Embedded - 126: Live From Supercon

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

Elecia went to Hackaday's SuperCon, got to announce the Hackaday Prize 2015 winners, then talked to the organizers about their conference. The guests this week were (in order of appearance): Amber Cunningham Dan Hienzsch (115: Datasheeps) Adam Fabio Brian Benchoff Aleksandar Bradic Sophi Kravitz (77: Goldfish, Fetch My Slippers! and 91: Save Us from Astronauts) Mike Szczys (69: Look at this Entire Aisle of Standoffs) Tamagotchi Hive Adam promised us a list of contributors to the goodie bag. Here it is! NFCRing.com OSHpark  Wicked Device Seeed Studio Pololu Parallax No Starch Press Microchip Nanomagnetics (http://nanodots.com/gyro.html) The Hackaday Store

Hello and welcome to Embedded FM. I'm Alicia White, on my own this week at the Hackaday Supercon. This is a weekend-long conference about hardware and low-level software, also about giving out the Hackaday Prize, which I got to do. It was amazing. The whole weekend was amazing. I'd planned to interview attendees and speakers, but after we gave out the prize, I wanted to talk more to the Hackaday folks. They put so much passion into all of this. So I lured the ones I could out to the car for a bit of quiet and asked how and why and when.

Here are the answers. My name is Amber Cunningham. I work for Supply Frame and Hackaday, specifically Tindy, which is our marketplace for makers where they put on projects that they make, such as if they make a board for their Arduino and they want to sell it, they can put it on the marketplace and then people can come and purchase it. Well, this is Tindy, Emil's Tindy that we heard about. Okay, cool. So you've been at the Supercon outside checking people in through rain and wind and not quite snow, but a lot of sun. How's that gone for you? Oh, it's been good. It's been really good. For the first part of the day, it was so busy that I didn't even notice that it was cold or really that windy. It was just meeting people and being excited and hearing the laughter and the excitement

inside and the music. Towards the end of the day, once the sun went down, it got a little chilly, but everybody was just super kind. People come out, ask if you'd like a coffee or something like that. So it's been really good. There's been a really, really good turnout. The last I checked, we had right at 200 attendees. And then that doesn't count volunteers or people that came

to speak or any of our team members. So I think there was almost about 300 people yesterday. So a lot of people to meet and greet. And did you get to attend anything? A little bit. I thought it was really important to have somebody outside to answer questions so people aren't feeling lost. I know that feeling in a conference when you look for somebody and you don't know where you're going. I peeked in on the awards ceremony a little bit. I had the door shut so that we could give some privacy so that everybody wouldn't be distracted. But I got to see a lot of that, which was really amazing. It was so cool. So cool.

Yeah, and super inspiring. I got to hear bits and pieces of little talks, and I'm really looking forward to watching some video later to kind of get the full feel of it. Oh, will the videos be online? I believe so, yes. We'll probably put them through Hackaday, and then I'll probably retweet them through Tindy.

And I did notice that they moved the question and answer so that it was essentially right in front of you when people come off the stage and want to talk more. Yes, yes. Have you gotten to check out any of those projects? Yeah, so we put that out there so that people weren't interrupting, you know, other talks or anything like that. So, yeah, it was supposed to be like 10 feet away and we could hear the question and answer in the new talk. So, it was great that they moved it. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And people were really excited.

And, you know, it gave more, it actually made it a little more intimate for people because they were right up on it and, you know, feeling things. And you didn't have to make a line. You could crowd around both sides of the table. Yeah, it was really exciting. And people would just, you know, even people were coming in and out. And maybe if they hadn't caught that that they were upstairs with a workshop or things like that, they could come down and they would catch a glimpse of it and, you know, look into

it on that. Well, and there were some of us out here yesterday where when it was sunny, we stood outside and chatted with each other. And then it was like the speakers came to us and redid their presentation. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I actually heard specifically from Paul when he was doing his audio with the Teensy. And he did his audio workshop. I heard that a lot because people were very, very interested in that. So I heard it several times while he was out and about. And it was really kind because it's difficult. Even myself, who is a huge talker, I talk all the time um by the end of

the day my voice was a little hoarse when I got home so I can't imagine you know when you have somebody that's been speaking all day at length with people um how everybody felt but everybody so far this morning has been super happy and excited um so it's been so I feel like it's been super successful I think so too. Well, I should let you get back before it gets too busy. Yeah. Thank you for speaking with me. Oh, no, thank you so much.

I'm Daniel Hinch and I work for parts.io. And what are you doing here at Supercon? At Supercon, I'm helping out generally getting the tables and chairs set up, things like that. I worked on putting together parts of the badge modding station that we have set up. And then also working at the Parts.io booth for people that are walking up wanting to know about the supply frame properties that are here. So this is a little confusing because there's supply frame and there's Hackaday and there's parts io and you know people out there are thinking well why would the parts io guy take out the trash at the hackaday conference well i i think i mean you're a nice guy and all but that seems above and beyond maybe but uh at

a conference this size uh and with with as many people that are here it you know you just got to keep your eye open and do what you can when you see something that needs to be done so i figure if the trash needs to be taken out and i've got a spare moment i'll take the trash out and then go back to the booth and wash my hands first have you gotten to see anything uh a little bit i've been over at the booth most of the time i saw the uh the interview interview with Grant Imahara last night that I thought went really, really well. I saw a little bit of the Tamagotchi singularity talk that was unique. Where he was simulating Tamagotchis and trying to bring about intelligence. That was weird and cool. It was probably the defining talk, I would say, for a Hackaday event right there. And then I got to say, I was really impressed with the badge modding station. I thought that there wouldn't be that much of a reception for us, but it was incredible to see what these people were putting together.

And they still have a little bit of time to do it this morning as well and i thought people would bring whatever they were going to do and then just glue it on and it wouldn't be that cool but people have been were over there for hours like detailed oh what's in the box i want to pick up all of the weird leds and see which one works best for it was just people were really into badge modding. There was, there was, there is a guy in there right now that has built a logic analyzer with his badge. He's got, he's got through hole potentiometer sticking out the side. He's got buttons on there so that you can change it from one, from, uh, from the frequency domain into something else. And then it'll display a Hackaday rolling logo across the face. I don't know where he got the parts, because I certainly think that he may have brought the display with him, but everything else was pretty much stuff that he picked up off the table,

and it is ridiculous to see what he was able to accomplish. It's pretty cool. How much did you have to do before the conference started? I mean, this whole conference was put together in what, six weeks? About, yeah. And you were not quite local, but more local than on what Parts.io was going to be doing here rather than the organizing of finding speakers or anything like that. That was more the Hackaday staff than anything I would have had anything to do with.

Have you been having a good time? I have. It's been an absolute blast. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of hard work. But the short little snips of the talks that I've been able to hear have all been remarkably interesting. Not just a little bit interesting, not just a, oh, well, that's an interesting project or anything, but it's a lot of really hardcore thought that's gone into a lot of these projects that the people have been talking about. So that's been really satisfying. I wish I could go to the workshops that are going on upstairs but there's just no time for it well those are solid hour and a half two hour things where you you

i mean i went to this back fun thing workshop and helped out there i mean people went from hardware in a baggie to controlling things with their phones. It was pretty cool. And they, all the installation stuff. And there was, of course the hard part is installing everything with Arduino. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was neat to see how far they got. And they had a, what, like two hour, like high CAD tutorial last night.

And then I think that's going on for another hour this morning. And then there's something about radio frequency stuff that's happening. It's just incredible stuff. This, that usually you go to a conference there's maybe one track that you're interested in and maybe two or three actual talks in that track that really that you want to attend and this one i i don't think i would have had time for if i was attending i would not have been on the show floor because i'd have been upstairs in every workshop. They are so cool. I mean, just standing outside and saying hello to people, you meet amazing folks. Yeah, absolutely.

You bump into people that you've seen projects for, you've read their blog two or three years ago, trying to find that one little tidbit of technical information to make your project work, and then they're standing next to you getting a bagel in the morning. Yeah. It's pretty ridiculous, yeah. It's been a lot of fun.

Yeah, I'd say so. Thank you for helping put it on. Absolutely. Thank you very much. My name's Adam Fabio. I'm the community editor at Hackaday.com and on Hackaday.io. And I'm also a hardware engineer, software, hardware, firmware engineer in my day job. And, you know, just try to keep the community going. So what have you been doing here at SuperCon?

So at SuperCon, I've been just helping to organize. My biggest job running up to SuperCon was getting the goodie bags together. We wanted to have goodie bags that, you know, the swag bags, goodie bags that had stuff people could use. The Open Source Hardware Summit has really pulled that off every year. And we wanted things, you know, like boards, either

Arduino boards or breakout boards that would be really, you know, useful to people rather than, you know, golf tees and doodads that people really, you know, they kind of go on the shelf and never get touched again. And I think we pulled that off. We had some help from companies like Pololu, Seed, Wicked Device, a whole host of companies. NFC Ring actually gave us a whole bunch of rings and it's been great. So not everybody got the same thing in their

goodie bags. Right. So one of the side effects of this was we got a lot of different products. And we'd have 20 of one part and 30 of another. And for the 250 or so attendees, everybody's bag was different. So it was kind of like when I made the speech at the beginning, I said, look to your left, look to your right. Everybody's got something different. Mix and match. Build something awesome with your pooled resources. And there was a book in there. There were a couple of books. There was the Omnibus, the Hackaday Omnibus, which is last year's Omnibus. The new one is about to come out this year, 2015. I'm looking at the one that I picked up already this morning.

Shh. No, it's pretty awesome. I'm a judge. I get to see it early. I've seen the new one. We've gotten a couple copies ourselves and it is incredible, the 2015 edition. Jo Kim is our artist and the cover art, just straight from the cover, is incredible and the stories inside.

I'm a little bit biased because I wrote a few of the stories but they're great. So um what also was in there was it's uh it's not rocket science which was a book microchip put in about some of their hardware modules that are included on their picks um no starch press also threw in um a number of books and vouchers that different people ended up with in their bags. Not everyone, of course. But yeah, there was some good reading material in there. And not just corporate swag.

What was your favorite thing? What goodie bag would you have made for yourself? What goodie bag would I have made for myself? Well, Lulu had the A-Star Micros in there. Seed had their Bluetooth shields. Wicked Device came up with some of their RGB, their Flick RGB

modules, which is basically a WS2812 breakout board. They actually gave us about 200 of those, which was really nice of them. I saw an EL board in there that I wanted, except I didn't know how to power it at the conference.

Yeah, well, no, Seed gave us the EL boards and the inverters. So I guess people would mix and match. I think some of the bags ended up with both, but one would have the inverter, others would have the ELs. So we were hoping people would mix and match. And I did see a few running yesterday, so people did get them together. Well, and the guy, I pawed through his bag because I didn't get one. Well, that's actually a problem with our success.

We originally started with an idea of 200 bags. We were going to have 200 attendees. But as Amber was saying, you have about 300 once you take into account the staff and the judges and the speakers. It ballooned up. Yeah. It's hard to say no, you can't come to our party. Right. So, I think that's a lesson. We're going to add that to our lessons learned database to get more than enough bags. Because the problem was once we all realized that we were going to have way more than 200 people just attending before we

even hit the speakers and the judges. Well, I couldn't go back and say, can we get another 50, 60 parts? It's hard to call up a company and beg for stuff. Actually, even saying I'm from Hackaday, it takes a little bit to actually call them up and say, yeah, can you send us a few hundred pieces of something? And not pens. We want actual product that you could be making money selling. And I really, I do have to thank everyone. I'll give you the full list. There was about 10 different companies that helped us out. Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes. Thank you. give you the full list there was about 10 different companies that uh that helped us out yeah i'll put it in the show notes thank you well have you gotten to see anything at the conference or have you been so busy being staff that you had to miss it i am lucky enough that actually at the conference

i am doing a lot of photography and videography um of the crowd which kind of has afforded me a chance to see some of the cool hacks people have brought. There's an incredible sign, LED matrix sign, that's running Conway's life that's in the side. That's what it's doing. Yes. And he's seeding it with the word Hackaday. Yeah.

So every 20 seconds or so, Hackaday pops up and then it breaks out into life, which is awesome. Sarah Petkus was one of our speakers. She brought her noodle robot. So that was, I haven't seen it walk around yet, but that's one of her creations. So she did the Robot Army Kickstarter that was successful. Oh, that was neat. Yes.

And she's one of our writers from time to time as well. Thank you for speaking with me thanks a lot so i'm brian i write for hackaday and yeah that's about it um i hate talking about myself all right all right okay now we've got the super con super con is um this is our second go at it well technically our first but um it's the conference for the hackaday prize event thing and we have a bunch of really cool people here that is mostly about hardware which you don't really get much of anywhere but yeah you get it somewhere but um yeah so it's just people building hardware and showing it off

so what have you seen that's been cool um so sprites tamagotchi is probably the best tamagotchi singularity we heard a little bit about that so that was his this is his second um talk he's given for us last year it was a mechanical keyboard that he played Snake on. All the keys light up. So I think it was a Oh. Like a typewriter? No, a mechanical keyboard. So with like

mechanical key switches. Oh, that's a thing, by the way. So I write which means I have a keyboard. I have several keyboards that I spent like $200 on. Yeah, because what? That's your tool. That's your tool. So his keyboard has mechanical key switches and LEDs in the back of them. And just standard firmware. I think it was a Cooler Master keyboard. And he reprogrammed firmware to make the LEDs a display.

So now he can play Snake, like the Nokia old brick phone Snake, on his keyboard using just the LEDs. Does he end up typing gibberish or has he convinced the computer to teach him how to type this way? Oh no, he just uses the arrow keys and the rest of the keyboard is just a display so oh see i'd want to you know if the snake is heading for the letter k i push k and he has to turn around yeah all right all right so yeah so let's get past here okay yeah what else have you seen um the badge hacking badge hacking is spectacular they have significantly outperformed our wildest expectations there's a somebody's building an am transceiver on their badge out of components found on the table yeah and the thing is this badge is not meant to do that because... They aren't that big.

Well, no, and it's not standard in any way. So the pads are not 0.1 inch, okay? A little surface mount on the back, that's all crazy. Why were you selling it? What? I guess it was Chris Gamble who was mean, wasn't it? Well, he didn't make... Okay, he published a picture, okay? And it's like, oh, there's a bunch of holes.

That's probably standard, right? You would think, right? I would think, yes. Yeah, but no, it's like 2.52... Yeah, it's bizarre. Yeah, but the badge hacking is, that's actually really impressive. AM transceivers are pretty cool. Yeah.

So the Hackaday Omnibus came out, and I stole a copy with permission. What's in there that's cool this year? So that's our best, it's actually a mix, which it shouldn't get the Omnibus name, but it's actually a mix of our best content from 2015. Yeah, that's just here. And some new stuff. So Sarah Pectus, she is giving a talk sometime this afternoon and she did. Noodle Robot. The Noodle Robot.

And she did a piece on art robots. So robots that draw art. On their own or with help? Is this like the watercolor buff that EMSL makes? Or is this they design their own art? They design their own art. So robots that make their own art. Yeah.

So we have new stuff. We have have the old stuff oh yeah oh we have my um uh april fool's day post in there what did you do for april okay so um about three weeks before april fools i was driving 10 hours to the middle of indiana around when I hit Pittsburgh, I thought, you know what would be cool is if Raspberry Pi got into wearables. So, you know what they should make? A Raspberry Beret. That's terrible. That is really, that is hilarious.

I got, yeah. I love it. Yeah, yeah. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm impressed with that. And why didn't Raspberry Pi play along? No, they did. Oh, they did? They did.

Yeah. We emailed them before that, before that went out. It's like, oh man. I think there was a, oh man, we should have thought of that. And did people, were people annoyed when it turned out? It's an Aprilil fool's day post so when my april fool's day podcast went people hate it well okay some of you actually listened to the whole thing and liked it yeah but for the most part if you say what was the worst episode it's like the freaking cat okay so don't interview your cat for paper because I don't think that would work either.

What are you looking forward to today? Today? At the conference. Okay. So we have Fran, which I haven't seen and she wasn't here yesterday, but apparently she's giving a talk today, I hope. But she'll be here about old technology. Yeah, she's giving a talk today i hope but um she'll be here about old technology um yeah she's she's great she was on the show not too long ago so yeah yeah i totally agree yeah yeah so she yeah so the she designed the um big muff pie the one in like 2000 ish the one that everybody has so yeah and now she's doing

manufacturing for guitar effects pedals so she's getting back into that very cool stuff noah freehand will be talking later i think he's talking after i leave so that's sort of sad when are you leaving it's the rain and travel and I have to go home before the water melts me. I'm made of sugar. Okay. Who else we got?

Yeah, the noodle robots. Giving a talk? Alvaro's giving a talk about robots and lasers. Robots and lasers. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that. I'm wearing dark glasses

for that talk. Okay. Oh, what else? There's so much. I didn't, yeah. You didn't read the schedule, did you? Admit it. I did, like five minutes ago, so. Or you just need a lot more coffee. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, we should go plan our day. Yes. Thank you for speaking with me. Yes, thank you. So my name is Alexander Braddock. I'm a CTO at SupplyFrame, which is a parent company of Hackaday, but also I'm like a contributor at large for Hackaday doing video stuff and just long-form stuff, things like that.

Yeah, my background is in computer science. Professionally, most of my time is in e in computer science professionally most of my time is you know in the computer science on the computer science side of things but you know most of my passion and free time goes to hackaday and everything that we're doing so what have you been doing here at supercon um mostly just sitting behind the av boot uh and then uh you know playing the uh you know i kind of feel now i know what it feels like to like around a morning show it's like oh now to camera one and now to camera two so it's basically just trying to coordinate all the videos and we ended up we ended up recording you ended up doing a bunch of

like original video stuff so trying to mix that in and to get a little bit of more of a nicer feel you know to the to the whole thing. So just coordinating video stuff. What has been your favorite part? Favorite part for me or for the conference? Favorite part of being at the conference. Just really a feeling that we are doing something that probably wouldn't have happened if we haven't done it. Because, you know, I come from, like,

open source background, the 90s, Linux, embedded development, stuff like that. And there was a lot of salt to everything that we were doing. And I feel like a lot of that has been lost over time with the kind of events that are happening right now. So our core idea behind the SuperCon, when Sophie and I were just goofing around two months ago, obviously, we were not big on planning was you know let's try to you know make something that

that carries that spirit of like really you know like the the even though like the technology today is everywhere and it doesn't feel as special as it was you know as it felt maybe 20 years ago you know just bring a little bit of that magic back. And then, you know, just having spent the whole day and, you know, feeling some of that, even though, you know, I was busy with stuff, it really makes me feel great. It's just like we did something. What's been your favorite talk so far? You know, I have to be honest.

Like, you know, most of my, I didn't get a chance to focus on any talk just because it was more like just trying to coordinate things between the videos. But I was really excited about Shani's talk, like the first talk. That was amazing. And I was just really trying to get as much of it as I can. That was the one about quantum entanglement, right?

Yeah. And I'm just going to end up when I go home tomorrow, start watching all the videos and then uh but yeah i think her talk was amazing what was the hardest part to organize um well you know just trying to do this whole thing on a two months notice uh or less but it's kind of my fault that you know we know it went like that so and but that wasn't you know for me it's a motivator so we kind of had to crank out a whole bunch so i did all the video stuff you know we worked on you know some other audio stuff i did

all the poster design things like that so it's like every day trying to crank you know some things out and and it was it was a lot of work but it wasn't hard so for me it was just all very positive how important is hackaday to supply frame i i would say that really you know like you know when we acquired hackaday it was more like well we love hackaday and you know we think that you know maybe you know we can do something special with it and there wasn't a plan at that point but i think really over time it evolved to become like a core dna of what supplyame is you know so everyone in the company is you know like so it's not like we own

Hackaday as sort of like a you know just a company we you know really feel just Hackaday being a part of you know what we all do as a part of our job that's just about passion and not necessarily very commercial.

And, you know, we, yeah. So, you know, kind of moving forward, I think it's really that. Because, for example, if you look at this event, you know, there are like over 15, 20 people from SupplyFrame that were really working hard on doing this, and they were working on this in their spare time.

It wasn't like, oh, this is your job now, let's go do this, because, you know, all this stuff is not for profit. Because the rest of the jobs just continued being jobs. Well, you know, I think the other stuff that we do is also very interesting for us, but this is the passion part. So yeah, I think that's the plan moving forward as well.

You said it, the soul of embedded systems. I feel like sometimes Hackaday is part of the soul of supply frame yeah no i mean just i mean like literally i would say that you know maybe a couple of years ago supply frame was more like a structured company really organized towards and it is you know oriented toward businesses and you know kind of very serious uh and and what really happened is like everyone just somehow i mean a lot of people that we have in the company are like you know very artistic or like very rebellious and you know people with like punk rock backgrounds or stuff like that you know people that are anti-establishment

and everyone felt that like hackaday you know gives permission for people to bring a little bit of that you know teenage riot you know in in them so yeah i think it was it was oh i get to do this and it's sort of you know part of work as well so yeah it's really cool i'm really like i mean i would say like professionally the last couple of years have been really you know the most amazing years of my life so uh so i'm really happy that's fantastic i was especially like last year since sophie joined like that. That's just been... It's nice to have another crazy person. You know Sophie may listen to this, right?

Yeah, of course. Hi, Sophie. Another crazy person. In a good way. In a good way, yes. I do see that part of her sometimes. What are we going to look at for next year? As far as conferences or Hackaday Prize? Sure.

Yeah, so I would say like for the Supercon, I think this has been amazing. And, you know, we're just going to make it a regular event. Although, you know, we're very spontaneous in everything that we're doing. So I don't see this becoming like, oh, now we're you know getting into this year ahead planning cycle getting very structured I'm sorry we're gonna come up with some other you know craziness along the way to add more pressure Sophie was like this morning oh we should do this next year in another city and I was like no that's you know starting everything from the beginning so I don't know but definitely like this this has been amazing and I think, you know, starting everything from the beginning. So I don't know. But definitely, like, this has been amazing.

And I think especially, you know, when we started talking about SuperCon, I was, you know, what I was really, you know, like, thinking as a team is something between, like, a DEF CON and a research conference. And really something that has a really high quality of talks and, you know, almost at the research level or anything that's just, you know, not very generic, that talk is, or something like that, but stuff that has an edge.

And I was really excited about how many people submitted proposals for talks and how awesome they are. So we are definitely doing this, again, just because of that. I think also Hackaday Prize. We're always, again, Hackaday Prize as well just started very spontaneous. There wasn't a lot of planning, you know, from the... Well, there was a big enough cash prize that there had to be a little bit of planning.

Like who's going to pay for this? Yeah, yeah. So this year, you know, definitely there was, you know, but, you know, the year before we were like, oh, we're just going to, you know, like supply front doesn't spend, you know, like, you know, we were like, well, we could probably afford this. Let's just do this and figure out what happens. So like that from the idea to launch, was less than two months. Like, really no planning. This year, we knew that we were going to do it. So there was planning, and we found sponsors and all that stuff.

What's going to happen next year? We don't know. We are evolving the thesis of what this is and what's the most valuable thing to do. But we're definitely going to do it again next year. So probably some new ideas, again, are going to kick in. And then for SupplyFrame, you know, we are really professionally, what I'm really, you know, kind of passionate about is, you know, like the core of the technology side of SupplyFrame,

we are really, you know, we are all, in the essence, computer science, you know, geeks that are, you know, like most of us have EE backgrounds. And, you know, some people have worked in EE and all that. But, you know, just our core competence is computer science, you know, geeks that are, you know, like most of us have EE backgrounds and, you know, some people have worked in EE and all that, but, you know, just our core competence is computer science and, you know, computer scientists, they always feel like they're, you know, like, oh, we can solve all the world's problems and all that. So when we really look at, you know, the domain of engineering, you know, there really feels that there are a lot of things that can be just made better by being smarter about a data search, things like that. Just, you know, like general problems that computer scientists are good at, you know, we can build better by being smarter about the data search, things like that. General

problems that computer scientists are good at, we can build tools that really help move engineering a little bit. It's still not the core of what the work is, but for me, it's really about how do you enable everyone to make smarter decisions

when it comes to design, purchasing, stuff like that. To me, the key question is that always, am I making the best possible decision right now? And, you know, as a computer scientist, when I see that space, I see, oh, well, you know, there's no one can go and read all the data sheets about all the components, you know, and no one can go and meet all the people when it comes to supply chain and all that. So there are things that, you know, we can do to really just help people be smarter about how to do these things. And I think hardware hasn't really fundamentally changed

when it comes to supply chain, when it comes to design and stuff like that. It's been... A lot of things have been running the same way for the last couple of decades. And some of those things are... There's a potential for them to change. And so our mission is more like, oh, what can we do to help that change just a little bit?

And I think by, you know, making everyone smarter, by making everyone more, like, building tools that, for example, make engineers more aware of, like, you know, how their decisions relate to, like, purchasing and supply chain and stuff like that. You know, the electronics industry is very siloed. And then people are just like, I don't care what the other person is doing. But, you know, because, you know, you have to do that. But I think if you build better tools, people can start caring more about, you know, how end-to-end impact of what they're doing. And, you know, maybe over time that can do something. So, you know, Partsio has definitely been a, you know, a thing that we've been working on.

And I think, you know, really getting into next year, you know, Partsio has definitely been a, you know, a thing that we've been working on. And I think, you know, really getting into next year, you know, we're really trying to figure out, Partsio was more around the search for individual components. How do we really provide more intelligence around building materials and, you know, just everything that flows from there? So there are a couple of products that we're working on. Well, I hope that all works out because I have quite enjoyed the Hackaday Prize

and helping give out all that money. It's really fun. I think it's good incentive and I'm really happy that, you know, it really goes to a good use. So like last year, so it wasn't about like just here's money to someone and someone cashes out and, you know, go for like a big vacation. Like, you know, SatNox guys, they took it and they they invested in you know um non-profit to help support a project i think this year's prize also went to like a an amazing i don't think they're gonna go to space although i bet they want to right i do think that they're that money is gonna go someplace really useful right right and and and that's really it's gonna change a lot of lives. Exactly, exactly. So cool.

And that's so exciting. So I kind of hope it continues to have that theme. All right. Well, thank you so much for talking to me. Sure. Thanks so much. I'm here with Sophie Kravitz, who's been a guest a few times, but now we're going to talk about the Superconference. How's it going? It's going awesome. Why are we at a Super Conference? How did this start? We were going to make a party for the Hackaday Prize Awards, the award ceremony.

This was the culmination of the competition, nine months of competition. So we would naturally have a party, and then we thought, let's do a conference. But you did this not very long ago. I mean, oftentimes, like for the sensors conference, they just closed the proposals last month in October for a conference that's not happening until June. The people take too long to do stuff. They really do. They really do. Yeah. If you wait till last minute, it only takes a minute. That's exactly right. When did you start planning for the conference?

About six weeks ago. And then it was like, go. We put out a call for proposals within a day. And we had 147 responses. Crazy, right? And yet you only had, what 35 slots yep we didn't even know how many slots we had because we just put the call out just to get it going and then we started doing the schedule yeah yeah i heard some people didn't know when they were talking until late last week i mean yes you've been accepted you'll be speaking at some point well you also don't know if you're

going to have no shows yeah we by design chose a lot of people who were first-time speakers. So you don't, I mean, if someone is not a practiced speaker, or they don't have a track record, so you don't know if they're going to be reliable or not. So far, we haven't had any no-shows. We had one cancellation. And I don't actually want to talk about that, but... That's fine.

Yeah. Why? Why go with first-time speakers I mean that seems scary no it's actually really awesome there's plenty of people in our community that are doing really amazing things and they don't normally speak so no one knows about them so this is an opportunity for people to talk about the things they're excited about and first-time speakers as I found, made a lot of extra effort. There were a lot of people talking about how they were preparing to speak on Facebook,

on Twitter. Two people developed their talks out on Hackaday.io so that people could comment on what they were planning on saying. what did you see yesterday that you liked what was your favorite part of the conference yesterday just the organizing of how well everything went I was doing a lot of emceeing for a while I was up on stage for about six hours so I felt pretty tired by the end. It was pretty awesome, like, seeing all these people come together. The last talk, Sprite's talk, that was fantastic about the Tamagotchi. This is the Tamagotchi one. Everybody has talked about the Tamagotchi one.

It was so good. And then doing the fireside chat with Grant Imahara, that was really fun. Really fun, actually. He is a very interesting person. And I thought he would, you know, blow in, do the talk, and go away. But he stayed. He stayed, yeah. He stayed and hung out for quite a while.

And people were really interested in talking to him. And yeah, it was good. I got a picture of him and holding my little torn apart BB-8. It was great. Aw, that's cool. Yeah, he said a lot of really interesting things too about robotics. I actually asked him if we would do it again and talk some more about that stuff. Well, I asked him to be on my show, but-

What did he say? Maybe. Maybe. Be cool. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. So are you already planning next year's Hackaday Prize? No, but I know that there is going to be one. We have decided that there will be one. Well, that is a step and a step in the right direction. Yes.

Are you happy with how this year's Hackaday Prize went? Very happy. And the winner? Happy with that? Super happy. That has been my favorite project from the beginning. The video they sent, I mean, because iDrivematic couldn't be at the conference, they not only developed the technology, they have Lou Gehrig, so they really couldn't travel. No.

But they made this video, and it was awesome. I know. It was a really good video yeah the whole whole thing was amazing and a little tear jerky and a little look we're getting all teary now but the whole thing was every time i'm gonna whine about you know how hard my job is. Like, yeah, I have all these wonderful abilities to type and not have to worry about these things. They got a lot done. Yeah, they really did. And I thought they have Patrick Joyce, who is the contact, the person that I spoke with the most, he has an amazingly positive attitude. It's really inspiring. I mean, I had the opportunity to have some chats with him online and we Skyped a little bit and he just has a very great attitude for something really

terrible that happens to you because it happened. I don't know how old he is, but I don't think he's even 40. And it's degenerative. So, you so you know it's getting worse he only has his eyes yeah he says in his profile that he has the use of his eyes and one finger still um so for listeners what we're talking about is als uh as alicia said lou gehrig's. And so that's the same thing that Stephen Hawking has. And so Stephen Hawking, from his Wikipedia page, I read up on it, he has something that's really rare because he's living past 70. So not only it's terminal as well as losing every motion in your body. It's heartbreaking.

Irmae gave some of that motion back. And that lack of motion is not just that disease. They did build something that matters. They really did. I mean, quadriplegics. It's like anyone who loses their independence due to some kind of terrible accident or being born that way who can't control where they go. Yeah. It's amazing.

Do you have any hints for us for next year's Hackaday Prize? It's going to be a shorter run. This time we did nine months. I think next time, ideally we would do it maybe five months or six months. Because you want like a couple of months off to recover? There will be, we won't be launching.

Alicia, we're not launching tomorrow sophie are you a little tired is that why you're taking a break there will be a break we won't be launching until next year yeah but i think we as um a community tend to be very good procrastinators and so it doesn't help to drag it out. Kind of like the Supercon. We put it together in six weeks. And it's going well. Yes.

And it's fine. So we could shorten the prize run and not have people procrastinating for three months. All right. Well, that's good to know. No offense to those of you who you know we're fascinated right what are you looking forward today at the conference you can say 5 30 i understand yeah it'll be it's been a long weekend it has been a really long

weekend i'm who i'm looking looking forward to many of the talks. And I can't actually even think of who is speaking today. But since I had a hand in putting together the schedule, every single person that's on there was in some way I wanted them to be there. There were five of us that did the choose. Oh, the power. Yeah, well, five people together chose who was going to be there. So, yeah. You've done a lot of traveling for Hackaday in the last year,

all over the world, really. Yeah. Is that going to continue? Are you guys going to travel some more next year? Yes. Very cool. Any particular destinations? On my wish list is, Hackaday or Supply Frame actually has a branch in Belgrade. So that's on my wish list. And I think we will probably make that happen. Also on my wish list is going to India. India is huge. So I'm not sure where we would go.

I'd like to go to the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. I'm sure I'll be in San Francisco and L.A. a lot. That's, you know, boring. There's just so much Hackaday here already. Right, right. New York City, which there isn't enough Hackaday in my opinion, but that's my home. So, you know, there.

I'm surprised that London is not on your list it'd be kind of fun to go visit the iDrive guys actually going to London is always on my list but London is very close to New York so I guess I just didn't think of it because it's not that exotic oh yeah backyard you know it's it's actually closer to get to London than it is for me to get to San Francisco. Well, next time we can meet there. Sure, sure, sure. All right. Well, I know you are very busy today, so I should let you go.

Okay. Unless you have anything else you'd like to add? Nope, I'm good. All right. Thank you for speaking with me. Thanks, Lucia. I think it's amazing how many people came and like stayed the entire day. It was packed and we had speaker after speaker after speaker, which you would think would wear people down. But at least from my point of view, there was so much variety on the speakers and they were so prepared and that it was just enthralling and fascinating all day. It was. And I'm glad I pushed record and got that, but maybe we should start with your name.

My name is Mike Stish. I'm managing editor of Hackaday.com. And what was the impetus for the Supercon? You know, we've kind of been on this path, this slow drumbeat of building up our ability to get the Hackaday community to come out of their labs and workshops and get together. And so if you look back about a year ago now, we had the 10th anniversary of Hackaday in Los Angeles, and we did a mini conference, which was like three workshops in the morning, maybe a half a dozen talks in the afternoon. And that was another situation where it was like standing room only, people stayed the whole day. It was really wonderful. We did similar in munich to announce the hackaday prize last year and then this year

with sponsors coming out for the hackaday prize we were able to travel a ton to all kinds of different cities around and we just see every single time we add something that has interest to engineers interest to people actually building hardware we get more and more people coming out and they're like fanatical about bringing their projects and talking about what's going on. So it really seems like the natural path is we need to do a conference. And I think we're just very fortunate that we have a pretty small team. We did the organization, but it's really the Hackaday community that brought the talent, people that were presenting, people that were doing lightning talks, showing off their projects, volunteering. And that's really what has made it a success for us.

How many people applied to talk? I want to say we had 160 applications for presentations. That might be off by a little bit, but it's right in that between one and 200 range there. That's a lot more slots than you had available because all along I knew it was only going to be a weekend and there was only going to be a couple of tracks. So we have one track in the upstairs, which is workshops that have been going both days. And we actually sold, because there's a limited number of seats and materials, we actually sold tickets. Some of them were free, some of them were low cost, $16 or $64, depending on what the materials were. And on the main floor, we have room for a few hundred people for the talks, and there was just a single talk track.

So if you wanted to hear all the speakers, you can, which I think is really nice. Sometimes you go to very large conferences, and if you're trying to just decide talks on the titles, it can be difficult. But it did limit us. We only have about 30 plus workshops and talks. And where that's limiting is who you can invite to the conference. But we do have all of those talk proposals. And we're going to be in touch with the people that submitted them, but we weren't able to invite. And I'm hoping, I'm fairly certain there's going to be opportunities to involve them in the future. So do you think you're going to spread the Supercon around the country? Or what are the plans for the next Supercon? Or should we finish this one first?

Well, actually, I have been saying, once we got going yesterday, I said, we should really think about what it's going to take to clean this up because it's running so well, we probably won't have to do anything the rest of the weekend. I mean, really, our group of Hackaday. And your group just sort of killed you at that point? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I saw them. They were pretty busy.

They were pretty busy. But the thing is, the Hackaday community are not passive conference goers. Anytime things needed doing, people just jumped up and helped out with it. And so really the staffing part of it is just people knowing what's going on, what's next, and then asking for help when they needed it. And it's been really wonderful that way. Sophie Kravitz and Chris Gamow really killed themselves making sure that this was well planned. And I know they were nervous about the level of planning coming into it. But anyone you talk to is going to say that things are going unbelievably smoothly. And it's because of the work that the two of them did with the help of the rest of the

Hackaday crew. Well, and the community has been pretty supportive too. I noted you got a lot more volunteers than you had space to use. Yeah, but I think that's perfect, right? Nobody wants to go and volunteer for something and be occupied the entire time that they're at the event. So, you know, the volunteers get t-shirts that are volunteer t-shirts only. They get into the event for free. And then it's, you know, maybe depending on who you are, 25 to 50% of your time is spent actually doing something. And the rest you're just attending and enjoying the festivities. Well, then a lot of people are more comfortable if they have a job. And then they can be part of the conference but also have a job to do at the conference.

Yeah. So I think the volunteering was a good experience for a lot of people. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. So what has been your favorite part of the conference so far? Jeroen's talk was my favorite. This was the time I got you. This was really popular. I was only there for a few minutes so i'm sort of oh you missed a great one but the nice thing is um we didn't have you asked before about you know we're going to spread the super con around to different parts of the world so we did a one-day um event in munich last year to announce the hackaday prize and um most of our

team is based yep at electronica most of our team is based in the United States. And so planning a conference from that far away is really tough. We didn't end up getting a lot of it recorded and up on the internet. And that was really sad because it was extremely special. And that was the first time that Jeroen gave a talk right before the Hackaday Prize for 2014 was announced. And he brought the house down with that one as well. And I think he topped himself this year. So he built what's called the Tamagotchi singularity.

He kind of reverse engineered what the hardware was for Tamagotchi and emulated it. it and then wrote some AI and networking connecting software that allows him to make an unlimited number of instances of Tamagotchi and then put it up on a server and let it go. And, and, you know, it did its thing and that was a really amazing hack. And I thought the talk was done. And then he said, Oh, by the way, I figured since it's a hardware conference, I should build something. So he got the original Tamagotchi, reverse engineered that, added Wi-Fi to it, and made it so he can view any of his virtual Tamagotchi on the one handheld unit. A spectacular hack. We got it on great cameras that we were able to rent. Rich Hogben has been wonderful. He's one of the team members that works on Hackadata.io and Parts.io and some of the other supply frame sites and is a great filmmaker and he's doing a wonderful job as a videographer this weekend. And so this will all be online?

Absolutely, yes. We've been recording all of the talks. It's a little more difficult to record the workshops because the workshops are hands-on and it's not a full presentation. And there was a lot of movement. There was a camera there for the SparkFun thing. I went to that one. Yeah, so we had cameras up there. I'm not sure what's going to come out of that, but I expect the talks to be spectacular. We've done multiple redundancies, so actually I have three cameras and a couple of different audio recordings, and it's just a matter of editing it all together. So talking about videos, the videos you put together for the prize announcement, did you do those? I did do those, yes. Those were fantastic. Thank

you. So, uh, you know, if you're going to give away a big prize and you have hundreds of people that have entered, I think we had over 900 this year. We came down to two sets of 10 finalists, 10 best product finalists and 10 Hackaday prize finalists. You want to give the audience an overview of who it is that's up for these amazing awards, a trip to space, $100,000, several other major prizes. So we're so fortunate that we have great judges who are volunteering their time and talent. And I hope we didn't take up too much of that because after they spent tens of hours judging in each round, then we asked them to do video interviews about what they saw. And so I worked on splicing together the judges' thoughts on each entry. Yeah, and I liked that. And Lenore, I heard her say that she was surprised

how well it went together, what she was saying with what the contestant was saying, and it just flowed nicely. You did a good job on that. Thank you. Oh, I think a big part of that is the good documentation from the contestant was saying, and it just flowed nicely. You did a good job on that. Thank you. I think a big part of that is the good documentation from the contestant's part. So Lenore and the other judges were able to really understand what was going on and make informed decisions based on that. So when you go and interview them about their experience, they are experts on the projects, and I think that is who should be in the finals, the ones that have the best documentation.

One of the biggest parts of the Hackaday Prize is promoting open design. Do you have ideas for where the next prize will be? Because I do. As in what the winner of next year will receive? Or what the build challenge will be? The build challenge. Well, I want to hear your build challenge because, you know, we just gave the award away last night, which means today we need to start planning for next year i want a have you seen robot or not no okay so it's this podcast it's usually just a couple of minutes and they bring in a thing is this a robot or not um and so like the uh the Mars rover.

One of them says, yes, it is a robot because it has intelligence on board. The other says, no, it's just remote control. Remote control is not robot. So with that in mind, I think that the next competition should be build a sensor that does something about what it senses. So build intelligence not just is there a gas here but i want to do something about it and i recognize a lot of people are going to be notify somebody is the do something about it but i want more i want since the soil needs water turn on the water build the intelligence into the system well now that's an interesting thing too because where do you put the line there so you can say to yourself like the nest thermostat is

obviously qualifies as intelligent thing because it detects that you're walking up and down the hall and then it learns your schedules from that and does predictive work with it if you had a thermostat that that had a pir sensor and just detected you walking up and down the hall, but didn't do predictive things, would it qualify? Well, if it also turned off your heater when you weren't there, then maybe it would qualify. But, I mean, the connected challenge, that was very, did it qualify? Last year, you know, well, what does it have to connect to? What kind of connections does it have to use? And is USB to a computer enough? Is that connected? So this would be another, there is no perfect definition, but you can look at it and say, oh yeah, that is,

yeah, that does something with what it has. Yeah, I think that's great advice. And it's interesting to talk about the 2014 Hackaday Prize, which was build something that's a connected device, and the 2015 Hackaday Prize, which is build something that matters. Asking someone to solve a problem that a lot of people face is not very constrained. And I think engineering often needs constraints. It was too hard. I mean, build something connected. As a judge, I could think of five projects I could build that would fit that, and maybe they wouldn't be great, but I had lots of ideas. Build something that matters. I kept thinking of ideas,

and then it was too big. And so I felt a little bad for some of the contestants because they, I mean, they did a great job and the winner oh i'm that was so fantastic but i couldn't i didn't feel like i could have participated very well this year sure so the winner was um i drive o matic which is an add-on a non-invasive add-on for powered wheelchairs that lets people drive them with their eyes using eye gaze which is existing software computer like Stephen Hawking's uses to speak and it's very important because a lot of times powered wheelchairs are rented they're not owned and so you can't modify them permanently and I also think it was very well executed. iDrive-O-Matic is very extensible.

So you can, if you have someone else that has another challenge, doesn't need to use the eye gaze, you can still adapt the way that the chair is controlled to that. So in the end, we really got a lot of great results. I think the problem with the challenge being a little not very constrained happened at the beginning. So like you said, you start to think of ideas and then you kind of like self-eliminate yourself because you're like, that's too much. And so that's something we'll definitely look at. One of the things that I think I would like to see us do in the future is get even better at connecting people into teams. Because the problem when you say, okay, that thing's too big, the problem is it's too big for me to do this by myself. And so we started like the hacker chat channel. We had like weekly

meetings where people could come in and ask questions about their projects and things that they're building. And we had a lot of hackers get together and start working on projects, whether they were at the Hackaday Prize or not. And I think if we can do a better job picking the constraints, but then also helping the community find other people to be teammates, to encourage each other. And when you get a little discouraged, someone else cheering you up can really get you over that hump and take you to the finish line. So expect that for next year. All right, I can do that. What are you looking forward to today for the conference? Well, I am giving a talk on the editorial voice of Hackaday.

And I've been thinking about it for a long time, but I didn't actually make a deck. So this morning I woke up and went, oh, oh. And then it was one of those things where I was like, I don't know if I can do this in time. And it came together. And so I'm kind of excited about that. And I think the thing that makes me excited is... You didn't have to say the editorial voice of Hackaday doesn't involve PowerPoint. Well, it never involves PowerPoint because I am open source only. So it's LibreOffice and Press for me. But I get really energized when I look... It's so easy to just say, okay, I have a deadline coming up because we publish something every three hours or more.

So there's always a deadline. But when you actually stop and look back at the work that so many people are doing really at a high level, I mean, everybody that works on Hackaday projects does a million things and wears a million different hats, things they weren't trained for, but things they're really passionate about. And when you look back and see that come together, it gives you like faith in humanity. And then to have the Hackaday community be so welcoming to things like the Super Conference, or we're about to release the Omnibus Volume 2, which is a print edition of Hackaday. And it has great art from Joe Kim in it. And people really loved it last year. It's going to be a lot bigger this year. All the time, the evenings and the weekends and moderating comments and scheduling posts and doing that sort of thing, just it is so worth it for what I see happening on the ground here. I think that's a good place to end it.

Thank you so much for speaking with me, Mike. Well, thank you, Alicia. I appreciate the opportunity. Well, that covers it. It doesn't cover all the supply frame and Hackaday folks who put it together. I couldn't get to talk to everyone. They were busy throwing a conference.

Chris Gamble was on stage, I'm seeing. Jasmine did an awesome job but wanted to stay in a conference. Chris Gamble was on stage, I'm seeing. Jasmine did an awesome job but wanted to stay in the background. Matt Bergeron will get his own entire show soon. And there were more. Plus whoever had to get that throwy down from the second floor duct. Sorry about that. Chris Gamble already admonished me about it, which was pretty hilarious. I wish I'd recorded that. Anyway, thank you to Hackaday for inviting me to be part of the festivities, and thank you to Christopher White for editing and producing all these tracks together, unless he makes me do it, in which case, not thank you. At least this time it wasn't on the show floor. And thank you to you. I got to meet many listeners this weekend, and I really enjoyed that.

Even when I get all weird and awkward, I like knowing you're out there, maybe getting a little bit out of what we share. So that's enough mushy stuff. Until next week, a C.S. Lewis quote. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed, your reward usually is to do another, and a harder and better one.