2026 Hackaday Supercon: Asserting Our First Spherical Of Speakers

Addison Vogt
Overengineering a CD shelf: A story of packing software program, electronics and dozens of motors into tight areas

Revisit the tutorial journey of packing 24 motors, 96 switches, 12 RFID readers, 12 motor controllers, six ESP32s, one Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, and 24 CDs into lower than 500mm for the (not so) easy pleasure of mechanically ejecting CDs. If you’ve ever run out of IO pins in a venture, come see how off the shelf electronics may be mixed with 3D printing to create compact, modular elements that type an expandable I2C-based distributed system.

Cyril Engmann
Minus: Blocking Ads on the Pixel Level with an HDMI Man-in-the-Middle

Minus is an open-source HDMI man-in-the-middle system that detects and blocks streaming commercials in real-time utilizing on-device machine studying. It sits between your streaming stick and your TV, captures frames from the HDMI passthrough, and runs a tiered inference pipeline solely on a Rockchip RK3588 with a devoted neural processing unit. When it spots an advert, it composites over the area and mutes the audio, all whereas sustaining sub-millisecond passthrough latency. No cloud, no subscriptions, no browser. Just bare-metal ML inference on each body that crosses the wire utilizing a $100 single-board pc.

Doug Goodwin
When Faster Isn’t Better: How Displays Cheat Time

Modern shows make time look steady by presenting a speedy sequence of discrete updates. Usually, that granularity goes unnoticed. This speak revisits one experiment through which it adjustments what individuals report seeing.

The viewers will expertise the experiment on an LED panel whereas the convention projector exhibits timing, instrumentation, and the instructive failure.

Eleanor Mazzarella
Vibe-CADding a wearable speedometer for a six yr outdated

My six-year-old has two obsessions: speedometers and seven-segment shows. So I constructed him one he can take with him wherever: a kid-sized arm band with GPS, a seven-segment readout, and rainbow-comet LEDs, so he can see precisely how briskly he’s operating, or how briskly the automobile is occurring the freeway.
This speak walks by way of the adventures and misadventures of the construct, design trade-offs, the enclosure I CAD’d largely by vibes, and the three components that had been the hardest lifts — the enclosure, the firmware, and all the pieces GPS.

Estefannie and Justin Andarza
Alternative Controllers: Designing Unconventional Game Worlds

Sit down with ArtCenter college members Estefannie and Justin Andarza for a hearth chat exploring the globe of other controllers and experimental recreation design. In this dialog, they’ll break down why the inventive intention and social consciousness behind a bodily object is simply as essential because the code and electronics inside it.

They will hint the journey of taking experiments to three-time alt.ctrl.GDC award winners, and in the end into Warped Worlds—a collective devoted to reimagining play. They’ll focus on the facility of physical-digital interactivity, the enjoyment of creating “bizarre” tactile artwork, and the way tangible, customized {hardware} is shaping the way forward for really immersive participant experiences.

Jim Scarletta
The Road to DOOM on an FPGA: Building a Soft-Logic Computer with Open Source Tools.

Running DOOM on an FPGA is way more fascinating than only a software program port. We’ll begin with a totally clean material after which instantiate the processor to run the code.

I’ll be harnessing Luke Wren’s Hazard3 RISC-V core. Yes, this is similar core used on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 and Pico 2. Of course we’ll want greater than only a CPU: External SDRAM, HDMI, JTAG debugging, timing closure, and extra. So what does it really take?

We’ll stroll by way of main steps and sudden challenges similar to having the design fail to fulfill timing necessities and the way sweeping seeds for placement and routing will help. The first move had a surprisingly gradual show body price, so we’ll additionally discuss some unplanned DOOM optimizations.

Charles Lohr and Evan Fletcher
Bad Apple in 65 Kilobytes

This is the story of how we compressed all 6,570 frames of the Bad Apple music video and all firmware right into a single 65kB binary that runs on a 13-cent RISC-V microcontroller. With growth spanning a decade, this venture has been an unbelievable expertise and we wished to share the good issues we realized alongside the best way, with all of the twists and turns that gave us deeper insights into the character of compression.

This speak will consist of assorted methods of compression, present trade-offs between alternative ways of storing, compressing and decompressing information, going into evaluating totally different lossless, and lossy compression mechanisms like LZSS, exponential-Golomb, Huffman timber, vary coding, and glyphs, in addition to the code wanted for performing decompression, with a give attention to embedded environments.

Johannes Wiig
The Terminal That Rings You Back: Resurrecting Sweden’s Failed Pre-Internet

Sweden’s videotex period ran from 1982 into the late Nineteen Nineties – Teledata, Datavision, Videotex, then TeleGuide, Televerket’s 2-billion-kronor reply to Minitel. When TeleGuide collapsed in 1993, the terminals went to landfill – besides a number of, which may now relive what they as soon as dreamt of. The community itself didn’t even die: it retreated into authorities service as Posten’s PostNet, quietly serving vehicle-registry lookups till the net completed it off round 1998. I’ve an unique PostNet good card. It nonetheless logs in – simply not the place you’d count on.

Thirty years later I tracked one down, refused to switch it, and rebuilt the globe round it as an alternative. The terminal now dials a contemporary AI agent as if it had been a interval videotex service. The bridge board can be on stage, dwell. You’ll depart realizing put any loop-powered telecom system again on a line you management, for about $40 in components.

Max Shirokawa
A Builder’s Guide to Developing Integrated Photonics

Integrated photonics is a comparatively nascent discipline of engineering and physics. In the final a number of years, it has grown quickly, largely as a result of utility of photonics inside the telecom sector. However, sensible facets and tacit data of the event course of are nonetheless obscure and sometimes deliberately stored secret in order that labs and foundries can higher protect their aggressive edge.

In this speak, I’ll describe a few of the much less well-known purposes of built-in photonics, give an outline of the foundry panorama for photonics, stroll by way of the essential growth cycle, and present a few of the outcomes from chips that we fabricated.

Through this speak, I purpose to unfold consciousness of what’s now doable with photonic circuits, and supply the viewers with some concepts as to how their optical methods may be capable to scale by integrating photonics in addition to the essential define of start that growth course of.

Joni Hendrickson
Itty Bitty Linux: Building NOMMU photos for MCUs with Yocto

Why don’t MCUs run Linux? The basic reply is that Linux requires the CPU to have a Memory Management Unit, or MMU, which provides each course of its personal digital tackle house. With an MMU, two applications can each consult with the identical reminiscence tackle and by no means collide, as a result of the MMU interprets every course of to totally different components of bodily reminiscence.

So, you possibly can’t run Linux on an MCU… besides there’s a “NOMMU” kernel config possibility?

In this speak, I’ll describe what I realized in my try to port Linux to the Teensy 4.1 microcontroller platform, and the way it differed from my previous experiences with RTOSes. This venture was the primary time I’ve labored with many of those applied sciences, and I’ll do my finest to elucidate every element in laypersons’ phrases.

Shannon Wu
Why We Should All Touch Grass More – A Beginner’s Guide to Using Nature as Engineering Inspiration

This speak explores how we will mimic rules of nature to give you options to our issues and the way engineering isn’t all math and science, however is stuffed with interdisciplinary concepts. It will use on a regular basis examples of nature in our lives to indicate how innovation is just hidden in plain sight.

Pongsagon Vichitvejpaisal
Designing Tiny ASIC GPUs

This speak particulars how I designed and fabricated a sequence of open-source customized ASIC GPUs. It will cowl the complete workflow: setting the specs, digital design in Verilog, FPGA testing, and fabrication through TinyTapeout. I may even clarify the architectural strategies used to squeeze a whole GPU pipeline right into a severely resource-constrained chip house.