Ish Ot Jr. writes about their Hackaday Remoticon experience:

I Attended Two Dozen Hackaday Remoticon Sessions So You Don’t Have To! (And Why You Should Anyway!)

The Hackaday Superconference typically takes place in Pasadena, California around this time each year — but like so many events in 2020, COVID threw a decisively un-jolly wrench in that plan, forcing the event online under a new moniker: Hackaday Remoticon.

Things kicked off casually on Friday night with the Community Bring A Hack, hosted on the Remo Conference platform. The platform attempts to recreate networking spaces common to in-person conferences, with “tables” and “sofas” where participants can double-click to “sit” — which in this virtual world initiates audio and video communications with other “seated” parties. While the technology itself worked fairly well, it seemed as though many participants were either confused as to how it worked, or unwilling to interact — I successfully engaged in two conversations throughout the event, otherwise happening mostly upon attendees whose audio and video was not enabled. And much like real-life events, the popular folks were unobtainable (in this case due to a six-person table limit), so it was mostly a case of looking out for people you knew, or trying to be brave and make new friends (both of which I was lucky enough to be able to do!).

The 11:15 (Eastern) slot had three workshops to chose from, and since attending two simultaneously was already pretty extreme, I had to sit out Sebastian Oort’s Soldering, nothing to be afraid of! — which thankfully is not a phobia I find myself afflicted with.

One topic I did want to learn more about was Anool Mahidharia‘s KiCad to Blender > Photorealistic PCB renders. I’d attended Mahidharia’s KiCad course on HackadayU, and have such high respect for his skills that I’d gladly have attended a session called “Photorealistic paint drying” if he was teaching it! But I’d seen some of Mahidharia’s renders already, and was so comprehensively blown away by them that I wanted to learn how he’d made them, plus, like him, I’ve been putting off learning Blender, and thought this might motivate me to get on with it! While the video for this session is not available yet, Mahidharia has written up a handy cheat sheet, and the accompany GitHub repo is full of glorious renderings that will probably make you want to give it a try too!