Category Archives: 2016 Hackaday SuperConference

Steve Collins: When Things Go Wrong In Space

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[Steve Collins] is a regular around Hackaday. He’s brought homebrew LIDARs to our regular meetups, he’s given a talk on a lifetime’s worth of hacking, and he is the owner of the most immaculate Hackaday t-shirt we’ve ever seen.

For the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference,  [Steve] took a break from his day job of driving spacecraft around the Solar System. As you can imagine, NASA plans on things going wrong. How do you plan for that? [Steve] answers all your questions by telling you what happens when things go wrong in space.

Space is the worst possible place for hardware. Not …read more

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Sophi Kravitz: State of the IO

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At the Hackaday SuperConference in November, Sophi Kravitz had the chance to look back on the past year of Hackaday.io, and what a great year it has been. Hackaday.io now has over 178k members who have published 12.6k projects with about 10% of those being collaborative team projects. But the numbers tell just a small story of the vibrant community Hackaday has.

The Hackaday crew made a trip to the desert to begin 2016. This resulted in the Hackaday Prize video which launched the engineering initiative which wrapped up with the awards ceremony at SuperCon. The video launched the 2016 …read more

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What Makes the Perfect Hardware Badge

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There are only a handful of people who can say they’ve built several successful electronic badges for conferences. Voja Antonic is not just on that list, he’s among the leaders in the field. There are a lot of pressures in this type of design challenge: aesthetics, functionality, and of course manufacturability. If you want to know how to make an exposed-PCB product that will be loved by the user, you need to study Voja’s work on the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference Badge. The badge is completely open, with all the design files, firmware, and a manual on the badge project page. …read more

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David Krum: The Revolution in Virtual Reality

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[David Krum] is associate lab director at the Mixed Reality Lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC. That puts him at the intersection of science and engineering: building cool virtual reality (VR) devices, and using science to figure out what works and what doesn’t. He’s been doing VR since 1998, so he’s seen many cool ideas come and go. His lab was at the center of the modern virtual reality explosion. Come watch his talk and see why!

What is Virtual Reality, Really?

We all know what VR is, right? It’s that trope in sci-fi where you’re stuck …read more

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Toshiro Kodera: Electromagnetic Gyrotropes

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We’ve learned a lot by watching the talks from the Hackaday Superconferences. Still, it’s a rare occurrence to learn something totally new. Microwave engineer, professor, and mad hacker [Toshiro Kodera] gave a talk on some current research that he’s doing: replacing natural magnetic gyrotropic material with engineered metamaterials in order to make two-way beam steering antennas and more.

If you already fully understood that last sentence, you may not learn as much from [Toshiro]’s talk as we did. If you’re at all interested in strange radio-frequency phenomena, neat material properties, or are just curious, don your physics wizard’s hat and …read more

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Derek Schulte: Path Planning for 3D Printers

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[Derek Schulte] designed and sells a consumer 3D printer, and that gives him a lot of insight into what makes them tick. His printer, the New Matter MOD-t, is different from the 3D printer that you’re using now in a few different ways. Most interestingly, it uses closed-loop feedback and DC motors instead of steppers, and it uses a fairly beefy 32-bit ARM processor instead of the glorified Arduino Uno that’s running many printers out there.

The first of these choices meant that [Derek] had to write his own motor control and path planning software, and the second means that …read more

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Derek Schulte: Path Planning for 3D Printers

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[Derek Schulte] designed and sells a consumer 3D printer, and that gives him a lot of insight into what makes them tick. His printer, the New Matter MOD-t, is different from the 3D printer that you’re using now in a few different ways. Most interestingly, it uses closed-loop feedback and DC motors instead of steppers, and it uses a fairly beefy 32-bit ARM processor instead of the glorified Arduino Uno that’s running many printers out there.

The first of these choices meant that [Derek] had to write his own motor control and path planning software, and the second means that …read more

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Mike Szczys on the State of the Hackaday

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Hey, that’s me! I had the honor of giving a talk at the Hackaday SuperConference in November about our editorial direction over the past year and looking towards the next. At any given time we have about 20-25 people writing articles for Hackaday. We depend on their judgment, experience, and skill to keep Hackaday fresh. It would be wonderful if you would join me in thanking all of the writers and editors for a great year by leaving your well-wishes in the comments.

Take a look at the video of the talk, then join me below for a few more …read more

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The Story of Kickstarting the OpenMV

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

The original OpenMV was an entry for the first Hackaday Prize, and since then the project has had a lot of success. There are tons of followers, plenty of users, and the project even had a successful Kickstarter. That last bit of info is fairly contentious — while the Kickstarter did meet the minimum funding level, there were a lot …read more

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Open Source Art Encourages Society to Think Inclusively

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Kate Reed has a vision for elevating the less talked about parts of ourselves, and of society. Through her art, she wants people to think about a part of themselves that makes them feel invisible, and to anonymously share that with the community around them. The mechanism for this is Invisible, a campaign to place translucent sculptures in public places around the world. The approach that she has taken to the project is very interesting — she’s giving the art away to empower the campaign. Check out her talk from the Hackaday SuperConference.

Kate is studying as part of …read more

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