2024 Hackaday Superconference

20 Articles

Supercon 2024: Repurposing ESP32 Based Commercial Products

June 10, 2025 by 4 Comments

It’s easy to think of commercial products as black boxes, built with proprietary hardware that’s locked down from the factory. However, that’s not always the case. A great many companies are now turning out commercial products that rely on the very same microcontrollers that hackers and makers use on the regular, making them far more accessible for the end user to peek inside and poke around a bit.

Jim Scarletta has been doing just that with a wide variety of off-the-shelf gear. He came down to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to tell us all about how you can repurpose ESP32-based commercial products.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: Repurposing ESP32 Based Commercial Products” →

Supercon 2024: From Consultant To Prototyper On A Shoestring Budget

June 5, 2025 by 10 Comments

Many engineers graduate from their studies and head out into the workforce, seeking a paycheck and a project at some existing company or other. Often, it’s not long before an experienced engineer begins to contemplate striking out on their own, working as a skilled gun-for-hire that makes their own money and their own hours.

It’s a daunting leap, but with the promise of rich rewards for those that stick the landing. That very leap is one that our own Dave Rowntree made. He came to Supercon 2024 to tell us what the journey was like, and how he wound up working on some very special shoes.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: From Consultant To Prototyper On A Shoestring Budget” →

Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions

June 3, 2025 by 10 Comments

You turn the dial on your radio, and hear a powerful source of interference crackle in over the baseline noise. You’re interested as to where it might be coming from. You’re receiving it well, and the signal strength is strong, but is that because it’s close or just particularly powerful? What could it be? How would you even go about tracking it down?

When it comes to hunting down radio transmissions, Justin McAllister and Nick Foster have a great deal of experience in this regard. They came down to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to show us how it’s done.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions” →

Supercon 2024: Using An Oscilloscope To Peek Below The Noise Floor

May 28, 2025 by 7 Comments

When you’re hunting for a signal with your oscilloscope, the stronger it is, the better. If it’s weak, you might struggle to tease it out from other interference, or even from the noise floor itself. You might wish that you were looking for something more obvious rather than the electromagnetic equivalent of a needle in a haystack.

Finding hidden signals below the noise floor may be a challenge, but it needn’t be an insurmountable one. James Rowley and Mark Omo came to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to tell us how to achieve this with the magic of lock-in amplifiers.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: Using An Oscilloscope To Peek Below The Noise Floor” →

A black and white slide with the Supercon 8 logo in the top left, the text, "Nanik Adnani" and "A Hacker's Guide to Analog Design in a Digital World" is in the bottom left. To the right is a circularly cropped image of An image of a college student in glasses and a cap sitting with a black camera in his lap.

Supercon 2024: A Hacker’s Guide To Analog Design In A Digital World

May 6, 2025 by 9 Comments

We often think of analog computing as a relic of the past, room-sized monstrosities filled with vacuum tubes doing their best to calculate Monte Carlo simulations or orbital velocities. Analog isn’t as dead as it might seem though, and analog mix signal design engineer [Nanik Adnani] gave us a crash course on analog circuits at Supercon 2024.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: A Hacker’s Guide To Analog Design In A Digital World” →

Supercon 2024: Quick High-Feature Boards With The Circuit Graver

April 4, 2025 by 11 Comments

These days, if you want to build something with modern chips and components, you probably want a custom PCB. It lets you build a neat and compact project that has a certain level of tidiness and robustness that you can’t get with a breadboard or protoboard. The only problem is that ordering PCBs takes time, and it’s easy to grow tired of shipping delays when you don’t live in the shadow of the Shenzhen board houses.

[Zach Fredin] doesn’t suffer this problem, himself. He’s whipping up high-feature PCBs at home with speed and efficiency that any maker would envy. At the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, he was kind enough to give a talk to explain the great engineering value provided by the Circuit Graver.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: Quick High-Feature Boards With The Circuit Graver” →

Supercon 2024: Yes, You Can Use The Controller Area Network Outside Of Cars

March 27, 2025 by 21 Comments

Ah, the CAN bus. It’s become a communication standard in the automotive world, found in a huge swathe of cars built from the mid-1990s onwards. You’ll also find it in aircraft, ships, and the vast majority of modern tractors and associated farm machines, too.

As far as [Randy Glenn] is concerned, though, the CAN bus doesn’t have to be limited to these contexts. It can be useful far beyond its traditional applications with just about any hardware platform you care to use! He came down to tell us all about it at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: Yes, You Can Use The Controller Area Network Outside Of Cars” →