Hackaday Europe is the continental version of the Ultimate Hardware Conference, taking place May 16th and 17th, and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops over the next couple weeks, because we got so many more great talks than we had anticipated that we’re negotiating for extra time.
This year, we’re moving to a new venue in Lecco, Italy, and it’s sure to be fantastic. Get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for another round of talk reveals next week!
Suryansh Sharma
Test. Fly. Survive. Building High Endurance Drones For The Outside World.
Every drone builder hits the same wall: limited flight time, no good way to bench-test drones without actually flying it, and worrying about a single crash causing catastrophe. This talk is about tearing down all three of those problems.
I’ll discuss Open Gimbal, a hybrid balloon-drone platform, and Janus — a morphing blimp-drone that detects its own balloon failure mid-flight and transitions to quadrotor mode in under half a second. Come find out what it takes to build aerial robots that go beyond the lab.
Janelle Wellons
Space Oddities
Troubleshooting is part of a maker’s DNA. Software encounters bugs, circuits short, and parts break — it is an expected part of the process when building something new. But what happens when your project is hundreds of millions of miles away—where you can’t see it, can’t touch it, and can’t press Ctrl-Z? This is the high-stakes world of anomaly resolution in space. This talk will explore how strong ingenuity, creativity, and strong problem solving skills have saved missions from a pre-mature end.
Milos Rasic
Is Your Blood Pressure Monitor Lying To You?
Besides the humble thermometer, a blood pressure monitor is the most common house hold medical device. I will go into an open-source project I developed that measures blood pressure, ECG, SpO2 and auscultations where I go step by step explaining how those signals are analyzed. This would include showing the electronics and signals analysis of pressure waveforms as well as the Pan Tompkins algorithm and how it works for the ECG signal.
Phil Underwood
Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools
Mapping caves presents multiple challenges: there’s no GPS, it can be muddy, wet, cold and tight – not a friendly environment for electronic tools. Cave surveying used to be done using analog tools – handheld compasses and inclinometers and tape measures! In this talk Phil presents the work he has done over the last 20 years to develop electronic cave surveying tools – called the Shetland Attack Pony.
Katrin Dietzsch
PCBs with a Plot: Building Narrative Hardware
What if a PCB wasn’t just a circuit, but a story prop? Most PCBs are designed for function, efficiency, and cost. But what happens if you start with a story instead? In this talk we’ll see how hardware and firmware decisions can be used to create narrative experiences for tabletop role-playing games. We’ll walk through the design process from concept to KiCad layout to fabrication. And show how electrical behavior can become part of the narrative rather than just a technical implementation detail.
Yannick Richter
Project Gigapixel: A Scanner Sensor Reverse Engineering Odyssey
The presentation details the in-depth process of reverse engineering the sensor protocol of the 12-line CCD, how to find out information about proprietary non-public components and implementing it in a portable camera using a Raspberry Pi 5, PIOLib, custom hardware and software capable of capturing extremely high resolution images. In total the process took around one year from the scanner to a functional camera.
Nicola Cimmino
The 1-Bit CPU That Ran Factories
In 1977, a 16-pin chip with no RAM, no stack, and a minimalist instruction set replaced racks of relays in industrial control systems. The Motorola MC14500B is a 1-bit CPU built to evaluate ladder logic directly in hardware, with a single-bit result register and discrete input/output lines.
A hands-on dive into industrial computing history and what minimalism can teach us about designing predictable, efficient logic systems.
Matt Venn
Tiny Tapeout Workshop
You will get the opportunity to design and manufacture your own design on an ASIC! You will learn the basics of digital logic, the basics of how semiconductors are designed and made, how to use an online digital design tool to build and simulate a simple design, how to create the GDS files for manufacture on an open-source PDK.
Participants will have the option to submit their designs to be manufactured on the next shuttle as part of the Tiny Tapeout project. Participants will need a laptop. Mouse and headphones are strongly advised. Nothing needs to be downloaded, but good internet is required.
[If you read this far, you probably want tickets. Go get ’em!]