Remoticon.2: Con Remoter
A Good Day (or two) to Learn Free or Try Hard, with a Vengeance! This time, it's personal!
This time last year, it was with reluctant acceptance that we collectively acquiesced to the fact that due to the pandemic's refusal to abate, Hackaday Supercon would have to move online, where it was christened with a new name: Hackaday Remoticon. After that glorious event, it seemed like a one-off triumph, never to be repeated, since surely by 2021 things would be back to normal. Yet a year later, with the COVID death toll in the US on target to surpass the previous year's, Hackaday announced that in deference to keeping people safe, this year would see a second virtual event: Remoticon.2.
As people have adapted to a more frequently remote lifestyle over the past year and a half, so did Hackaday streamline the delivery of their flagship event. While last year was a patchwork of often overlapping Zoom meetings, Twitch Streams, and YouTube broadcasts, 2021's event was a single, linear track, held on YouTube, with the comments off, and no opportunity for direct user participation. Thankfully, however, the official Remoticon Discord server provided a backchannel where viewers could congregate, chat, and occasionally ask questions of the speakers when time and technology permitted. Although the Discord was a much-welcomed addition, and the single YouTube stream provided a much more straightforward and less frantic experience, there was something missing compared to last year's Zoom meetings, where the propensity toward interacting directly with speakers was far greater, rather than the more unidirectional experience this year. Despite the linear track, however, a similar smorgasbord to last year's was provided, with close to two dozen talks and events. This was achieved by spanning two full days to last year's one and a bit, although shifting the start to Friday may have impacted people's ability to participate if they had to work during that time.
After opening remarks from the organizers, the event kicked off with an hour of the most delightful presentation of what might otherwise have been a rather dry topic, in the form of Elecia White's Map Files and Other Buried Treasures. Using a DnD style map as our guide, we traveled together from RAM Landia to Heap Hallows and beyond, graduating from simple examples to real map files, detouring to learn about linkers and where map files come from. White's congenial presentation style, likely honed via her incredibly popular Making Embedded Systems live course, was the ideal departure point for the two-day expedition that would be Remoticon.2.
In the first of several talks that took a second look at older tech, rather than obsessing over the new and shiny, Maurits Fennis' Hack for the Planet made a case for reverse engineering as a means of reducing e-waste. Rather than just renewing old hardware for continued use, Fennis' Unbinare creates new, high-end tools, such as the OI!STER, a tool with a QFP48 clamshell socket for debugging salvaged STM MCUs, and the UNBRK, which facilitates reuse of reclaimed SMD components from mobile phones.
Returning from last year's popular Remoticon talk Zero to ASIC (as well as course by the same name), Matt Venn spoke this year on Open Source ASICs — A Year in Perspective. Despite more and more once-exotic capabilities coming within reach of the maker community in recent years, making one's own silicon seems incredibly far-fetched — but not only has Venn been through this process — he's guided dozens more through it, and reflected on this experience with his usual passionate exuberance.
The move from hard-coded logic to soft-wearing fabrics was a welcome change of pace, as Hal Rodriguez and Sahrye Cohen talked us through their interactive wearable piece Conductive Melody. Shortly afterward, Jay Bowles took A Dip Into The Plasmaverse, consisting of a series of demonstrations of high voltage physics, while viewers watched along live, trusting that he would remember to climb aboard the box that prevents him from grounding the tens of thousands of volts he was playing with, and hoping he wouldn't burn himself while intentionally attracting flames toward his person!
Less nerve-wracking, though only slightly, was Voja Antonic's light speed journey through over 100 slides, Become a Hardware Expert in 40 Minutes. Starting from basic gates, Antonic demonstrated how these simple elements could combine to perform specific functions, such as holding, inverting, or adding a value, which can in turn create building blocks like registers, decoders, and ALUs, ultimately culminating in a CPU not too dissimilar to those we all use today — and with physical demonstrations of each major concept along the way! Among the many dozens of slides, there was one in particular that we were instructed to pay attention to among all the rest, and this was (spoiler alert) the Flip-Flop, the most important circuit in digital electronics, and the foundation of computing. Antonic also had a completely fascinating RGB LED representation of Conway's Game of Life on the wall in his lab, so be on the lookout for that as well!
From bits and gates, we moved to bits in space, with former SpaceX engineer Sergiy Nesterenko's Don't Flip My Bits: Electronics in Spaaaace. As if wrangling bits wasn't already complicated enough (though Antonic had certainly helped make it seems simpler), it turns out electronics in space suffer a whole new host of challenges, from static build-up, to solar flares, to ... cruise ships!
Jeroen Domburg — more commonly known online as Sprite_TM, creator of the PocketSprite, and presenter at every Supercon ever held — gave a very entertaining and technically satisfying talk called Rickrolling Buddha: A Deep Dive in Reverse Engineering and Thoroughly Pwning an Unknown Chip. Accepting the challenge of reverse engineering a cheap meditation aide, with the ultimate goal of replacing the built-in sound files with Rick Astley's classic, Domburg took viewers on a fascinating, highly opinionated journey of decryption and reverse engineering.
The last event of Friday's stream was Hacker Trivia with Lewin Day and Justin McArthur. Through the magic of a shared Google Form, as well as much banter in the Discord, attendees competed for the top spot over a wide range of questions. And many of them cheated by googling the answers. And had the audacity to claim that it wasn't cheating. But everyone enjoyed the quiz in their own way, not least our two hosts, who seemed to spiral further into the surreal as the questions intensified. In the end, hacker dream team Yes We Can pipped Nate/Myself and PocketSprite designer Sprite_tm to the post by a single point. Punctuated with some wonderful ambient techno performances by Hackaday alum Richard Hogben, this fantastic opportunity to unwind then yielded to Bring-a-Hack event on the Gather platform for the remainder of the evening.
Saturday began with a keynote from astrophysicist Dr. Keith Thorne, group leader at the LIGO (that stands for "Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory") Livingston Observatory, an NSF project, operated jointly by Caltech and MIT. His talk, LIGO: The Most Sensitive Instrument Humans Ever Created Will Unfold the Mysteries of Gravitational Waves, was reminiscent of Nesterenko's from the night before, in terms of space-scale issues making things even more complicated, yet at the same time was relatable to a hacker audience who are used to coming up with creative workarounds to sophisticated problems. His detailed exploration of how various aspects of the equipment works, along with what it was capable of, as well as the challenges in getting it to deliver the desired results, and the hacks to overcome them, made for a fascinating start to the second day.
From priceless instruments, to...free dumpster goodies — as Arsenijs Picugins took us piece-by-piece through component re-use with his talk Laptop-Be-Done. From screens to webcams to keyboards to batteries, Picugins showed how to unlock the potential of other people's trash using datasheets, open-source or inexpensive third-party controller boards and adapters, and a little ingenuity. Picugins' entertaining, meme-laden presentation included real-world examples of systems he'd built completely from the free bin, inspiring viewers to take a second look at their own old hardware for hidden potential, as well as reflecting on the environmental impact of discarded electronics, and how reclaiming working components can help the planet — while helping you to hack the planet!
Next up was another returning Hackaday favorite: Uri Shaked with his Reverse Engineering the ESP32 WiFi. Shaked is a Hackaday superstar, having taught HackadayU courses as well as having spoken at last year's Remoticon. He is also the creator of Wokwi.com, a cloud-based electronics simulator, and if you're going to simulate hardware, you have to understand how it works, and sometimes to know how it works... you're going to have to reverse engineer it! Shaked took viewers back to the world of ROM Landia, riding the Ghidra dragon as he unlocked the mysteries of the ESP-32 Wi-Fi stack.
Hash Salehi was the next presenter, with Smart Meter Hacking. Hash's passion and expertise was evident in his talk, where he excitedly shared the tools and learning process that enabled him to extract and display data from smart meters all over town after experimenting with a captive unit in a Faraday cage. Jay Doscher's Getting Started With and Outgrowing Tinkercad focused on learning 3d modeling tools, while both recommending Tinkercad as a great way to get started (as he did when his fascination with cyberdecks, and thus need for 3D printing, began), and dis-recommending it as a solution for some more advanced requirements.
In Teaching An Old LCD New Tricks, Joey Castillo shared his amazing journey of discovery that begat his Casio F-91W replacement board, the Sensor Watch. Rather than focus on the specifics of that project, Castillo took a more abstract look at how LCDs work, how to unlock their magic, how to select the right hardware, and even the secrets of having your own custom LCDs made!
Next up: author of The Hardware Hacking Handbook, Colin O'Flynn's Upskilling your Hardware Security Work. In his talk, O'Flynn demonstrated fault injection techniques with Raspberry Pis, using both high-end and low-end tools (for example, a barbecue lighter!), to, for example, uncover a private key. Then, Rob Weinstein's Patently Obvious — Reverse Engineering a 45 Year Old Patent into a Fully-Functional HP-35 Replica walked us through his journey of recreating HP's first pocket calculator, using the extensive detail found in its original patent, in time for the device's 50th birthday.
Debra Ansell, aka GeekMomProjects, shared her unique approach to PCB design in Form is Function: Modular PCB Building Blocks. Ansell advocates diving into PCB design without worrying about the potential for mistakes (or as she calls them, "really cool coasters"!) — even the most experienced designers end up re-spinning boards multiple times, and the cost and speed is so reasonable these days, that you can feel free to experiment. Ansell shared her journey of creating Nanoleaf-style LED tiles, which use PCBs not just for function, but for diffusing the edge-lit LEDs, rather than adding the complexity and expense of laser-cut acrylic. Ansell also shared her amazing experiments with connectors, including her "bendy boards" and ingenious use of dollhouse hinges (although she recommends against their use)!
Vaibhav Chhabra shared the touching story of the M19 Initiative — A Case of Open Innovation & Distributed Manufacturing at Scale. As the pandemic gripped India and citizens were forced into lockdown, members of the Maker's Asylum makerspace quarantined at the space, where they cranked out PPE quickly and efficiently. They shared their design, process, and innovations with others, eventually spanning 300 volunteers across the country, and producing one million pieces of PPE in just 49 days. They then began working on respirators, oxygen concentrators, and more, contributing to over $271MM of medical supplies produced worldwide.
Jeremy Fielding's closing keynote, Building Hardware that Moves: the Fundamentals that Everyone Should Know, was a fascinating dive into the world of motors, gears, pneumatics, and levers. Having begun with no formal engineering training himself, Fielding shared his trek from wanting to optimize some storage space to fabricating an industrial-level robotic arm from scratch, and the importance of prototyping and exploring with whatever materials and abilities you may have.
Finally, Majenta Strongheart and Mike Szczys presented the Hackaday Prize Ceremony, counting down to (spoiler alert) FlowIO Platform, a controller for soft robotics, which took the $25,000 Grand Prize. Finally, the Saturday stream came to an end with Closing Remarks from Szczys and Angie Weis Gammell.
Closing out the second night, and moreover the entire event, was a live set on Twitch by DEF CON's resident DJ, Miss Jackalope. While the bangers delighted our ears, many attendees hung out on the Discord server to discuss music, cocktails, and all we had enjoyed over the past two days. Jackalope's drum-and-bass stylings were the perfect nightcap, and as friends in faraway time zones began to fade, the heartiest partiers followed Miss J's raiding of other streams until the wee hours, then on to slumber, and dreams of an in-person Supercon next year...
You can re-watch the two days of streaming here:
As well as find most of the presenter's slides on a shared Google Drive.
