Tickets for the 2024 Hackaday Supercon are on sale now! Go and get yours while they’re still hot. True-Believer Tickets are half-price at $148 (plus fees), and when that pile of 100 is gone, regular admission is $296 (plus fees).

Come join us on November 1st-3rd in sunny Pasadena, CA, for three days of talks, demos, badge hacking, workshops, and the sort of miscellaneous hardware shenanigans that make Hackaday Hackaday! If you’ve never been to a Supercon, now is the best time to check that off your bucket list. And if you’re a seven-time veteran, we’re stoked to see you again. Supercon is like a year’s worth of posts in one weekend. You don’t want to miss it.

Friday, November 1st, is our chill-out day. You can roll in as soon as the doors open in the morning, get your badge and some bagels, and get down to hacking. Or you can start socializing early. Or, as it almost always happens, both at once. We’ll have food and music and even a few workshops, but for the most part, Fridays are what you all make of them. And we love it that way.

Talks start up on Saturday on both stages, along with the soldering contest and an alley full of hackers. We’ll close out the evening with a special celebration, but more on that in a minute.

On Sunday, in addition to the usual slate of talks, we’ve set aside a big block of time for Lightning Talks. These are seven-minute quickies where you get to tell the bigger Hackaday community what you’re up to. A short talk like this forces you to condense the story down to its essence while giving tons of people their fifteen minutes of fame in half the time! If you’ve got a Lightning Talk that you’d like to present, let us know! We’ll try to fit in everyone we can.

Wrapping up Sunday evening, we’ll give you a chance to show off whatever badge hacks you’ve been working on over the weekend. We love the badge hacking demo because it allows us to see a wide (and wild) range of projects, all of which were put together in record time. Whether funny, flashy, or phenomenal, we want to see what you’ve been up to.

Supercon Add-Ons

It’s still way too early to let the badge cat out of the bag, but we’ll give you a clue. This year centers around the shitty Supercon Add-On. We want you to make your own fun badgelets to show off and share, so we’re offering three special prizes and much limited-edition schwag for honorable mentions.

DeLorean, by [realanimationxp]But more than a contest, designing your own Supercon Add-On is an invitation to get creative, get clever, or even just to get your first-ever PCB project made. There’s nothing simpler than an SAO – you’re talking six pins, a small board, and the rest is up to you. With a snazzy board outline and some good artwork, even a couple of LEDs can make a weekend’s work look like a million dollars.

Or, if you want to make it more interesting, the six-pin SAO standard has both I2C lines and a pair of GPIO pins, and we don’t see those taken advantage of nearly enough in the wild. If you’re already onto your second or third SAO design, why don’t you pay attention to the connectivity in this design?

Next week, we’ll release the full specs, rules, and regulations. Until then, start brainstorming up six-pin SAO designs. Again, we’re not saying that you’ll need to make use of the I2C pins, but we’re saying that we’ll be running some tutorial articles about SAO design in the very near future. Here’s [Arya]’s SAO design primer from two Supercons past if you want to get a head start.

Come Join Us!

If you are Hackaday, you really want to make it to Supercon if you can, and we want to see you there. You’re all a great crowd, and the small size and relaxed venue makes for about the highest signal-to-noise ratio around! We’ll be releasing the schedule as it firms up over the next couple weeks, and until then, you have a chance to get a discount ticket if you move quickly. Stay tuned, and act fast!

Making something enjoyable often requires a clever trick. It could be a way to cut something funny or abuse some peripheral in a way it was never designed for. Especially good tricks have a funny way of coming up again and again. [DERAILED3D] put a 3d printed benchy in a bottle with one of the best tricks 3d printing has.

The trick is stopping the print part way through and tweaking it. You can add manual supports or throw in some PTFE beads to make a generator. The benchy isn’t the print being paused; the bottle is. The benchy is a standard print, and the bottle is clear resin. Once halfway through, they paused the print, and the benchy was left suspended in the bottle with a bit of wire. Of course, [DERAILED3D] moved quickly as they risked a layer line forming on the delicate resin after a minute or two of pausing. The difficulty and mess of tweaking a gooey half-finished resin print is likely why we haven’t seen many attempts at playing with the trick, but we look forward to more clever hacks as it gets easier.

The real magic is in the post-processing of the bottle to make it look as much like glass as possible. It’s a clever modern twist on the old ship in the bottle that we love. Video after the break.

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Every now and then, a commercial product aims to help you in your life journey, in a novel way, making your life better through its presence. Over the years, I’ve been disappointed by such products far more often than I have been reassured, seeing each one of them rendered unimaginative and purposeless sometimes even despite the creator’s best intentions. The pressures of a commercial market will choke you out without remorse, metal fingers firmly placed on your neck, tightening with every move that doesn’t promise profit, and letting money cloud your project’s vision. I believe that real answers can only come from within hacker communities, and as we explore, you might come to see it the same way.

This is the tip of the iceberg of a decade-long project that I hope to demonstrate in a year or two. I’d like to start talking about that project now, since it’s pretty extensive; the overall goal is about using computers to help with human condition, on a personal level. There’s a lot of talk about computers integrating into our lives – even more if you dare consult old sci-fi, much of my inspiration.

Tackling a gigantic problem often means cutting it down into smaller chunks, though, so here’s a small sub-problem I’ve been working on, for years now, on and off: Can you use computers to modify your sense of time?

The Time Question

Ever start your day thinking you will hack on a project, and in the evening, realize you’ve instead done something else entirely? Sometimes you find something cool while distracted, and sometimes, getting distracted comes to haunt you.
maybe one day I will assemble these
This has been a staple of my days as long as I remember my conscious life, and at some point, I started wondering just how much this could be modified. Do you remember one particular project we’ve seen a couple people build, a vibration-based compass build that gives you a sense of where north is? Ironically, I have made PCBs for building my own version of this project – they were designed in 2022, I finally ordered them last year in 2023, and I haven’t gotten to assemble them still.

So, you can give yourself a sense of “where’s north” – something that humans are missing, generally. Technically, humans are also missing a source of time, which is why we always supplemented it with wrist-worn watches and pocket clocks. Having compared my day plans to what actually happens on that day for two decades, I can see that I need something more than that. It’s traditionally been common for me to mis-estimate when exactly I could get something done – I would give an estimate that felt correct, then start doing part of the task and forget about the flow of time, minutes passing by me.

So, there are two problems here. One of them is that, despite having been alive for a fair bit of time, my database of “how much it takes for me to do X” is inaccurate. This makes sense: keeping such references is a conscious effort that might not extend to, and day-to-day situations are highly variable. Still, if someone is relying on me, it would be nice to be aware enough to at least notify that person, and to learn to plan ahead. Another is that it’s easy for me to get and forget about the flow of time. It sure helps me concentrate on articles, but it doesn’t help when someone is waiting on me.

At some point, this started to screw with my sense of self. Really, just how much can you rely on some aspects of your mind if it continuously fails you and people you care about, in a manner that you are expected to “just figure out already”? You have to learn to distrust certain basic aspects of your cognitive processes; again and again, something as “simple” as time planning is weighted down by all the instance of letting people down with zero intention to do so. This is a pretty uncomfortable position to be in, if being honest with yourself is a priority of yours. Unsurprisingly, it also made things pretty difficult when talking about employment or real-life obligations. Something had to be done.

Well, could you give yourself a sense of time, say, with vibromotors? Apparently, you can, but there’s nuance to it. Let me tell you about two projects I’ve built to attempt this, and some basic concepts I learned about human-computer integration.

The Not-A-Bomb Wearable

My first project in this vein grew out of a purpose-less experiment, funnily enough: a project literally called I Made This And I Don’t Know Why – a simple board I built to make use of seven-segment displays our hackerspace had a dozen of. ESP8266, dynamic indication with a shift register, and MicroPython – writing firmware for this board was a nice challenge in writing non-blocking code and finding portions of code to optimize. Soon, the board found a good few purposes – among them, a time tracker.

I decided to solve a simple problem – building a mental database on the amount of time does it take me to get from “start” to “finish” for an arbitrary task. Tracking that was tricky – say, I want to check the length of a bicycle ride from my house to a certain point. I’d need to check my phone at the exact time when I left the house, keep that time in mind, and then, once I’ve arrived to my destination, check again. Both of these require some time to execute and some memory, so, I decided to make an automatic countdown timer. Glancing at my wrist felt significantly easier, so, after some cutting, sewing, and hotglue work, I made one of the IMTAIDKW boards into an oversized watch, and used one of my universal power source designs to power it from a 18650.

There were some setbacks during – notably, this countdown timer required me to patch MicroPython’s ESP8266 port, due to an obscure bug making the time.time() function seriously imprecise; an inaccurate countdown timer wasn’t in my plan. Still, it was a nice experiment – relying on something that you build yourself is always fun, and I’ve added features like adjusting the start time. It was also automatic enough to be useful, with digits large enough and bright enough to be noticeable, still, making for an unobtrusive device, and pretty cool to wear.

The main problem was that I forgot to put it on and start the countdown. It was a purpose-built device, and I only needed it a couple times a day at its very most, so most of the time it stayed off my wrist, and I would even lose track of it sometimes. Another problem was remembering to check the time of arrival, unsurprisingly – looking at my wrist was easy enough, so most of the time I could notice the time difference and go “oh interesting”, but even then, it was easy to forget. The last, main problem, was actually keeping a mental database – turns out that when you need to remember pretty similar datapoints, it’s easy to confuse them. Does it normally take me 15 minutes to get to the city center, or was it the electronics store? This turned out to be pretty easy to mix up.

The lessons from this iteration: decreasing resistance to use is good, collecting data is good, and, you should automate the data collection process if at all possible. I wouldn’t stop here, of course – some time later, I found an even nicer wristband to hack on.

Unconventional Battery Upgrades

The TTGO (or was it Lilygo?) T-Wristband is a fun product – with an ESP32 at its heart, a good few sensors, a 160 x 80 IPS LCD, and a single capacitive button. It’s an old device by now, but when I bought it in the beginning of 2020, it was fun to hack on, and hack it I did, making it run MicroPython. I didn’t know what exactly to do with it, but soon I remembered about the “sense of time” project. At the time, I wanted to tap into my life minute-by-minute and see if I could build a device able to help me notice when I’m distracted. The minimum viable prototype idea was very simple – adding a vibromotor to the watch, then having it vibrate exactly every minute, having it be an “am I currently spending my time correctly” reminder.

The problem was, by the time I came up with that, a good few months passed where the wristband was sitting in a drawer with the battery fully discharged – hurting its capacity a bit, which, at 80 mAh, was already not great. Also, I wanted to be able to keep adding features to the code without carefully balancing sleep modes or having to charge my watch multiple times throughout the day; I just wanted to run code and charge the battery every night at most. So, it got a battery upgrade – a Samsung phone battery glued to, ahem, yet another wristband, and a devboard with vibromotor driver taped on top. After the hardware tweaks, the code itself was seriously easy to write.
despite the added bulk, it was surprisingly fun to wear. at some points, I even added features like remote PC control and a gesture interface!
Whenever I’d notice it vibrating, I’d ask myself – “am I doing the right thing right now?” And, to my surprise, it did catch some distraction moments every now and then, for sure! Oftentimes, I wasn’t doing the right thing, in one way or another, and a reminder about being supposed to do something else was quite welcome. Other times, when I was focused on something, the “am I doing the right thing” question would get a “yes” in my mind, and, it felt good to think that.

It wasn’t as comfortable in times when I wasn’t expecting me to be on top of things – while I’d be resting, the every-minute feedback of the watch would feel annoying and needlessly distracting; soon, I implemented a vibration toggle with the capacitive button, and a few other things. My guess is that the annoyance factor and generally getting used to the vibrations has made me less sensitive to the vibromotor’s signal, which in turn made the wearable less effective at its goal. Apart from that, the battery wire kept breaking every so often, taking the watch out of commission, which made it hard to start properly relying on it.

youtube.com/embed/DJtZOUD4jko?…

On the upside – it turned out that this idea has been floating in collective unconscious for a while now, to the point that it was the point of a watch worn by one of the characters in Mr. Robot, and a relatable one at that. It’s pretty good to get external independent confirmation that an idea of yours has merit! In particular, the video above reminds me a lot of my experiences – I spent less time on my phone and generally less time doing things I didn’t want to do, I was getting up and walking around more often, and, I had add a small feature that mutes the watch when I go to sleep.

It All Worked Out Despite The Plan

Lessons here? If you can hook your device’s signals into producing a thought in your brain, that helps massively – checking for “am I doing the right thing” every minute came to me naturally, and a lot quicker than I expected it to. Context sensitivity is a must for self-help devices- the wearable would’ve had been way more effective if I had some ways to detect that I’m likely to be distracted, as opposed to having it vibrate indiscriminately every minute. In general, make sure your device is not annoying to you in any bad way – it’s supposed to be helping you, so any reason you’re annoyed by it, is a problem for the device’s primary usefulness.

On the hardware side, make your device reliable – building habits takes an ongoing effort, and you want it to be consistent. At the same time, consider building your device as a playground for developing your idea further; this could require a bigger battery, or more space inside the case, or an expansion socket. Reality is to plans what pure oxygen is to paper, and getting things done is typically way more important than getting them right the first time. Last but by no means least, wires suck – I’ve been saying this, and I will repeat that as much as needed.

In the end, I have mostly solved my original problem by tweaking my personal approach to time over the years, learning to over-estimate estimates, and ultimately putting myself in less situation where I am under time pressure – it turned out that was the bigger problem. It would’ve been nice if I could’ve noticed that sooner, but, the devices I’ve built certainly have helped. Today, I still have some sense-of-time solutions I rely on, but they are new, designed with these lessons in mind, and they’re a part of a multi-faceted system that I can only tell you about in the next articles – stay tuned!

da Chepalle blog - di Mario Salvini

In mezzo a uno tsunami cosí ti vien voglia di lasciarti andare. Se qualsiasi cosa provi a fare, quelli di là trovan sempre la maniera di frapporre una mano, un piede, un’anca, una coscia, un gomito tra il pavimento e la tua schiacciata, a un certo punto ti fai portar via.
O ti arrendi, o ti perdi, ubriacato da tutti quei prodigi. Quanti accidenti di giapponesi c’erano in quegli 81 metri quadri? E quanti cavolo di Yamamoto?
Ti sembrava di vederci doppio, quadruplo. E in più eri impallinato dalle loro battute. Che quei demoni tiravano a mille e non sbagliavano mai.
Qualsiasi squadra al mondo sarebbe stata trascinata via. Non i nostri. Nel post precedente ho messo Simo Giannelli, con gli occhi lucidi, in battuta sui loro match ball del terzo set. Un attimo prima di morire
Quel suo ace resterà per sempre nella storia della pallavolo italiana. Speriamo in quella dello sport italiano, se capite cosa intendo
Poi c’è molto altro.
Che il Giappone avrebbe potuto essere questo il mio amico e collega Davide Romani lo diceva da mesi. Smentito dal girone, e poi puntualmente ottimo profeta nel momento per noi peggiore
Fefè De Giorgi lo sapeva più di tutti. E lo sapeva ogni lettore che stamattina avesse letto la Gazzetta. Dove, riportando le parole del ct, Elisabetta Esposito ha scritto: “Il Giappone ha un libero straordinario che fa delle cose fuori dal normale. Noi dobbiamo essere bravi ad avere pazienza, che non significa aspettare, significa accettare la situazione”
Ecco, i nostri sono stati stupefacenti, per come hanno accettato la bravura dei loro avversari. Per come sono andati oltre gli errori commessi. Per come non si sono incolpati l’un l’altro.
Se ho avuto fiducia fino in fondo è stato per due palloni nella fase finale di secondo set, quando ancora mi stavo illudendo di poter andare sull’1-1. Due alzate NON precise di Giannelli, tutte e due per Lavia
“Lo schiacciatore non commenta le alzate, le risolve”, diceva - e dice - Julio Velasco
Lavia le aveva risolte, e lì per lì sembrava che non fosse servito a nulla. E invece è anche per quello che siamo rimasti vivi.
È la pallavolo, è la vita, direbbe Al Pacino se ogni maledetta domenica avesse fatto l’allenatore di pallavolo invece che di football
È l’insegnamento di questa che è stata una delle partite di pallavolo più belle di sempre
In cui una squadra italiana è stata capace di non farsi spazzar via, come sarebbe successo a qualsiasi altra squadra. E come a regola avrebbe dovuto capitare a un gruppo di ragazzi giovanissimi
Che invece sono stati duri come il granito.
E lo sono stati perché in panchina hanno un gigante
Che non solo aveva già visto questa partita, come avete letto sulla Gazzetta
Ma perché è un riferimento
Perché è un adulto. Non c’entra l’età.
Per come interpreta il suo ruolo con autorevolezza senza autoritarismi. Con competenza. Con sicurezza trasmettendo sicurezza. Che è poi esattamente quello per cui dopo il Mondiale vinto lo aveva ringraziato il presidente, Sergio Mattarella. Che magari di pallavolo non ci capisce molto, ma di uomini e di vIta sí.
Tutti, in qualsiasi ambito, avremmo bisogno di girarci verso la panchina e di trovarci un Ferdinando De Giorgi
Non è un’altra ragione di cui andare fieri, oltre alla vittoria.
È LA ragione per cui la vittoria l’abbiamo trovata, in quel modo disperato, esaltante, inimmaginabile.

[Breaking Taps] has done some lithography experiments in the past, including some test patterns and a rudimentary camera sensor. But now, it’s time to turn it up a notch with 1µm garage semiconductor ambitions.

The e-beam lithography he’s done in the past can achieve some impressive resolutions, but they aren’t very fast; a single beam of electrons needs to scan over the entire exposure area, somewhat like a tiny crayon. That’s not very scalable; he needed a better solution to make 1µm semiconductors.
Test patterns from the first attempt
In his quest, he starts by trying to do maskless photolithography, using a literal projector to shine light on the target area all at once. After hacking a projector devkit apart, replacing blue with ultraviolet and adding custom optics, it’s time for a test. The process works for the most part but can’t produce fine details the way [Breaking Taps] needs. Unfortunately, fixing that would mean tearing the whole set-up apart for the umpteenth time.

The photomask used in the reduction machine
In either a genius move, or the typical hacker tangent energy, he decides not to completely re-build the maskless lithography machine, but instead uses it to create masks for use in a 10:1 reduction machine, also known as the more traditional mask photolithography. In the end, this works out well for him, reaching just about 2µm effective minimum feature size in this two-step process.

We haven’t even remotely covered everything and there are, of course, always things to improve. And who knows? Maybe we’ll see 1µm semiconductors from [Breaking Taps] in the future.

youtube.com/embed/RuVS7MsQk4Y?…

There was even a day not too long ago when printers appeared to be going the way of the dodo; remember the “paperless office” craze? But then, printer manufacturers invented printers so cheap they could give them away while charging $12,000 a gallon for the ink, and the paperless office suddenly suffered an extinction-level event of its own. You’d think space would be the one place where computer users would be spared the travails of printing, but as [Ken Shirriff] outlines, there were printers aboard the Space Shuttle, and the story behind them is fascinating.

The push for printers in space came from the combined forces of NASA’s love for checklists and the need for astronauts in the early programs to tediously copy them to paper; Apollo 13, anyone? According to [Ken], NASA had always planned for the ability to print on the Shuttle, but when their fancy fax machine wasn’t ready in time, they kludged together an interim solution from a US military teleprinter, the AN/UG-74C. [Ken] got a hold of one of these beasts for a look inside, and it holds some wonders. Based on a Motorola MC6800, the teleprinter sported both a keyboard, a current loop digital interface, and even a rudimentary word processor, none of which were of much use aboard the Shuttle. All that stuff was stripped out, leaving mostly just the spinning 80-character-wide print drum and the array of 80 solenoid-powered hammers, to bang out complete lines of text at a time. To make the printer Shuttle-worthy, a 600-baud frequency-shift keying (FSK) interface was added, which patched into the spaceplane’s comms system.

[Ken] does his usual meticulous analysis of the engineering of this wonderful bit of retro space gear, which you can read all about in the linked article. We hope this portends a video by his merry band of Apollo-centric collaborators, for a look at some delicious 1970s space hardware.