If you’re hear a rushing noise, don’t be alarmed — that’s just the rapidly approaching 2024 Hackaday Supercon. As hard as it is to believe, a whole year has gone by, and we’re now just a few days away from kicking off our annual hardware hacking extravaganza in Pasadena. Tickets just sold out over the weekend — thank you procrastinators!

For those of you who have tickets to join us this weekend, we’ve got a few last minute announcements and bits of information we wanted to get out to you. As a reminder, you can find the full schedule for all three days on the official Supercon site.

New Events Added!

For those who’ve attended a Supercon before, you know we like to cram as much content as we can into the weekend. But there’s always room for more, and this year we’ve managed to squeeze in a couple extra activities that we’re very excited about.

Halloween Hacker Happy Hour

It just so happens that Halloween is the night before Supercon officially kicks off, and that seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up. So we’ll be throwing a pre-event party at the nearby KingsRow Gastropub where costumes and all manner of blinking LEDs are very much encouraged. Officially we’ll be hanging out from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself still talking to Hackaday folks at last call.

You don’t need tickets for this event, but we’d like to have a rough head count, so if you could RSVP through Eventbrite we’d appreciate it.

Tina’s Junk Challenge

We’ve always wanted to introduce some kind of swap meet aspect to Supercon, but the logistics have always been a challenge. This year though, we’re finally going to get the chance to test out the idea. Former DesignLab Resident Tina Belmont is in the process of moving out of the country and needs to find a new home for her electronic bric-a-brac.

Everything is free, so attendees are encouraged to take anything they think they can make use of. Naturally, an influx of interesting hardware could provide for some very unique badge hacking possibilities. If we can get enough people to graft these second-hand components onto their badges, we just might be able to turn it into a proper category come Sunday night.

A table where folks can offload their electronic bits and bobs has worked well at other hacker cons, so we’re eager to see how it goes at Supercon. If this is something you’d like to see more of, or would potentially like to participate in next year, let us know.

Krux’s Side Quests

Let’s be honest, most of us are already taking our marching orders from the computer in one way or another. So why not turn it into a fun interactive game?

The idea is simple: use the mysterious retrocomputer oracle, and it gives you a quest. Maybe you’ll have to find a hidden item, or solve a riddle. Krux has a run a variation of this game at Toor Con in the past, but the challenges spit out by the computer this time will be tailored to Supercon.

Windows Through Wires Exhibition

You may recall that we asked the Hackaday community if they had any unusual display technology they’d like to show off during Supercon as part of an exhibit.

Well, as you might have imagined, the response was incredible. From gorgeous vintage pieces to completely custom hardware, there’s going to be a wide array of fascinating hardware for attendees to study up-close.

While getting a chance to see various display technologies throughout the years would have our attention as it is, what’s really exciting is that many of the custom-built devices in the exhibit are either projects hosted on Hackaday.io or ones that we’ve covered at some point on the front page.

Considering how gorgeous some of them have looked in photographs, we’re eager to drool over them in the real world — and we bet you are to.

Workshop Technical Difficulties

Hopefully we’ve provided enough good news that we can slip in a bit of the bad. Unfortunately, we’ve had to cancel the “Hands on with an Electron Microscope” workshop that was to be hosted by Adam McCombs and Isabel Burgos. Everyone with tickets will of course be getting a refund, and you should be receiving an email to that effect shortly if you haven’t already.

While we’re just as disappointed by this news as you are, it’s one of those situations where there simply weren’t any good solutions. Long story short, the scanning electron microscope that was small enough to bring to Supercon is down, and there’s just not enough time to get it up and running at this point. An attempt was made to find another small-ish electron microscope on short notice but…well, that’s just as tricky to pull off as it sounds.

Send Us Your Lightning Talks!

To end this update on a high note, we want to remind everyone that this year we’ll once again be going Lighting Talks on Sunday morning. If you’ve never given a talk before, the shorter seven minute format is perfect for getting your feet wet. Or maybe you’ve got something you want to talk about that doesn’t take a whole hour to explain. Either way, the Lightning Talks are a great way to share what your passionate about with the Supercon audience.

If you’d like to give a Lightning Talk, simply fill out this form. You can upload slides if you’ve got them, but they aren’t strictly necessary.

The Vectrex was a unique console from the early 1980s. Developed by a company you’ve probably never heard of—Smith Engineering—it was put into production by General Consumer Electronics, and later sold by Milton Bradley. It was an outright commercial failure, but it’s remembered for its sharp vector display and oddball form factor.

The Vectrex was intended for tabletop use in a home environment. However, [Jeroen Domburg], also known as [Sprite_tm], decided to set about building a portable version. This wasn’t easy, but that just makes the development process a more interesting story. Thankfully for us, [Sprite_tm] was kind enough to tell the tale at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.

Vectorlicious

[Sprite] starts by introducing the audience to the Vectrex, just to make sure everyone understands what was special about this thing. For comaprison’s sake, he lines it up against its contemporaries. Back in the early 1980s, the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision had incredibly low resolution video output with big ugly pixels. In contrast, the Vectrex could draw clean, sharp lines with its inbuilt vector-style display.

Basically, instead of coloring in individual pixels, the Vectrex instead drew lines from point to point on the screen. It was an entirely different way of doing graphics—fast, tidy, and effective—and it was popular in early video arcade games, too. Some Vectrex games even came with plastic overlays to create the impression of color on the screen. Unlike pixel displays, though, this technology didn’t really scale well to prettier, more lifelike graphics. Thus after the Vectrex, no other mainstream consoles adopted this technique.

From there, [Sprite_tm] walks the audience through the hardware of the Vectrex. The architecture is fairly simple, based around a 68A09 CPU, which is a Motorola CPU with some improvements over the earlier 6502. It’s paired with some ROM, RAM, and I/O glue logic, and it loads its games off cartridges. Then there’s the audio hardware, a digital-to-analog converter for video output, and all the subsequent analog electronics for driving the vector CRT display.

Unlike a modern console, what’s inside the box is no secret. Datasheets and full schematics are publicly available that lay out exactly how the whole thing works. This is hugely valuable for anyone looking to repair a Vectrex—or make a portable one. You don’t need to reverse engineer much, since it’s all laid out for you. Indeed, as [Sprite_tm] notes, a replica motherboard already exists that lets you play Vectrex games on an oscilloscope’s XY input.

Building the Portable

Some people have built small Vectrexes before, by going the emulator route with a Raspberry Pi and a small LCD display. [Sprite] wasn’t a fan of this route, as modern pixel LCDs make for jagged diagonal lines because they’re not proper vector displays like the original Vectrex CRT. Thus, to build a more authentic portable Vectrex, [Sprite_tm]’s build needed certain parts. On top of replicating the CPU and logic of the Vectrex, he needed to find a small CRT that operate as a proper vector display. Plus, he wanted to build something properly portable—”I wanna sit on the bus and then whip it out and play it,” he explains.

Obviously, finding a suitable CRT was the first big hurdle to clear. [Sprite_tm] mused over using a tube from a Sony Watchman handheld portable TV, but decided against it. He notes that these are fairly rare and valuable, and he didn’t want to destroy one for his project. But he still needed a small CRT in a practical form factor, and he found the perfect donor. In the 90s, LCDs were pretty crap and expensive, so apartment video intercoms relied on CRTs instead. Now, these systems are all largely defunct, and he notes you can find old examples of these answerphones for a few dollars online.

Of course, these answerphone CRTs weren’t designed for vector operation. However, [Sprite_tm] teaches us how you can convert one to draw straight lines on command instead of scanning like a TV. You can get legit vector operation just by squirting the right voltages into the deflection coils. Of course, getting it to work in practice is a lot harder than you might think, but perseverance got the job done in the end. Understanding the physics involved is useful, too, and [Sprite_tm] explains the theory with an apt comparison between coils and a pig.

From there, the talk explains how the rest of the hardware came together. [Sprite_tm] elected to stuff all the Vectrex magic into an FPGA, which felt cooler than software emulation but was more compact than using all-original chips on a replica mainboard. It lives on a custom PCB that also carries all the necessary electronics to drive the CRT in the desired vector mode.

The build also has a cartridge port for playing original Vectrex games. However, for ease of use, [Sprite] also fitted a RISC V CPU, some RAM, and a microSD card for loading ROMs for games that he doesn’t own in physical format. Everything was then wrapped up in a custom 3D-printed case that’s roughly twice as large as the Nintendo Game Boy Color in length and width—and about four times thicker.

We’ve been hinting at it for a few months now, running a series of articles on SAOs, then a Supercon Add-On Challenge. We even let on that the badge would have space for multiple SAOs this year, but would you believe six?

Way back in 2017ish, Hackaday’s own [Brian Benchoff] and the [AND!XOR] crew thought it would be funny and useful to create a “standard” for adding small custom PCB art-badges onto bigger conference badges. The idea was to keep it quick and dirty, uncomplicated and hacky, and the “Shitty” Add On was born. The badge community took to this like wildfire. While the community has moved on from the fecal humor, whether you call these little badgelets “SAOs”, “Simple Add-Ons”, or even “Supercon-8 Add Ons”, there’s something here for everyone. So if you’ve already got some SAOs in a drawer, bring them to this year’s Supercon and show them off!

But you don’t need to bring your own SAOs. We thought that as long as we were providing six SAO ports, we’d provide you with a small starter collection: four of them, in fact. A fantastic capacitive touch wheel designed by [Todbot], a beautiful spiral petal matrix of LEDs designed by [Voja Antonic], a completely blank-slate protoboard petal, and an I2C-enabled microcontroller proto-petal.

Bringing it all together, of course, is the main badge, which sports a Raspberry Pi Pico W on the back-side, for WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. This badge is intended to be a showcase of SAOs, and we thought that there have always been some under-explored corners of the spec. The most recent six-pin standard has power, ground, two GPIO pins, and an I2C pair. How often do we see SAOs that only use the power lines? This year, that changes!

Every GPIO pin on all six SAO slots is individually accessible, and the Pi Pico’s two hardware I2C peripheral busses are broken out on the left and right sides of the badge respectively. (Have an I2C enumeration conflict? Just move one of the offenders to the other side.) The idea here, combined with the wireless features and a trio of buttons on the front, is to give you a big sandbox to explore the possibilities of SAOs that go farther than just art.

Many Ways to Play

Straight out of the gate, the touch wheel and the LED petal matrix invite you to play with them, all the while fooling you into learning a little bit about interfacing I2C devices. You see, I2C devices have a unique address, and the rest of the functionality is handled by as if they were memory-mapped peripherals. What does this mean? If you want to ask the touch wheel where your finger is, you simply query its memory location 0. To set the LED colors, you write bytes to memory locations 15, 16, and 17 for red, green, and blue, respectively. Each spiral arm of the LED matrix petal is simply a byte in memory – write to it and the blinkies blink.

The take-home: I2C devices are fun and to play with. And when you start combining the functions of multiple SAOs, you can really start getting creative. But we’ve only scratched the surface. The I2C proto petal includes a CH32V003 chip, with its own dedicated I2C device hardware peripheral, so if you have essentially anything that you can solder to it, you can turn that into an I2C-enabled device to add to the party.

This is a multi-lingual party, though. The main badge, and all of the connection logic, runs on MicroPython. This makes it just a few lines of code to display your finger presses on the touchwheel over on the LED petal matrix, for instance, and we’ll have some demo code to ease you in. (And we’re frantically writing more!) But the I2C protoboard requires a little bit of C. If you’ve got a CH32V003 environment set up, by all means bring it – we love [CHLohr]’s CH32V003fun. We’re working on getting the badge board to program the CH32 in-situ, and we’re 99% sure we’ll have that ready by showtime. We’ll have demo code here to get you started as well. Will you program your first RISC-V chip at this year’s Supercon?

But say you don’t want anything to do with all this software? Just give me the solder! The blank-slate protoboard is for you. It breaks out the SAO lines, and gives you maximal room for creative hardware play. Heck, you could solder an LED, a resistor, and call it done. Or play around with the possibilities of the GPIOs. Low-code or no-code, the choice is yours.

Participate!

We know you’re all looking forward to getting your hands on the badge and the SAOs and getting creative. Here is the 2024 Supercon SAO Badge GitHub repository, for your perusal. All of the design files that we have are there in the hardware directory, but the code is not yet complete. If you want to design a 3D-printed case or add-on, you’ll find the vector files in PDF.

As usual [Voja] makes his circuit diagrams by hand, so you’ll find a beautifully annotated schematic that lets you know where each and every pin goes. If you’re not feeling the AA battery love, you’ll see that [Voja] has left you some pads to hook up an external power supply, for instance.

But the software is a work in progress, and in particular, we don’t know what I2C devices you’ll be bringing with you. We’re going to include as many MicroPython I2C device libraries as we can find, from OLED screens to magnetometers, and we’d like them to be on the default conference image. So if you’ve a device that you’d like us to support, either drop a link in the comments below or add the code in the libraries folder and submit a pull request! We’ll be flashing these at the absolute last minute, of course, but please get it in this weekend if you can.

Supercon!

Supercon 8’s badge is the unofficial world-record holder for the most SAO connectors on any official conference badge, but it also aspires to encourage you to play around with the functional aspects of our favorite mini-badge form factor. Heck, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about I2C along the way? Push some GPIOs around? Or maybe you’ll just have a fun weekend with a soldering iron, some stellar talks, and some great company. Whatever it’s going to be, we can’t wait to see you all, and to see what you come up with!

If you have any questions about the badge, fire away in the comments here.

You do have your tickets already, right? See you soon!

(C3P0 add-on by [kuro_dk] and Cyclops by [Simenzhor] not included.)

Starting a hacker con is hardly what anyone would describe as easy — but arguably, the truly difficult part is keeping the momentum going into the second year and beyond. For the first year, you can get away with a few missed opportunities and glitches, but by the time you’ve got one event under your belt, you’ll have set the bar for what comes next. There’s pressure to grow, to make each year bigger and better than before. All the while, making sure you don’t go broke in the process. Putting on a single hacker con is an achievement in and of itself, but establishing a long-running hacker con is a feat that relatively few groups have managed to pull off.

With this in mind, the incredible success of the second annual JawnCon is all the more impressive. The Philadelphia-area event not only met the expectations of a sophomore effort, but exceeded them in pretty much every quantifiable way. From doubling attendance to providing a unique and immersive experience with their electronic badge, the team seized every opportunity to build upon the already strong foundation laid last year. If this was the make-or-break moment for the Northeast’s newest hacker con, the future looks very bright indeed.

But before setting our sights on next year, let’s take a look at some of the highlights from JawnCon 0x1. While you can watch all of this year’s talks on YouTube, the aspect of a hacker on that can’t easily be recorded is the quality time spent with like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, there’s no way to encompass everything that happened during a two-day con into a single article. Instead, this following will cover a few of the things that stood out to me personally.

If you’d like to experience the rest of JawnCon, you’ll just have to make the trip out to Philly for 2025.

Creating New Traditions

For returning attendees, certainly the most striking thing about this year’s event was simply how many people showed up. In the closing ceremonies, we learned that attendance had more than doubled since last year, and you could absolutely feel it. The rooms never felt cramped, but they certainly felt full. 

But the growth of this year’s event wasn’t limited to the ticket holders. The local chapter of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) was there, equipped with picks and transparent padlocks for anyone interested in an impromptu lesson in lockpicking. You could also try to get yourself out of a pair of handcuffs and other forms of restraints.

This year also featured a “Free Table” where attendees could leave interesting items for others. We’ve all got some piece of hardware that’s been gathering dust for just a bit too long. Maybe it was for some project that you’re no longer interested in, or you just don’t have the time to mess around with it. Instead of tossing it in the trash, a table like this is a great way to re-home some of those technical treasures.

The table was constantly being refreshed as more attendees showed up and added their contributions to the pile. There was only one rule: if your stuff was still there at the end of the con, you had to take it home. But as things started wrapping up on Saturday evening, there were just a few oddball antenna cables and a couple mystery PCBs left. It was especially gratifying to see how many reference books were picked up.

Another highlight this year was a informal competition inspired by the old IT adage that digital subscriber line (DSL)  broadband service could be run over a piece of wet string. With all the hardware necessary to establish a DSL connection on-site, attendees were invited to bring up various objects that would fill in for the telephone line. The medium that provided the fastest confirmed Internet connection would be crowned the winner.

Two pieces of spaghetti ended up taking the top spot, with a link speed of 10 Mbit. A section of carbon fiber tube — dubbed “hard-line coax” for the purposes of the competition — managed second place with around 6 Mbit. As you might expect, the failures in this competition were perhaps just as interesting as the successes. A line of “energy gel” was apparently not conductive enough, though some flickering of the indicator LEDs on the modem seemed to indicate it was close. While it came as no surprise that a line of hackers holding hands wasn’t a suitable link for the experiment, the audience did appreciate the irony that the hardware indicated it couldn’t progress past the handshaking stage of the connection.

Living History for Hackers

Attendees had already gotten a sneak peek at the JawnCon 0x1 badge a few weeks before the event, so the fact that they’d all be getting tiny modems to plug into their computers (and indeed, wear around their necks) wasn’t a complete surprise. But still, I don’t think anyone was fully prepared for what a unique experience it was really going to be.

For the younger players, there was an obvious learning curve. But the veterans in attendance were all too happy to explain the relevant AT commands and get them dialing away. Once you’d figured out how to connect up to the network and start exploring, it added a whole new dimension to the event.

Not only were there various puzzles and Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges that could be accessed through the modem, but it also acted as a gateway to games, chats, and other features that functioned within the con’s infrastructure.

For example, running a command within the modem’s onboard menu system would print the current talk taking place on the stage downstairs, and tell you who was up next.

It was actually a bit surreal. Walking around you’d come across a table of 20-somethings, all with look-alike Hayes modems plugged into their shiny new MacBooks or high-end gaming laptops. It’s hard to say how many of them came away from the event with a new respect for the old ways, but there’s no question they had learned a hell of a lot more about the early Internet than they would have from just watching a YouTube video about it.

While the badge was certainly the star of the show, there were also vintage serial terminals dotted around the chill-out area that you could interact with. By default they showed the talk schedule in a glorious shade of either amber or green, but hit a key and you’d be dumped into the terminal. Nominally, jumping on the terminals and executing various tasks was part of the CTF, but it was also a lot of fun to turn back the clock and sit down at a real serial terminal and interact with some *nix box hidden away elsewhere in the building.

Long Live the Jawn

Any event that manages to double its attendance from the previous year is clearly doing something right. But if you don’t know how to handle the growth, it can become a problem. Luckily, the JawnCon staff are on the case. It sounds like next year they may opt to use a larger space within the same building at Arcadia University. The University is a great fit for the event, so the fact that there’s room to grow is great news for everyone involved.

Of course, it takes more than simply securing a larger room every couple years to make sure an event like this stays on the right track. You also need intelligent and responsible folks at the wheel. Here again, JawnCon is well equipped for the future. The staff and volunteers that worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring this con to life are some of the most passionate and welcoming individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. They represent the very best qualities of hacker culture, and armed with a genuine desire to bring that sense of exploration and inclusion to the next generation, they’re the catalyst that will keep JawnCon growing and evolving over the coming years.

This summer, I was pleasantly surprised when a friend of mine from Chicago turned up at one of the hacker camps I attended. A few days of hanging out in the sun ensued, doing cool hacker camp stuff, drinking unusual beverages, and generally having fun. It strikes me as a shame that this is such a rare occurrence, and since Hackaday is an American organisation and I am in a sense writing from its European outpost, I should do what I can to encourage my other friends from the USA and other parts of the world to visit. So here I’m trying to write a hacker’s guide to visiting Europe, in the hope that I’ll see more of you at future camps and other events.

It’s Intimidating. But Don’t Worry.

First of all, I know that it’s intimidating to travel to an unfamiliar place where the language and customs may be different. I’m from England, which sits on a small island in the North Atlantic, and believe it or not it’s intimidating for us to start traveling too. It involves leaving the safety of home and crossing the sea whether by flight, ferry, or tunnel, and that lies outside one’s regular comfort zone.

Americans live in a country that’s almost a continent in its own right, so you can satisfy your travel lust without leaving home. Thus of course the idea of landing in Germany or the Netherlands is intimidating. But transatlantic flights are surprisingly cheap in the scheme of international travel because of intense competition, so I’m here to reassure you that you can travel my continent ‘s hacker community without either feeling out of your depth, or breaking the bank.

What About The Language Barrier?

Let’s start with the language. I’m a British English speaker, je parle Francais, een beetje Nederlands, and ein bischien Deutsch. (Ed note: errors left intact for authenticity.) The fact is though, while it’s nice to try my halting Dutch to buy a portion of haring en uitjes, the truth is I rarely find myself completely lost in my travels through the hacker community on just my native language. It may annoy the French to call English a lingua franca, but if you’re an Anglophone you’ve lucked out in having the international glue language at your fingertips. It’s the default translation when traveling, in major cities you will usually find people who speak it when you need to. Meanwhile we’re lucky enough that there are few cities which don’t have some form of hackerspace, so you can usually find someone friendly with local knowledge if you need a bit of advice.

So It’s Not As Scary As You Think, But Why Come Here?

From here in Europe we look over the Atlantic at events like Def Con with some envy, but the fact is that Americans do things a little differently from us. Those events are expensive, while for us a summer hacker event is a community led affair in a field with camping thrown in. Some of the tickets are a few hundred dollars, but that’s it, no hotels, just camping in a field with five thousand other hackers.

Even better, the smaller events are cheaper, and often have much more charm as they aren’t so overwhelming. I can afford to do more than one, because they don’t cost an outrageous amount, and if I work out my timing I can even travel from one to the next without needing anywhere to stay over, instead helping with set-up and teardown. Add to that those hundreds of hackerspaces in cities only a relatively short distance apart, and there’s a lot to see.

Getting Around Needn’t Bankrupt You

One of the great holidays of the world remains the Great North American Road Trip. Grab a car with a couple of friends, and head out across the wide open spaces on the roads less traveled. Eat at Mom-n-Pop roadside diners in flyspeck towns, and enjoy what the continent has to offer under that endless sky. But while hire cars and gasoline may be cheap in the USA, long distance driving is tedious, so Americans prefer to fly.

Europe is different, hire cars are expensive, gasoline is eye-wateringly expensive, and while budget flights can be cheap, they really are a royal pain in the ass. Fortunately our continent is still cris-crossed by an extensive passenger rail network, and while individual tickets can be expensive there’s a very handy hack that makes them a great choice for a tourist. It’s called the eurail pass, originally designed for young people but now available for all ages, and it offers universal access for visitors to the whole continent’s rail network.

Taking a train from Paris to Copenhagen is simply a case of punching the journey into the app, and doing it with 180 mph high-speed trains instead of slower regional trains usually only takes a few Euros extra booking fee. If you’ve ever wondered how I write about events all over Europe for Hackaday I can reveal that there’s no diamond-encrusted expense account, instead I use the domestic European version of this pass. It’s that good.

Where To Stay

If you are coming over for a hacker camp, there’s your campsite and event all rolled into one, but outside the camps there are still some affordable options. Starting with camping, for us it’s not the backwoods facilities of a trailhead camping spot but in most cases a commercial camp site. For not a huge a mount of money you’ll get toilets and showers along with your pitch, and even a 230V CEE-form power hook-up if you’re prepared to pay extra.

I’ve written Hackaday articles in more than one camp site in my time. Then if you have a eurail pass it’s worth noting that Europe has a night train network. If it’s a conventional sit-up train you might not have the most comfortable night, but for the extra cost of a sleeper berth you can swallow up the journey in comfort and have the day to do more interesting stuff. Then as everywhere it’s easy to find a hotel, I tend to aim for non-tourist-destination train stops and find a two-star room for about 50 to 70 Euros when I need one. And after a few nights camping and night training, you will need one. Finally as you wander around our continent’s hackerspaces you may find the occasional offer of a sofa for the night, but remember that most European houses are tiny and the etiquette around staying over may be a little different. Only expect to stay for a while and use someone’s place as a base if they really know you.

Day To Day

It’s possible to exist in many European cities using small-denomination cash in whatever the local currency is, and shopping in ancient markets for exotic ingredients. It’s fun, even. But Europeans shop at the same shops and supermarkets as anyone else, and your Mastercard will work here too.

Look out for budget supermarkets, Aldi, Lidl, or Netto if you’re on a shoestring, and Primark if you’re in need of clothing. Meanwhile eating out can be expensive, and we don’t have a tradition of eating out for breakfast. We have McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC here just like anywhere else, but seek out the local fast food, it’s worth it.

European Hackerspaces

Wrapping it up, if you’re an American you may not be used to most hackerspaces only being a few tens of miles from each other. As a member of several European spaces it’s great to have international visitors drop by, so please, check out online when you go somewhere, find the space, and give them a shout. I have drunk Club-Mate and eaten a variety of delicacies while sitting on shabby sofas in the company of my peers continent-wide, and if you’re One of Us and looking to get to know a country there’s no better way.

So. The Hackaday Tourist Guide has spoken, are we going to see you at a European event next summer?

Header: NASA, public domain.

With the 2024 Hackaday Supercon just a couple weeks away, we’re pleased to announce that the official site for the three-day event is now live!

On the brand-new Supercon page, you can find a listing of all of our fantastic speakers, the hands-on workshops, and perhaps most importantly, the schedule of when everything is happening. As always, Supercon is jam-packed with incredible content, so you’ll want to consult with the schedule to navigate your way through it. Don’t worry if it ends up that two talks you want to see are scheduled for the same time — we’ll be recording all of the talks and releasing them on the Hackaday YouTube channel, so you won’t miss out.

If you’re still on the fence, we do have a few tickets left at the time of this writing. All of the workshops are full at this point, but you can still get on the waiting list for a few of them just in case a spot opens up.

Here’s the thing about radio signals. There is wild and interesting stuff just getting beamed around all over the place. Phrased another way, there are beautiful signals everywhere for those with ears to listen. We go about our lives oblivious to most of them, but some dedicate their time to teasing out and capturing these transmissions.

David Prutchi is one such person. He’s a ham radio enthusiast that dabbles in receiving microwave signals sent from probes in deep space. What’s even better is that he came down to Supercon 2023 to tell us all about how it’s done!

Space Calling

David notes that he’s not the only ham out there doing this. He celebrates the small community of passionate hams that specialize in capturing signals directly from far-off spacecraft. As one of these dedicated enthusiasts, he gives us a look at his backyard setup—full of multiple parabolic dishes for getting the best possible reception when it comes to signals sent from so far away. They’re a damn sight smaller than NASA’s deep space network (DSN) 70-meter dish antennas, but they can still do the job.  He likens trying to find distant space signals as to “watching grass grow”—sitting in front of a monitor, waiting for a tiny little spike to show up on a spectrogram.

The challenge of receiving these signals comes down to simple numbers. David explains that a spacecraft like JUNO emits 28 watts into a 2.5-meter dish, which comes out to roughly 44.5 dBm of signal with a 44.7 dBi gain antenna. The problem is one of distance—it sits at around 715 million kilometers away on its mission to visit Jupiter. That comes with a path loss of around -288 dB. NASA’s 70-meter dish gets them 68 dBi gain on the receive side, which gets them a received signal strength around -131 dBm. To transmit in return, they transmit around the 50-60 kW range using the same antenna. David’s setup is altogether more humble, with a 3.5-meter dish getting him 47 dBi gain. His received signal strength is much lower, around -152 dBm.

His equipment limits what he can actually get from these distant spacecraft. National space agencies can get full signal from their dishes in the tens-of-meters in diameter, sidebands and all. His smaller setup is often just enough to get some of the residual carrier showing up in the spectrogram.  Given he’s not getting full signal, how does he know what he’s receiving is the real deal? It comes down to checking the doppler shift in the spectrogram, which is readily apparent for spacecraft signals. He also references the movie Contact, noting that the techniques in that film were valid. If you move your antenna to point away from the suspected spacecraft, the signal should go away. If it doesn’t, it might be that you’re picking up local interference instead.

THIS. IS. JUST. AWESOME. !!!

This is video decoded from the 8455MHz high rate downlink @uhf_satcom received yesterday. All the work on the decoder and data analysis really paid off in the end!

Video shows solar panel of Chang'e-5 glistening in the sun and dust floating around. pic.twitter.com/FKc92kgskl

— r00t (@r2x0t) November 25, 2020

Some hobbyists have been able to decode video feeds from spacecraft downlinks. 

However, demodulating and decoding full spacecraft signals at home is sometimes possible—generally when the spacecraft are still close to Earth. Some hobbyists have been able to decode telemetry from various missions, and even video signals from some craft! David shows some examples, noting that SpaceX has since started encrypting its feeds after hobbyists first started decoding them.

David also highlights the communications bands most typically used for deep space communication, and explains how to listen in on them. Most of it goes on in the S-band and X-band frequencies, with long-range activity focused on the higher bands.

Basically, if you want to get involved in this kind of thing, you’re going to want a dish and some kind of software defined radio. If you’re listening in S-band, that’s possibly enough, but if you’re stepping up into X-band, you’ll want a downconverter to step that signal down to a lower frequency range, mounted as close to your dish as possible. This is important as X-band signals get attenuated very quickly in even short cable runs. It’s also generally required to lock your downconverter and radio receiver to some kind of atomic clock source to keep them stable. You’ll also want an antenna rotator to point your dishes accurately, based on data you can source from NASA JPL. As for finding downlink frequencies, he suggests looking at the ITU or the Australian Communication and Media Authority website.

He also covers the techniques of optimizing your setup. He dives into the minutae of pointing antennas at the Sun and Moon to pick up their characteristic noise for calibration purposes. It’s a great way to determine the performance of your antenna and supporting setup. Alternatively, you can use signals from geostationary military satellites to determine how much signal you’re getting—or losing—from your equipment.

Ultimately, if you’ve ever dreamed of listening to distant spacecraft, David’s talk is a great place to start. It’s a primer on the equipment and techniques you need to get started, and he also makes it sound really fun, to boot. It’s high-tech hamming at its best, and there’s more to listen to out there than ever—so get stuck in!