Category Archives: 2018 Hackaday Superconference

Of Roach Killer and Rust Remover: Sam Zeloof’s Garage-Made Chips

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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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Supercon: Designing Your Own Diffractive Optics

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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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Apple 1 Emulator Is A Perfect Fit For Supercon Badge

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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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Sprite_TM’s Magic Paintbrush

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When it comes to hackers we love, there’s no better example than Jeroen Domburg, a.k.a. Sprite_TM. Sprite’s now working for Espressif, makers of the fantastic ESP8266 and ESP32, where he created a miniature Game Boy and turned this PocketSprite into a real product. He’s installed Linux on a hard drive, and created a Matrix of virtualized Tamagotchis. In short, if you’re looking for someone who’s building the coolest, most technical thing of sometimes questionable utility, you need look no further than Sprite_tm.

Sprite was back at this year’s Superconference, and again he’s bringing out the big guns with awesome hardware …read more

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It Happened at Supercon: Six Days of Fun in a Three Day Con

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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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Supercon Badge Hackers Racing The Clock

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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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Green LED Means GO For Supercon Badge Hacking

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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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Competitive Soldering Gets Heated at Hackaday Superconference

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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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Livestream the Hackaday Superconference

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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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These Are The 100 Finalists In The Hackaday Prize

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The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware competition on the planet. It’s the Academy Awards of Open Hardware, and over the last few years we’ve been doing it, we’ve seen literally tens of projects that have gone from an idea to a prototype to a finished project to a saleable product. It’s the greatest success story the Open Hardware community has.

Over the last eight months, we’ve been deep in the weeds with this year’s Hackaday Prize. It’s five challenges, with twenty winners per challenge. That’s one hundred projects that will make it to the semifinals in the hopes of …read more

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