Collaborate Disseminate
When you design an electronic badge, the goal is to make a device that’s interesting and has enough depth to keep your attendees engaged for the duration of the con …read more Continue reading Supercon 2023: Exploring the Elegance of the Voja4
The inner orbits of the Hackaday solar system have been vibrating with the announcement of the 2022 Hackaday Supercon badge. The short version of the story is that it’s a …read more Continue reading Why Learn Ancient Tech?
[Voja Antonic] has been building digital computers since before many of us were born. He designed with the Z80 when it was new, and has decades of freelance embedded experience, …read more Continue reading Remoticon 2021 // Voja Antonic Makes You a Digital Designer
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
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
Although I’ve been to several DEF CONs over the past few years, I’ve never found time to devote to solving the badge. The legendary status of all the puzzles within are somewhat daunting to me. Likewise, I haven’t yet given DefCon DarkNet a try either — a real shame as the solder-your-own-badge nature of that challenge is right up my alley.
But finally, at the Hackaday SuperCon I finally got my feet wet with the crypto challenge created by [Voja Antonic]. He developed a secondary firmware which anyone could easily flash to their conference badge (it enumerates as a USB …read more
One can imagine a political or business conference without an interactive badge — but not a hacker conference. Does this make the case for hackers being a special breed of people, always having something creative to show for their work? Yes, I think it does.
Following the Hackaday Belgrade conference in April of this year, we met at the Supplyframe offices to discuss the badge for the Hackaday SuperConference that will happen in Pasadena on 5+6th of November. The Belgrade conference badge (which was fully documented if you’re curious) was surprisingly popular, and I was asked to design the new …read more
Continue reading Design and Hacking Drilldown: SuperCon Badge
The 2016 Hackaday SuperConference is just around the corner and today we get a good look at the hardware badge. It was designed by [Voja Antonic] — a legend of hardware creation who will be at the conference. I like to think of him as the Woz of the Eastern Bloc, having designed the Galaksija computer. This badge is a beautiful example of embedded design. We’ll dive into all of the details after the break.
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This badge hosts an 8×16 surface-mount …read more
Continue reading New SuperCon Badge is 40% Lighter and a Work of Art
We’re glad we’re not the only hacker-packrats out there! [Voja Antonic] recently stumbled on an EPROM emulator that he’d made way back in 1991. It’s a sweet build, so take your mind back 25 years if you can. Put on “Nevermind” and dig into a nicely done retro project.
The emulator is basically a PIC 16C54 microcontroller and some memory, with some buffers for input and output. On one side, it’s a plug-in replacement for an EPROM — the flash memory of a bygone era. On the other side, it connects via serial port to a PC. Instead of going …read more
It’s pretty awesome to have a hardware design hero jump at the chance to work on a Hackaday conference badge. I am of course talking about Voja Antonic.
I’ve gotten to know him over the last two years when we were introduced and he agreed to work on some original articles. He’s long been a hacker and shared his story of technology despite politics and society changing around him. His Galaksija computer was the first personal computer available in Yugoslavia with over 8,000 kits sold. Since those days he never stopped refining his design and fabrication skills. For instance, his …read more
Continue reading How to Design, Manufacture, and Document a Hardware Product
