous mixture of taiko drumming, ArcAttack’s musical Tesla coils, and the beeping [...]
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Hack a Day
[Garrett Mace] wrote to us in hopes of finding a few good programmers to help him out with a project he’s been working on for Maker Faire Bay Area 2011. More specifically, he is looking for Processing programmers who are also pretty decent with graphics. Macetech’s big project for this year’s Maker Faire is a [...]
