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2024 Hackaday Europe: Workshops Announced, Get Your Tickets

There are only a few weeks left until Hackaday Europe takes place in Berlin on April 13th and 14th. With only one full day of programming, we simply can’t run as many workshops as we do at Supercon, but what we do have should tickle your fancy. As if that weren’t enough, there will be at least a few other impromptu workshops and activities to distract you from the talks.
If you’re thinking of attending, get your tickets now for both the event and the workshops of your choice. There are only a few left, and workshops sell out like hotcakes.

Official Workshops

Jaap MeijersLight modulation: Listening to Light, Seeing Sound
Ever wondered what light sounds like? In this workshop you will make the visible audible and the audible visible. By means of a small solar panel and loudspeaker you will discover the hidden frequencies that surround us. You will also experiment with sending music via visible light.

Paul BeechLoud Bangs. Uncensored Robot Carnage.
You’ll be given a microcontroller, code examples and a bunch of wheels, mounts and other frills. With the support from a couple of tinkerers you have to build a robot to complete five simple tasks. Robots can be remote controlled or autonomous. Bonuses for autonomy. Prizes for innovation, hilarity and maybe even for completing the tasks.

Matt VennTiny Tapeout
In this workshop you will get the opportunity to design and have manufactured your own design on an ASIC. You will learn the basics of how semiconductors are designed and made, the basics of digital logic, and how to use an online digital design tool to build and simulate a simple design. All participants will be able to get their design manufactured free of charge thanks to Efabless sponsorship. Physical chip and PCB are sold separately and are available to purchase during or after the workshop. Participants will need a laptop. Mouse strongly advised.

Unofficial Workshops

Kevin Santo CappuccioBuilding a Jumperless Probe and Poking Stuff
In this workshop, you’ll build your own personalized probe for a Jumperless breadboard and then use it to poke out some 7400-series logic circuits super quickly. You’ll also learn the ins-and-outs of using a Jumperless for other things. At the end, we’ll hold a race to see who can wire up a given circuit the fastest. Kevin will have Jumperless boards available for sale for those who want to take one home.

Bart DerudderUV Tape Wall
Bart’s UV Tape walls have showed up at a number of European hacker conventions, and he’s volunteered to set one up for us! He’ll be running a short workshop to get the ball rolling for people to keep adding their own creations. No need to register, just bring your ideas!

Hackaday conferences are participatory, and we want you to bring whatever you’re interested in as well. If a Workshop isn’t your style, but you still have something to share, plan on giving a lightning talk Sunday morning! We’d love to hear what you’re up to. […]

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It’s About Time

I’m pretty good with time zones. After all, I live in Germany, Hackaday’s server is in Los Angeles, and our writers are scattered all over the globe. I’m always translating one time into another, and practice makes (nearly) perfect. But still, it got me.
I was in the states visiting my parents, when Daylight Saving Time struck, but only in the USA. Now all my time conversions were off by an hour, and once I’d worked through the way the sun travels around the globe, I thought I had it made. And then my cell phone started reporting a time that was neither CEST nor EDT, but a third time zone that was an hour off. Apparently some cell towers don’t transmit time zone information, and my phone defaults to UTC. Who knew? For a short while, my phone lied to me, the microwave oven clock in the hotel lied to me, and I felt like I was going nuts.
But this all got me thinking about clocks and human time, and possibly the best advice I’ve ever heard for handling it in your own programs. Always keep time in something sensible like UNIX time – seconds elapsed since an epoch – because you don’t have to worry about anything more than adding one to a counter every second. When and if you need to convert to or from human times, you can write the function to do that simply enough, if you don’t already have a library function to do so.
Want to set an alarm for 2 hours from now? That’s easy, because you only need to add 7,200 seconds, and you don’t need to worry about 59 wrapping around to 0 or 23:59 to 0:00. Time math is easy in seconds. February 29th? That’s just another 86,400 seconds. It’s only us humans who make it complicated. […]

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Hacking and Working on the Go

I’m off visiting my parents for a while, and have managed to bring nearly everything along with me that I need to get work done, and it all fit in a small backpack! This includes a portable audio interface to run my podcast mic, two (count them) two Linux computers, and all manner of simple hacking tools. Microcontrollers with USB/serial adapters built in are a godsend.
But putting together the minimal setup was no easy task! Alone the USB cable assortment I had to bring was astounding. And in the end, it looks like I forgot a USB-B mini, and good luck finding that at the local drug store. (I know! But the Zoom recorder wants mini. Don’t ask me why.)
And then there’s the power adapters — brick for the laptop, USB-C fast charger for the Steam Deck, another wall-plug USB for recharging the power banks. And of course, this silly custom keyboard which I’m so used to typing on, and which embodies so much muscle memory in its macros that I’m practically helpless without it.
So fundamentally, I’m astounded by the amount of functionality I could cram into my pack, but I’m also aghast at all the little things that add up around the edges. And I’m sure that I’ll find stuff that I’m missing in the next few weeks.
Do you need to travel for work with your full kit? What’s your approach? Minimal? Maximal? Leave us your hacker travel kit tips in the comments. […]

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Sometimes It’s the Little Things

I had one of those why-didn’t-I-think-of-it moments this week, reading this article about multiplexing I2C on the ESP32 microcontroller. The idea is so good, and so simple, that it’s almost silly that it’s not standard hacker practice. And above all, it actually helps solve a problem that I’ve got. This is why I read Hackaday every day.
I2C is great in that it lets you connect up multiple devices to a pair of wires using a very bus architecture. Every device has its own address, the host calls them out, and hopefully all other devices keep quiet while just the right one responds. But what happens when you want to use a few of the same sensors, where each IC has the same address? The usual solution is to buy a multiplexer chip.
But many modern microcontrollers, like the ESP32, have an internal multiplexer setup that lets you map the pins with the dedicated hardware peripherals, usually at initialization time. Indeed, I’ve been doing it as an “init” task so long, I never thought to do it otherwise. But that’s exactly the idea behind [BastelBaus]’s hack – if you dynamically reassign the pins, you can do the I2C multiplexing with the chip you’ve got. This should probably work for any other chips that have multiple assignable pins for hardware peripherals as well.
Cool idea, but really simple. Why hadn’t I ever thought of it? I think it’s because I’ve always had this init / mainloop schema in my mind, which for instance the Arduino inherited and formalized in its setup() and loop() functions. Pin mappings go in the init section, right?
So what this hack really amounts to, for me, is a rethinking of what’s static and what’s dynamic. It’s always worth questioning your assumptions, especially when you’re facing a problem that requires a creative solution. Sometimes limitations are only in your mind. Have you had your mind opened recently by a tiny little hack? […]

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Want to Learn Binary? Draw Space Invaders!

This was the week that I accidentally taught my nearly ten-year-old son binary. And I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear.
It all started innocently enough. He had a week vacation, and on one of those days, we booked him a day-course for kids at our local FabLab. It was sold as a “learn to solder” class, and the project they made was basically a MiniPOV: eight LEDs driven by a museum-piece AVR ATtiny2313. Blinking lights make a pattern in your persistence of vision as you swipe it back and forth.
The default pattern was a heart, which is nice enough. But he wanted to get his own designs in there, and of course he knows that I know how to flash the thing with new code. So I got him to solder on an ISP header and start drawing patterns on grids of graph paper while I got the toolchain working and updated some of the 2000’s-era code so it would compile.
There’s absolutely no simpler way to get your head around binary than to light up a row of LEDs, and transcribing the columns of his fresh pixel art into ones and zeros was just the motivation he needed. We converted the first couple rows into their decimal equivalents, but it was getting close to dinner time, so we cheesed out with the modern 0b00110100 format for the rest. This all happened quite organically; “unintentional parenting” is what we call it.
While we were eating dinner, I got the strangest sense of deja vu. When I was around ten or eleven, my own father told me about the custom fonts for the Okidata 24-pin printer at his lab, because he needed me out of his hair for a while, and I set out to encode all of the Hobbit runes for it. (No comment.) He must have handed me a piece of graph paper explained how it goes, and we had a working rune font by evening. That was probably how I learned about binary as well.
Want to teach someone binary? Give them a persistence of vision toy, or a dot-matrix printer.

(Art is from a much older POV project: Trakr POV — a hack of an old kids’ toy to make a long-exposure POV image. But it looks cool, and it gets the point across.) […]

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2024 Hackaday Europe Call for Participation Extended

Good news, procrastineers! A few folks asked us for a little more time to get their proposals together for our upcoming 2024 Hackaday Europe event in Berlin, and we’re listening. So now you’ve got an extra week – get your proposals for talks or workshops in before February 29th.
[Joey Castillo]’s awesome custom touchpadHackaday Europe is a two-day event taking place April 13th and 14th in Berlin, Germany. Saturday the 13th is the big day, with a full day of badge hacking, talks, music, and everything else. We’ve got the place booked until 2 AM, so get your sleep the night before. Sunday is a half-day of brunch, lightning talks, and showing off the badge hacks from the day before. And if you’re in town on Friday the 12th, we’ll be going out in the evening for drinks and dinner, location TBA but hopefully closer than where we ended up last year!
The badge is going to be a re-spin of the Supercon badge for all of you who couldn’t fly out to the US last November. There are no secrets anymore, so get your pre-hacks started now. We’ve seen some sweet all-analog hacks, some complete revisions of the entire firmware loadout, and, of course, all sorts of awesome hardware bodged onto it. Heck, we even saw Asteroids and DOOM. But we haven’t seen any native Jerobeam Fenderson-style oscilloscope music. You’ve got your homework.
What to Bring?
A few other people have asked if they could bring in (art) projects to show and share. Of course! Depending on the scale, though, you may need to contact us beforehand. If it’s larger than a tower PC, get in touch with us, and we’ll work it out. Smaller hacks, projects in progress, and anything you want to bring along to show and inspire others with, are, of course, welcome without any strings attached.
What else might you need? A computer of your choice and a micro USB cable for programming the badge. There will be soldering stations, random parts, and someone will probably be able to lend you nearly any other piece of gear, so you can pack light if you want to. But you don’t have to.
If you’d like to attend but you don’t have tickets yet – get them soon! Space is limited, and we tend to sell out. Or better yet, submit a talk and sneak in the side door. We’d love to hear what you’ve got going on, and we can’t wait to see you all. […]

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Our Home Automation Contest Starts Now!

Your home is your castle, and what’s better than a fully automatic castle? Nothing! That’s why we’re inviting you to submit your sweetest home automation hacks for a chance to win one of three $150 DigiKey gift certificates. The contest starts now and runs until April 16th.
[Matej]’s Home Buttons gets the job done in open-source style.We love to play around with home automation setups and have seen our fair share, ranging from the simple “turn some lights on” to full-blown cyber-brains that learn your habits and adapt to them. Where is your project on this continuum?
Whether you’re focused on making your life easier, saving energy, gathering up all the data about your usage patterns, or simply stringing some random functions together and calling it a “system,” we’d like to see it. Nothing is too big or too small if it makes your home life easier.
Home is where the home automation is!
To enter, head over to Hackaday IO and start documenting your project there. We are, of course, interested in learning from what you’ve done, so the better the docs, the better your chances of winning. And if you need some inspiration, check out these honorable mention categories.
Honorable Mention Categories

Thanks again to DigiKey for sponsoring this with three gift certificates! […]

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Wireless All the Things!

Neither Tom Nardi nor I are exactly young anymore, and we can both remember a time when joysticks were actually connected with wires to the computer or console, for instance. Back then, even though wireless options were on the market, you’d still want the wired version if it was a reaction-speed game, because wireless links just used to be too slow.
Somehow, in the intervening years, and although we never even really noticed the transition as such, everything has become wireless. And that includes our own hacker projects. Sure, the ESP8266 and other WiFi-capable chips made a big difference, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for the nRF24 chipset, which made at least point-to-point wireless affordable and easy. Others will feel the same about ZigBee, but the point stands: nothing has wires anymore, except to charge back up.
The reason? As this experiment comparing the latency of many different wireless connections bears out, wireless data links have just gotten that good, to the point that the latency in the radio is on par with what you’d get over USB. And the relevant software ecosystems have made it easier to go wireless as well. Except for the extra power requirement, and for cases where you need to move a lot of data, there’s almost no reason that any of your devices need wires anymore.
Are you with us? Will you throw down your chains and go wireless? […]

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One Project at a Time, Or a Dozen?

We got a bunch of great food for thought in this week’s ask-us-anything on the Hackaday Podcast, and we all chewed happily. Some of my favorite answers came out of the question about how many projects we all take on at once. Without an exception, the answer was “many”. And while not every one of the projects that we currently have started will eventually reach the finish line, that’s entirely different from saying that none of them ever do. On the contrary, Tom Nardi made the case for having a number of irons simultaneously in the fire.
We all get stuck from time to time. That’s just the nature of the beast. The question is whether you knuckle down and try to brute-force power your way through the difficulty, or whether you work around it. A lot of the time, and this was Dan Maloney’s biggest bugaboo, you lack the particular part or component that you had in mind to get the job done. In that situation, sometimes you just have to wait. And what are you going to do while waiting? Work on Project B! (But take good notes of the state of Project A, because that makes it a lot easier to get back into the swing of things when the parts do arrive.)
Al and I both weighed in on the side of necessity, though. Sometimes, no matter how many attractive other projects you’ve got piled up, one just needs to get out the door first. My recent example was our coffee roaster. Before I start a big overhaul, I usually roast a couple days’ worth of the evil bean. And then the clock starts ticking. No roasting equals two unhappy adults in this household, so it’s really not an option. Time pressure like that helps focus the mind on the top-priority project.
But I’m also with Tom. It’s a tremendous luxury to have a handful of projects in process, and be able to hack on one simply because you’re inspired, or in love with the project at that moment. And when the muse calls, the parts arrive, or you finally figure out what was blocking you on Project A, then you can always get back to it. […]

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Hackaday Europe 2024 is On, and We Want You!

Hackaday Europe is on again for 2024, and we couldn’t be more excited! If you’re a European hacker, and have always wanted to join us up for Supercon in the states, here’s your chance to do so without having to set sail across the oceans. It’s great to be able to get together with our continental crew.
Just like last time, we’ll be meeting up in Berlin at Motionlab, Bouchestrasse 12 for a weekend of talks and workshops. On paper, the event runs April 13th and 14th, but if you’re in town on Friday the 12th, we’ll be going out for drinks and socializing beforehand. Saturday starts up at 9 AM and is going to be full of presentations, with food throughout and our own mix of hacking and music running until 2 AM. Sunday starts up a little bit later with brunch and as many lightning talks as we can fit into the afternoon.
And as always, we want you to bring a project or two along to show and tell. Half the fun of an event like this, where everyone is on the same wavelength, is the mutual inspiration that lurks in nearly every random conversation. It’s like Hackaday, but in real life!
So without further ado: get your tickets right here! We have a limited number of early-bird tickets at $70, and then the remainder will go on sale for $142 (plus whatever fees).
Call for Participation
So who is going to be speaking at Hackaday Europe? You could be! We’re also opening up the Call for Participation right now, both for talks and for workshops. Whether you’ve presented your work live before or not, you’re not likely to find a more appreciative audience for epic hacks, creative constructions, or you own tales of hardware, firmware, or software derring-do.
Workshop space is limited, but if you want to teach a group of ten or so people your favorite techniques or build up a swarm of small robots, we’d love to hear from you.
All presenters get in free, of course, and we’ll give you an early-bird price even if we can’t fit you into the schedule. So firm up what you’d like to share, and get your proposal in before Feb 22.
The Badge
Part of the fun of an event like this is sharing what you’re working on with a rare like-minded crowd. True story: we came into last year’s Hackaday Berlin event with a raw idea for our own Superconference badge, that we needed to have done by November. Talks with [Schneider] about the lovely badge for the Chaos Communications Camp inspired us to use those sweet round screens, and a chat with [Stefan Holzapfel] convinced us of the possibility to run an audio DAC at DC.
So it’s fitting that we’ll be bringing the Vectorscope badge to Berlin, with some new graphics of course. If you didn’t catch it at Supercon, it’s a emulation of an old-timey X-Y mode oscilloscope and a DAC to drive it in software. Folks had a great time hacking it at Supercon, and you will too. It’s analog, it’s digital, and it’s got room for a lot of art. We’d love to see what you bring to it!
Thanks and See You Soon!
Of course, we can’t put on an event like this without help from our fantastic sponsors, so we’d like to say thanks to DigiKey for sponsoring not only the stateside Superconference, but also Hackaday Europe 2024. And as always, thanks to Supplyframe for making it all possible.
April is coming up fast, so get your proposals in and order your tickets now! We can’t wait to see you all. […]