Remoticon 2021 // Vaibhav Chhabra and the M19 Collective Make One Million Faceshields

[Vaibhav Chhabra], the co-founder of Maker's Asylum hackerspace in Mumbai, India, starts his Remoticon talk by telling a short story about how the hackerspace rose to its current status. Born out of frustration with a collapsed office ceiling, having gone through eight years of moving and reorganizations, it accumulated a loyal participant base - not unusual with hackerspaces that are managed well. This setting provided a perfect breeding ground for the M19 effort when COVID-19 reached India, mixing "what can we do" and "what should we do" inquiries into a perfect storm and starting the 49 day work session that swiftly outgrew the hackerspace, both physically and organizationally.

When the very first two weeks of the Infinite Two Week Quarantine Of 2020 were announced in India, a group of people decided to wait it out at the hackerspace instead of confining themselves to their homes. As various aspects of our society started crashing after the direct impact of COVID-19, news came through - that of a personal protective equipment shortage, especially important for frontline workers. Countries generally were not prepared when it came to PPE, and India was no different. Thus, folks in Maker's Asylum stepped up, finding themselves in a perfect position to manufacture protective equipment when nobody else was prepared to help.

We've seen collective projects like these over the years - this one is magnificent in its thoughtfulness at scale. All of that is here for us to learn from - for instance, nuances of manufacturability optimisations in context of diverse variety of hackerspace infrastructure. An often-forgotten requirement for any project wishing to be successful is expanded upon - keeping the end users, healthcare specialists, in a tight iterative design loop. The sheer amount of this effort, coupled with media coverage, didn't go unnoticed by other hackerspaces, which is where the challenge of sharing knowledge rose up, and was swiftly dealt with. End result? One million faceshields produced across India's hackerspaces and other lasercutter-equipped places, in only a bit longer than a month and a half's time.

After the demand for face shields started to finally get fulfilled, the new capabilities and strengths of the hackerspace consortium were waiting for the next goal to be unlocked - at least, those that didn't need to be diverted to quality assurance and keeping the effort running. The experiences and frameworks developed during are now a vital part of a research case study and QA/QC principle formation effort, both led and funded by University of Cambridge. In turn, the maker resources available were then directed towards designing and manufacturing oxygen concentrators, as well as repairing the ones that were just waiting to be put into working order.

If you were ever looking for a tale of a myriad hackerspaces collaborating on a social project, this is it - and there's plenty to learn for anyone wishing to inspire other hackers to conquer large social problems. This talk covers about every part of the process that you would like to learn from, wrapped in an exciting story you could make a documentary on. The effort lives on, and we will certainly see its principles in action whenever it is that the next storm hits us.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #hackerspaces #medicalhacks #2021hackadayremoticon #covid #covid19 #india #m19collective #makersasylum #remoticon

Remoticon 2021 // Jay Bowles Dips Into The Plasmaverse

Every hacker out there is familiar with the zaps and sizzles of the Tesla coil, or the crash and thunder of lighting strikes on our hallowed Earth. These phenomena all involve the physics of plasma, a subject near and dear to [Jay Bowles's] heart. Thus, he graced Remoticon 2021 with a enlightening talk taking us on a Dip Into The Plasmaverse.

[Jay]'s passion for the topic is obvious, having fallen in love with high voltage physics as a teenager. He appreciated how tangible the science was, whether it's the glow of neon lighting or the heating magic of the common microwave. His talk covers the experiments and science that he's studied over the past 17 years and in the course of running his Plasma Channel YouTube channel.

Physics!

The talk serves as a great dive into the world of HV experimentation, with [Jay] featuring three exotic applications of high voltage science.

The first demonstration is of human electrostatic levitation. This requires a very high static voltage of -60,000 V applied to the body via a Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier, while [Jay] is isolated from the ground on a stool. [Jay] reminds the audience that high voltage itself is not by itself lethal to the body, highlighting the role current has to play. A bottom plate is then used, set at ground potential to enable the effect.

With the voltage applied, a lightweight foil "boat" will levitate above the plate and below [Jay]'s hand. It's a quasistable system, and a difficult thing to maintain, but the experiment works and the aluminium foil floats in the air. [Jay] then goes through the science behind it all, discussing the charge relationships and the other physical effects at play. The detail is key, which explains not just how the foil floats, but how it remains in place without shooting off in one direction.

It only gets more exotic, with [Jay] repurposing the voltage multiplier and stool to bend a flame electrostatically. This is possible as fire contains many positive and negative ions which can be influenced by electric fields. It's an effect that [Jay] discovered by accident, having left a burning candle near a high-voltage multiplier, and noticed the flame bending towards the high voltage source.

High voltages can literally split a flame in two.

With his body charged to high voltage once more, [Jay] is able to "pull" the flame towards his left or right hand, with the demo proving difficult as he twice pulled the flame entirely off the wick, extinguishing the candle. It's a dangerous experiment in some ways too, as it involves literally attracting fire towards the body. In more controlled conditions, [Jay] has been able to achieve some impressive feats with this trick, bending and tugging large flames to his will, even "splitting" a candle flame in two directions.

The last demonstration involves a device called an atmospheric corona motor. Rather than the "high" current used by magnetic motors, it relies on high voltage instead, running at extremely low currents. The design relies on electrostatic charges to turn a rotor rather than electromagnetic fields, and [Jay] explains how it all works and compares it to the operation of a traditional gravity-driven waterwheel. He also points out how the motor can be driven by static electricity extracted from the atmosphere itself, with the help of a balloon or drone to carry a wire high into the air.

Overall, the talk serves as a wonderful dip into the plasmaverse, just as the title promises. [Jay]'s demonstrations and explanations are a great primer to get any hacker thinking about the possibilities of working with high voltage plasma science. All that's left is to get experimenting on your own!

#cons #hackadaycolumns #science #2021hackadayremoticon #electricity #hackaday #highvoltage #hv #physics #plasma #plasmaphysics #remoticon #talk #talks

Remoticon 2021 // Joey Castillo Teaches Old LCDs New Tricks

Segmented liquid crystal displays are considered quite an old and archaic display technology these days. They're perhaps most familiar to us from their use in calculators and watches, where they still find regular application. [Joey Castillo] decided that he could get more out of these displays with a little tinkering, and rocked up to Remoticon 2021 to share his findings.

[Joey's] talk is a great way to learn the skills needed to reverse engineer a typical segment LCD.[Joey] got his start hacking on these displays via his Sensor Watch project - a board swap for the venerable Casio F-91W wristwatch, with the project now available on CrowdSupply. It kits out the 33-year-old watch design with a modern, low-power ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller running at 32 MHz that completely revolutionizes what the watch can do. Most importantly, however, it repurposes the watches original segmented monochrome LCD.

Segment LCDs are usually small monochrome devices made out of glass, that have the benefit of using very little power in their operation. They come with a fixed layout, which cannot be changed - so they're often designed specifically for a given purpose. A calculator will have segments laid out to display numbers, often in the usual 7-segment fashion, while a watch may add dedicated segments for displaying things like "AM," "PM," or "ALARM."

Their purpose-built nature means they're often very thin and compact with useful layouts that are attractive and fitting for their given applications. Compared to general purpose LCDs, like the popular HD44780 character LCDs, they often have much cleaner aesthetics and a sleeker design as they're meant to be consumer-facing, rather than used in any one of a million different industrial applications.

[Joey's] talk starts off with a primer on how segment LCDs work, initially comparing them to 7-segment LEDs that so many of us are familiar with. However, LCDs are a little different in their operation, with segments darkening when a voltage differential exists, and are driven with AC signals rather than DC. [Joey] explains how to drive LCD segments in this manner, providing a CircuitPython example that demonstrates how its done.

Multiplexing is also described in detail, a technique used in many segment LCDs to allow them to be driven with less IO pins. Scoping out the LCD pins on a standard Casio F-91W wristwatch shows how the technique works, and it's easy to follow along seeing the signals displayed clearly on an oscilloscope. [Joey] also explains that generating all the signals needed is easy if you just go out and purchase a microcontroller with an integrated segment LCD controller, like the Microchip SAM L22.

As a primary example of what can be achieved when hacking segment LCDs, [Joey] shows how he repurposed the display from the Casio Databank DB-36. The LCD has 55 connections and tons of segments, and is hooked up with zebra strips - a rather delicate method of connecting a segment LCD. Using some sticky tape, he blocks out a pin going to the LCD, reassembles the watch, and looks for which segments don't work anymore. This technique allows the pinout of the display to be quickly mapped out.

Obviously, though, if you're reverse-engineering a display, you're limited to using the segments as laid out by the original designers. As [Joey] happily explains, though, you can actually get your own custom segment LCDs made without too much bother! He's already done it himself, creating a dupe to match the Casio F-91W in a Feather-compatible form factor to ease development of the Sensor Watch board. There is a quantity requirement, but you can end up spending less than $1 per unit on big orders.

While segment LCDs are old-school and basic, they're still a great technology for any low-power project that needs to display some data. After all, just think about how long the average digital wrist watch can last on a single coin-cell battery! [Joey]'s talk is a great primer if you're interested in taking advantage of these displays, whether in existing hardware or by getting your own made from scratch!

#cons #hackadaycolumns #2021hackadayremoticon #7segment #casio #casiof91w #casiowatch #lcd #remoticon #segmentlcd #sensorwatch

Friday: Getting Social with Discord and Bring-a-Hack

With just a few days to go before the kickoff of the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon, we're still working furiously behind the scenes to pack as much content as possible into the two day virtual event. In fact, there's so much going on that we thought you'd appreciate getting a bit of a head start as far as planning your own personal course through the weekend goes. The event might be free, but that's no reason not to squeeze as much out of it as you can.

Chat It Up on Discord

To begin with, you're really going to want to join the official Hackaday Remoticon Discord server. We know some subset of the Hackaday readership would rather we used Matrix, or IRC, or maybe carefully modulated smoke signals; but at the end of the day, Discord has bubbled to the top as the defacto choice for this kind of thing. Give it a shot, you might actually like it.

The Discord server isn't just a place for like-minded hackers to hang out and discuss the musical stylings of DJ Jackalope during the Saturday afterparty. It's also how attendees can ask questions at the end of each presenter's talk, as we'll be turning off YouTube chat to keep things centralized. Even if you don't plan on communicating with others (though you really should), the Discord server has an interactive schedule of events which will let you sign up to be notified when the talks you've selected are about to start, and we'll be dropping important announcements and links in there as the event goes on.

Friday Bring-a-Hack on Gather Town

Like this, but with soldering irons.

Friday night ends with a Bring-a-Hack where attendees can show off whatever they've been working on using Gather. It's a video chat platform inside a virtual 2D world that looks a bit like Legend of Zelda.

Using this virtual environment, you can easily drop into an ongoing video stream simply by walking up to the presenter. Once you've seen enough, just walk over to the next little cluster of users. The point is to recreate the experience of stopping by a crowded after party where everyone brought some hardware project along with them to get spark conversations. Space will be limited, with ticket holders and people in Discord getting the first dibs, so keep an eye on your inbox for information about how to join.

Of course this is not the only Friday evening activity. A few weeks ago we announced that Lewin Day will be hosting Hacker Trivia, giving our beloved commenters the chance to show off your unimpeachable knowledge of technology and Hackaday history. The Friday talk stream will dump immediately into trivia, but here's the dedicated link if you want to set a reminder for yourself.

Try It, You'll Like It!

It's difficult, perhaps even impossible, to truly recreate the experience of going to an in-person hacker con. But with interactive events and the latest and greatest communication software, we're hoping the 2021 Remoticon can get pretty close. All the pieces are in place, the only thing we need now is to have a whole bunch of excited hackers to join in and have a good time. Think you can help us out?

#cons #2021hackadayremoticon #bringahack #discord #remoticon

Three More Remoticon Speakers Complete the Lineup

You know, it's hard to believe, but Hackaday Remoticon 2021 is just two weeks away. Every year, we work hard to make the 'con a little better and brighter than the one before it, and this year is no exception. We've already got a star-studded list of keynote speakers, and our list of inspiring talks seems to get longer and more exciting every week. With todays announcement of three more speakers, that list is complete and available along with their scheduled times on the official Remoticon website.

Come and see what we've got in store for you on Friday, November 19th and Saturday, November 20th. Remoticon admission is absolutely free this year, unless you want a t-shirt to commemorate the event for a paltry $25. Tickets are still available -- in fact, they'll be available right up until Remoticon Day One on the 19th, but if you want a shirt you'll need to grab one of those tickets by a week from today. Go get yours now!

Okay, let's get on to today's announcement of the speakers!

Jay Bowles

**A Dip Into the Plasmaverse
**

Ball bearings vs. high voltage!

Plasma isn't just the stuff in your blood that's worth more than a stale chocolate chip cookie down at the donation center. It's the fourth state of matter, and it can be achieved with high voltage, high heat, or strong electromagnetic fields. Does science get any cooler than invisible control over objects? We think not.

Jay Bowles is certainly no stranger to these pages. Who could forget the handheld exciter wand or the time Jay piped power using only water and ball valves? To say that Jay is passionate about plasma physics is an understatement -- he believes it is the key to the future.

This high-energy talk is sure to spark your interest, whether it's the electronic levitation demonstration that involves Jay's body and 80,000 volts, or the part where Jay gets up close and personal with fire to control and influence it using 100,000 volts, or the bit where he teaches your new favorite winter party trick -- drawing in fog and/or mist by merely pointing at it. We're pretty charged up for this one!

Colin O'Flynn

**Upskilling Your Hardware Security Work
**

There's a lot more to hardware hacking than just the 101-level stuff of serial consoles and dumping SPI flash. Although the other stuff may seem daunting at first, Colin O'Flynn's talk will demystify topics like side channel power analysis and fault insertion.

Far from being some inaccessible lecture, this talk will focus on experimentation along with the tools and basic knowledge required to actually get something going. Colin is going to show how to do it with tools you probably already have, like an oscilloscope, a spare Arduino, and a handful of discrete components.

Colin will be using his own creation, the ChipWhisperer (second prize winner in the inaugural Hackaday Prize), and referencing the Hardware Hacking Handbook, which is a new guide he wrote with Jasper van Woudenberg. Colin will demonstrate where to poke and prod to get that piece of hardware to spill its secrets, and he'll reveal the locations of some free and/or inexpensive educational info.

Hash Salehi

**Smart Meter Hacking
**

Remember when you'd occasionally see someone traipsing through your yard with a clipboard, because they were coming to read the electromechanical meter? Like so many other things, power meters went smart sometime in the last 25 years.

Hash is reverse-engineering smart power meters, doing everything from demystifying undocumented wireless protocols to dumping the microcontrollers' firmware. Since these meters are meant to stay in place for a decade or more, that leaves plenty of time to gain a deeper understanding of what's going on, and how vulnerable all that information criss-crossing the neighborhood may be.

There's plenty for the community to uncover from these black boxes, since there isn't much publicly-available information about them. Hash will be presenting his latest research into smart meters and will discuss the tools he uses to reverse engineer them.

So Many Speakers!

This fourth and final round of talks, which brings our total to sixteen, plus our three keynote speakers. We've set up a handy site with all the speakers and their subjects so you don't have to keep sifting through Hackaday articles for conference announcements.

Combine all of this awesomeness with Hacker Trivia, the Bring-A-Hack social hour, and of course, the Hackaday Prize ceremony and closing blowout party, and the weekend is going to be unforgettable! We may even have a few more surprises up our sleeves. Who knows? Don't wait any longer -- go get your ticket!

#cons #hackadaycolumns #2021hackadayremoticon #presenters #remoticon #talks

Four More Talks Added to the 2021 Remoticon Lineup

We've already unveiled multiple keynote speakers and a slate of fascinating presenters that will be showing off everything from reverse engineering vintage calculators to taking those first tentative steps on your CAD journey for this year's Remoticon. You'd be forgiven for thinking that's everything you'll see at the conference, but there's still plenty to announce before the two-day virtual event kicks off on November 19th. Normally we'd be promising to make sure you get your money's worth, but since tickets are completely free, we're shooting a bit higher than that.

We were blown away by the number of fantastic talk proposals we received during this year's extended call. Let's take a look at the next four presenters who will be joining us for the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon on November 19th through the 20th.

Jeroen Domburg (aka [Sprite_tm])

Rickrolling Buddha: A Deep Dive in Reverse Engineering and Thoroughly Pwning an Unknown Chip

Jeroen, best known to Hackaday readers as the legendary [Sprite_tm], is not one to turn down a challenge. So when Big Clive published a flash dump from a cheap musical Buddhist meditation aid and asked if his viewers were interested in trying to figure out how the device could be made to play different songs, he was happy to lend his skills to the effort.

It turns out, Jeroen and the other Internet sleuths who took on the puzzle had their work cut out for them. Between figuring out what chip was hiding under the dreaded black epoxy blob to cracking the encrypted firmware stored on the SPI flash chip, the project has ended up being a tour de force in reverse engineering.

While they still haven't hit their aspirational goal of loading the gadget up with Rick Astley's greatest hit, Jeroen thinks they're getting close and will tell us all about their progress in what's sure to be a fascinating presentation.

Sergiy Nesterenko

Don 't Flip My Bits: Electronics in Spaaaace

Designing electronics is hard, and it gets even harder when the electronics in question are built to travel through space. During his five years working in the avionics group at SpaceX, specializing in EMI and ionizing radiation effects, Sergiy learned a thing or two about making sure your hardware has the Right Stuff to complete its mission.

His talk is a hitchhiker's guide to lightning, humidity, vibration, triboelectric charging, radiation, solar flares, re-entry plasma and some of the other physics that engineers must consider in their designs. In other words, 1000 ways to break a computer. These are issues we don't give much thought to when hacking around with development boards, but if you ever hope to take one of your designs out to the black, these are the things that will keep you up at night.

Now heading up a startup that does physics-driven generative design for PCBs (space-bound and otherwise), Sergiy describes his presentation as a light-hearted take on the effort required to qualify electronics for space applications, so you don't need to be a rocket scientist to tune in. But it might help.

Vaibhav Chhabra

M19 Initiative - A Case of Open Innovation & Distributed Manufacturing at Scale
To say the world was unprepared for the global COVID-19 pandemic would be something of an understatement. Seemingly overnight, communities all over the globe found themselves woefully short on the same personal protective equipment (PPE) that hospitals were in desperate need of. Seeing this as an opportunity to put their skills and equipment to use, makers all over the world began using their 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC routers to churn out everything from face masks to prototype ventilators.

In March of 2020, makers in India banded together to form the M19 Collective. With an eye towards combining centralized open source design philosophy with decentralized manufacturing, they were able to produce one million face shields in just 49 days. Recently they have been focusing on India's oxygen shortage by not only building and distributing concentrators, but in educating locals on how to operate and maintain them.

During his presentation, Vaibhav will give a first-hand account of how India's hacker and maker community came together in these unprecedented times. With grass-root level innovation leading to arguably the largest scale adoption of open source hardware in history, the M19 Collective is demonstrating the value collaborative development on the global stage.

Arsenijs Picugins

Laptop-Be-Done

It’s safe to say that most Hackaday readers have an old laptop or two kicking around the workshop. You might not use them, they might not even be in functional condition, but it just seems wrong to throw them away. You know they’re full of fabulously useful components, miniaturized and made cheap by the economies of scale, but how do you determine which parts are worth salvaging? Perhaps more importantly, what do you do with the components once you've liberated them?

Luckily for us, Arsenijs has put together a presentation specifically for the hacker that wants to get the most out of that stack of old laptops collecting under their desk. In this talk he’ll go over reusing the obvious components like the screen, keyboard, charger, motherboard, webcam, battery, and touchpad, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more useful gear inside those old machines than you’d expect, you’ve just got to know what to look for.

As the creator of the Zerophone, a hacker-friendly mobile phone that can be assembled for $50 USD, Arsenijs knows plenty about mobile devices. But his experience with reusing scavenged parts also comes from trying to put projects together with next to no budget; something we’ve all had to deal with at one time or another. He believes the Hackaday Remoticon is the perfect place to show off some of the thrifty lessons he's learned as a starving hacker, and so do we.

We're Not Done Yet

Hungry for more? Don't worry, there might only be three weeks left before we kick off our second Remoticon, but we've still got more talks and special events to reveal as we enter the final stretch. So do yourself a favor and put your name down for a free ticket, or better yet, spend the $25 and get the shirt. After all, it's the only way you're going to get some swag from a virtual event until we develop transporter technology.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #2021hackadayremoticon #presenters #remoticon #talks

Announcing the Next Round of Remoticon Talks

It's coming up fast -- Hackaday Remoticon 2021 is just a few weeks away, and we're working around the clock to load up the weekend with awesome and inspiring talks that are bound to get the creative juices racing through your crazy straw brain.

Come and practice your neuroplasticity with us on November 19th and 20th. Remoticon is free-as-in-beer this year, unless you want a t-shirt. Even then, $25 is peanuts, because we're sure that you'll find a few talks that are priceless, and you'll have a cool shirt to remember them by. Grab your ticket right now! We'll wait.

A few days ago we announced mechanical engineering marvel Jeremy Fielding as our second keynote speaker. Passion is paramount to all projects, and Jeremy's passion is making things move. He's a renaissance man with a quiver full of self-taught skills, and is sure to bring enthusiasm to his keynote talk, which focuses on building hardware that moves, and how to handle the mechatronic mysteries that arise when trying to scale things up.

For now, let us indulge you with a preview of the second round of talks and speakers that we'll be showcasing on November 19th and 20th. There's plenty more where these came from, and we'll be serving up fresh samples all the way until Remoticon weekend.

Maurits Fennis

**Hack for the Planet: Reverse-Engineering Embedded Systems to Reduce E-Waste
**

Usually when we hear about reverse engineering embedded systems in the context of information security, the focus is on searching for vulnerabilities with the aim to exploit. Maurits' talk will re-contextualize the reverse engineering embedded devices while working toward the goal of reducing e-waste.

Maurits founded Unbinare in 2020 to tackle the global rise of e-waste through the power of reverse engineering. He will present and explain the tools used at Unbinare such as a passive, spring-loaded needle probe for exploring PCBs, a magnetic base that can connect up to twelve of these probes, a board with a QFP48 clam shell socket that's aimed at debugging STM32L5 microcontrollers, and more.

Jay Doscher

**Getting Started With and Outgrowing Tinkercad
**

Tinkercad may be a great place to start your 3D modeling journey, but it should lead you to other lands instead of leaving you stranded on Tinkercad Island.

Jay Doscher's talk will focus on getting started with Tinkercad. He'll run through the reasons why it's good, and delve into when you should be using something else. This is meant to be a beginner course, and Jay will cover basic shapes, adding and subtracting materials, designing for 3D printing, and more.

We've seen many a printed project from Jay including a Raspi terminal, some other rugged Pi projects, and a mil-spec-looking cyberdeck you can replicate without the DoD budget.

Joey Castillo

**Teaching An Old LCD New Tricks
**

Joey shot to fame with the Open Book Feather, an open hardware e-reader that won our 2019 Take Flight with Feather contest.

Nowadays, he's playing around with segmented LCDs, which seem to be way less popular within the community than say, 7- or 16-segment LEDs are, likely because of the lack of information out there. In particular, Joey reverse-engineered the iconic Casio F-91W wristwatch ~~to play DOOM~~ to do much more than it was ever intended to.

Don't be put off by the complexity of these things. Joey's gonna give you a brief primer on the way these multiplexed LCDs work. He'll also go over the basics of driving them, and will share what he's learned about working with LCD technology while building an open-hardware watch mod.

Uri Shaked

Reverse-Engineering the ESP32 WiFi

Uri wrote an online simulator for the ESP32 chip that runs ESP-IDF apps, Arduino projects, and even MicroPython code. But one crucial piece is missing, he says. The WiFi radio!

Join Uri for a fascinating journey into the depths of the ESP32 WiFi stack as we navigate through the Xtensa-assembly jungle using Ghidra reverse-engineering software and the GNU project debugger. Reverse engineering, big time.

As popular as the ESP32 chip has become, very little is known about its closed-source WiFi stack. Pop the hood on the WiFi implementation with Uri as he navigates the unknown by the light of reverse engineering.

Hal Rodriguez and Sahrye Cohen

**Conductive Melody: a Tech Couture Instrument
**

Image via McDonald Photography

Conductive Melody is a wearable tech couture instrument that unites music, clothing, and artistic performance. It's a stunningly-designed dress that produces music and light that's played by the wearer and shared with an audience.

An Arduino captures touch inputs from a sleeve made of conductive fabric, and a Raspberry Pi uses a machine learning music interface to expand the eight touch inputs to a full 88-key piano in real time.

You don't need to know about apparel construction or even how to read an electrical diagram, because Hal and Sahrye will dive into how they put it all together. All you need to bring is an interest in fashion, electronics, music, and/or machine learning.

Only the Beginning

This second round of talks are still just a taste of what's in store for Remoticon 2021, so get your free ticket now, or grab a $25 ticket that includes a really cool t-shirt. And if you didn't get the shirt, were you really even there?

#cons #hackadaycolumns #2021hackadayremoticon #presenters #remoticon #talks

These First Remoticon Speakers Are Just a Taste of What’s to Come

With the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon fast approaching, we've been hard at work crafting a schedule filled with thought-provoking presentations from knowledgeable speakers; precisely what you've come to expect from one of our events, virtual or otherwise. We've already announced that Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) astrophysicist Keith Thorne will be presenting a literally out-of-this-world keynote on the incredible engineering it takes to detect gravitational waves with the highest precision interferometers ever devised, but that's only the beginning.

To make doubly sure we'll be able to pack every available minute of our second Remoticon with fascinating content, we've decided to extend the deadline on talk proposals for a few more days to see what the late-bloomers can bring to the table. If you've ever wanted to present at a Hackaday event, but couldn't swing the trip to Pasadena or Belgrade, this is your chance to take the stage virtually and show off what you're passionate about.

In the meantime, we've churned through enough of the early proposals to let slip the first four talks that we'll be beaming out between November 19th and 20th. There is plenty more to announce over the coming weeks, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what we've got in store for our global audience of hardware hackers. So grab your Remoticon ticket right now!

Debra Ansell

Form is Function: Modular PCB Building Blocks

The low cost of PCB manufacturing makes PCBs a reasonable choice to use as structural elements comprising larger modular electronic projects. I first created a system of PCB-based NanoLeaf-style tiles in June of 2020. My goal was to build an inexpensive, reconfigurable, aesthetically pleasing, sturdy system using custom PCBs and readily available parts.

Issues in modular systems can be different from those in more typical PCB projects. For example physical stress on boards in an assembly can create just enough torque to separate pressure connectors from contact points. I've spent many hours combing through the results of "board-to-board connector" searches on Mouser and Digi-Key, and invested even more time trying to design my own PCB-based connectors.

I'll cover which connectors have worked best for me in different builds, which connectors I would love to use if they were just a bit cheaper, and why dollhouse hinges don't actually make a great PCB connector, even though they provide terrific structural support. Anyone with an interest in PCB design, and in stretching PCBs beyond their standard use cases might be interested in this talk.

Rob Weinstein

Patently Obvious - Reverse Engineering a 45 Year Old Patent into a Fully-Functional HP-35 Replica

HP-35, the first scientific calculator, by Seth Morabito CC BY 2.0

I'm an electrical engineer who has spent the last 30 years designing with FPGAs for the wireless communications field (mostly). When I was a young engineer, I only cared about what was the latest and greatest and I didn't give a hoot about old stuff. Now that I'm old stuff, I'm fascinated by what came before -- how the foundation of technology was built by brilliant people using only stone knives and bear skins.

On Halloween 2018, I started reverse engineering US Patent 4,001,569 in which the HP-45 pocket scientific calculator is disclosed. Using the '569 patent as my primary source, I built a fully-functional replica of the HP-35 calculator using a small FPGA for each of the seven ICs described in the patent. I attempted to implement the FPGA designs faithfully to what's described in '569. Together, the seven ICs comprise a 56-bit, serial CPU and display subsystem that runs a calculator program stored in three of the ICs. There's no microprocessor emulation here. The replica became fully operational on June 9th, 2021.

In this talk, I'll attempt to explain everything I learned along the way.

Matt Venn

Open source ASICs - A Year in Perspective

Drawing N-channel MOSFET in silicon

Hot on the heels of his Zero to ASIC workshop from Remoticon 2020, Matt Venn is back with a retrospective covering the major developments in the world of application-specific integrated circuits, as well as a look at what's to come in the future. Last year saw the release of SkyWater: the world's first manufacturable, open source Process Design Kit (PDK), which is a key part of what's required to design custom ASICs.

Since then there have been two "shuttles", the ASIC manufacturing service set up by Google and SkyWater, with a third set to launch in October. This free program allows anyone with a fully open source design to experiment with custom silicon without the usual costs associated with fabrication.

This talk will be relevant to anyone interested in the new opportunities to make their own chips, and with four free shuttles left, there's still plenty of time to get involved without having to pay a lot of money.

Voja Antonic

Become a Hardware Expert in 40 Minutes

An original Galaksija computer.

If there's anyone who can give you the knowledge you need to master hardware in under an hour, it's Voja Antonic. Over the course of 100 slides he'll show off the microprocessor architecture in a way that anyone can understand it. That includes basic logic gates, combinational logic, flip-flops, sequential logic, registers, CPU structure, memories, I/O and peripherals.

Voja, who famously developed the Galaksija computer in 1983, says this talk is relevant to beginners and experienced engineered alike; although it's really targeted towards the hardware hackers and enthusiasts who want to peek into the "blackbox" of the CPU. He believes that programmers can write better and more efficient programs if they know how a CPU works internally.

With Much More to Come

These first four talks are only a fraction of what we've got planned for Remoticon 2021, so make sure you get your free tickets now so we have an accurate headcount come showtime. There is also a $25 ticket that includes a shirt, because what's a hacker con if not an excuse to add another t-shirt to your collection of swag?

#cons #2021hackadayremoticon #presenters #remoticon #talks

I asked @[email protected] for a #remoticon badge PCB. I don't know what I expected 😅♥️

I have to say the remo hangout of #Remoticon was a lot nicer and closer to a con experience that I would have thought :)
Was nice hanging out with some of you and meeting some new people.