2022 Hackaday Supercon: Call For Proposals Extended

August 31, 2022August 31, 2022 fustiniconference, hackaday, superconLeave a comment

The Call for Proposals is extended to September 1st for Hackaday Supercon!

After a two-year hiatus, the Hackaday Superconference is returning live for another three days of technical talks, badge hacking, and hands-on workshops.

Interested in giving a talk or workshop? Fill out the following form and we will review your proposal. Proposals deadline has been extended to September 1st, 2022.

Wondering what to submit? Check out our Youtube playlist of 2019’s talks for what we accepted last Superconference. You can view talk titles in the right sidebar so you don’t need to watch every video, although they’re all fantastic! But don’t limit yourself to the beaten path! We love to get proposals for hacks that we haven’t even dreamt of.

We have two presentation tracks, one for shorter talks and another for longer ones. If you’re a first-time presenter or simply have a shorter hack, the 20-minute track is for you. Or spread out a little bit and go into detail with a 45-minute talk.

Workshops are usually one to two hours. Let us know how much time you need.

Best of luck to you, we hope to see you in person to hear about your project this year!

Hackaday Supercon returns for 2022

July 31, 2022 fustiniconference, hackaday, hackaday superconLeave a comment

After two years in remote mode, we’re very excited to announce that this year’s Hackaday Supercon will be coming back, live! Join us Nov. 4th, 5th, and 6th in sunny Pasadena, CA for three days of hacks, talks, and socializing with the Hackaday community. And we’d love to see and hear in person what you’ve been up to for the last two years – so start brainstorming what you’re going to talk about now and fill out the call for proposals.

Enter the 2022 Hackaday Prize and Help Save the World

April 5, 2022April 5, 2022 fustinihackaday, hackaday prizeLeave a comment

This year’s 2022 Hackaday Prize challenges you to think of big or small ways to create greener energy sources, make recycling easier, hack old devices to save them from the landfill, or build out the networks that keep our local communities together and conscious of our group effort. If you’ve got a super solar harvester, a recycling robot, or even reverse engineering tools to help combat forced technological obsolescence, we want to see your hacks. Or if you’d like, you can simply save the world in the wildcard round.
As always, courtesy of our overlords at Supplyframe and the generous sponsorship of Digikey, we’ve got tons of prize money to give out to the best projects. The top ten projects in each of five challenge rounds will receive a $500 cash prize, and five winning projects will bag from $5,000 to $50,000 in the finals in November. But you shouldn’t wait — the first round, Planet-Friendly Power, starts right now!

Backpack Board for OLEDs Boasts Fancy Features

February 15, 2022February 15, 2022 fustinihackadayLeave a comment

From Donald Papp on Hackaday:

Back when LCD character displays based on the HD44780 controller were the bee’s knees, a way to make them easier to work with came in the form of “backpack” PCBs, which provided an accessible serial interface and superior display handling at the same time. [Barbouri] has updated that idea with a backpack board that mounts to OLED displays using the US2066 display driver, and provides an I²C interface with powerful and convenient high-level functions that make the display simple to use.

On the software side, the backpack uses this I2cCharDisplay driver project which provides functions like cursor control, fading, display shifting, and of course writing characters or strings. While [Barbouri] designed the board specifically to accommodate Newhaven Slim Character OLED displays, it should in theory work with any US2066-based OLED character display. [Barbouri]’s design files for the Slim-OLED Display backpack board are available for download directly from the project page (link is near the bottom), or boards can be purchased directly from OSH Park.

KiCAD 6.0: What Made It and What Didn’t

January 18, 2022January 18, 2022 fustinihackaday, kicadLeave a comment

Dave Rowntree writes:

I’ve been following the development of KiCAD for a number of years now, and using it as my main electronics CAD package daily for a the last six years or thereabouts, so the release of KiCAD 6.0 is quite exciting to an electronics nerd like me. The release date had been pushed out a bit, as this is such a huge update, and has taken a little longer than anticipated. But, it was finally tagged and pushed out to distribution on Christmas day, with some much deserved fanfare in the usual places.
So now is a good time to look at which features are new in KiCAD 6.0 — actually 6.0.1 is the current release at time of writing due to some bugfixes — and which features originally planned for 6.0 are now being postponed to the 7.0 roadmap and beyond.

This USB-C Connector Is Flexible

January 9, 2022January 9, 2022 fustiniflex, hackadayLeave a comment

From Hackaday:

The USB-C standard with its smaller connector has so far mostly escaped this trend, though this might be about to change thanks to the work of [Sam Ettinger]. His own description of his USB-C connector using a flexible PCB and a BGA-packaged ATTiny84A microcontroller is “cursed”, but we can’t decide whether or not it should also be called “genius”.
Key to this inspired piece of connector fabrication is the realization that the thickness of BGA and flex PCB together comes to the required 0.7 mm. The BGA provides the necessary stiffness, and though it’s a one-sided connector it fits the space perfectly. There are several demo boards as proofs-of-concept, and the whole lot can be found in a GitHub repository.

Sniffing Signals To Teach Old Speakers New Tricks

December 20, 2021 fustinihackadayLeave a comment

All Jay Tavares wanted was for his Bose Cinemate speakers to turn themselves on and off as needed. It seems like a reasonable enough request, and indeed, is exactly the point of HDMI’s Consumer Electronic Control (CEC) feature. But in this case, it would take a bit of custom hardware to get similar functionality.
Unfortunately, the speakers [Jay] has only support optical audio; so any interoperability with HDMI-CEC (hacked or otherwise) was immediately out the window. Still, he reasoned that he should be able to detect when the TOSLINK audio source is actually active or not, and give the speaker system the appropriate signal to either power on or shut down. You might think this would require some kind of separate stand-alone device, but as it turns out, all the necessary information was available by reverse engineering the connection between the receiver and the subwoofer.
After some investigation, [Jay] found that not only was the content of the TOSLINK audio source being sent over this DB9 cable, but so were the control signals required to turn the system on and off. So he designed a simple pass-through device with an ATtiny85 and a couple passives that latches onto the relevant lines in the cable.

The 555 Timer Contest Returns! — Hackaday

December 4, 2021December 4, 2021 fustini555, contest, hackadayLeave a comment

The Hackaday 555 Timer contest has returned:

The short of it is you just need to use a 555 timer and you qualify for this contest.
The longer story is that we want to see just about anything 555-related. In fact, projects that don’t use a 555 are fine as long as they are based on the idea. So, if the global chip shortage has you struggling to even find one of these, just build the parts of the internal circuit yourself and you’re golden. The real trick here is to explain what you’re doing and why.

Find out more…

Watch Blender Plugin Make Animated PCB Traces

December 1, 2021December 1, 2021 fustiniblender, hackadayLeave a comment

Donald Papp writes on Hackaday:

[Staacks]’s Blender plugin to animate growth is behind the sweet animation seen above. It’s an add-on that cleverly makes creating slick growth animations easier when using Blender. It isn’t limited to PCB images either, although they do happen to make an excellent example of the process.
The idea is that one begins with an image texture with a structure showing a bunch of paths (like a maze, or traces on a PCB), and that gets used as an input. The plugin then uses a path finding algorithm to determine how these paths could grow from an origin point, and stores the relevant data in the color channels of an output image. That output is further used within Blender as the parameters with which to generate the actual animation, resulting in the neat self-creating PCB seen above. That PCB isn’t just for show, by the way. It’s the PCB for [Staacks]’s smart doorbell project.

Hackaday Remoticon: What’s Happening Right Now

November 19, 2021November 19, 2021 fustinihackaday, RemoticonLeave a comment

Hackaday Remoticon is live now! Watch all of today’s talks on the live stream and interact with everyone by joining Discord.

All talk and schedule information is available on the conference webpage, but here are the things you don’t want to miss (all times are Pacific time zone):

11:10 am | Keynote: Elicia White
5:15 pm | Hacker Trivia: https://youtu.be/uRpUdQi31tg
6:15pm | Bring-a-Hack: Remoticon ticket holders will receive an email on how to join, we’ll also share that info in the Discord