Hackaday Berlin Was Bonkers
To celebrate the 10th Hackaday Awards, we organized a fantastic weekend in Berlin. It was a great opportunity for the entire European Hackaday community to come together for a few days of interesting discussions and demonstrations, and most importantly to sit down together and brainstorm the old-fashioned way. Obviously the logo and website, there was a huge hacker space in Berlin called MotionLab, and there was even a laser-eyed octopus hovering above the pass. Everyone who came brought something to share or display. You couldn't ask for more.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to record the discussions, so we'll show you the highlights here. (Jenny List) is currently writing the badge hack, so we'll skip that for now. You have to be there to fully enjoy the experience, but we will share the photos we found with you. Enjoy!
Conversations
The morning started with [Jiska Classen] introducing us to her reverse engineering course. He quickly admits that it's "looking at the code" to present, but points out a few helpers along the way. If you can get hold of the SDK, you'll often ignore the images, which helps the look a lot. And [Jiska] provided a great introduction to dynamic reverse engineering practices: writing your own code hooks is like printf() to someone else's closed-source binary.
Then [James Broughton] came on stage and told us how he does it all on his YouTube channel. A good percentage of this involves working full days or more, but you also have an agent who helps you get support, which accounts for the majority of your income. If you want to know how to make a career out of it, [James] says you have to do it right, invest in studios and productions and produce great content. No surprises there. The one suggestion that might come as a surprise is that retention is important to the YouTube algorithm, so a viral special offer can hurt rather than help.
Former Hackaday Award winner [Ali Shtarpanov] details his flagship project FlowIO and open source software and hardware platform for building softbots. Since the hardware itself can be very expensive to produce, (Ali) mentions a lending library-type approach that encourages people to use the system to build their own projects. The first to write the program.
[Astrid Bean] loved playing musical instruments from the Star Trek universe. There was more than we thought and everyone told us something about the aliens they played with, but I especially learned a lot about designing real (unusual) gadgets by studying them. He created a harp-like instrument that played louder and louder as you held it tighter, eventually emitting a burst of sound. Our most important lesson in designing electronic instruments: don't focus on what you can technically do, but think about the music it allows you to create, because that's what matters.
[Bleeptrack] gave us insight into his generative art practice. An endless error generator, never-reproducible PCB layouts, and the realization of why you wouldn't want to have so much detail even if you had a CNC router - it's all sandblasted. One of the main themes of the conference was finding the balance between allowing everything to be random and choosing enough parameters to ensure interesting technical control over everything.
Finally, [Trammell Hudson] tells the story of reverse engineering a cell phone app that controls his IoT dishwasher in his home automation network. To bring it full circle, he included a presentation (by Jiska) at the event and shared his passion for dynamic reverse engineering. He gave a big boost to Frida's toolkit for reverse engineering Android apps and ultimately created a tool that lets you control your Home Connect devices the way you want.
Socialize
Much of the fun of being at a place like Hackaday Berlin is hanging out with over 256 fanatics and sharing their successes and failures. We started at the BrewDog on a Friday night as we walked past our assigned table and started grabbing whatever seats the bars could find.
Saturday was mostly spent talking, but it lasted well into the evening. Hackaday.io's [Rich Hogben] himself played modular techno live until 3:30 in the morning.
It's a miracle how people manage to get out of bed and eat a Bring-a-Hack brunch at 11am, but almost everyone does! It's self-determination. And then the Sunday morning blitz talks were fantastic.
Movement workshop
I've never been to MotionLab before, but it's a great shop full of hacker tools and more. Whether it's a laser cutter you can walk into, stations for a shop, or a 3D printer big enough to print a human-sized chair in one go, the tools are out there. But above all, the hacker spirit is very much alive.
It takes a few square meters to install a bus in a room, but it takes a lot of crazy intruders to turn it into a living room, office and meeting room. It offers a nice, peaceful setting in the middle of nowhere and we are more than jealous.
The giant inflatable octopus is made from discarded industrial propellers, found plastic sheets, and bungee cords pulled by motors. The eyes are DMX-controlled strobe lights, and everything is suspended in the venue's skylight. Needless to say, it was a mixture of fear and excitement as it approached you, oozing and glowing and moving upwards.
Price rigged
And last but not least, a fantastic secret that we accidentally revealed to the public: The Hackaday Prize turns ten this year. This is our 10th time running many of our favorite categories from the past as well as a new category. For full details, please visit the Truth Hackaday Prize homepage or stay tuned for our introduction to reform education tomorrow, the first challenge.
We're excited to see what you come up with for the award this time around, and it starts on Saturday, so get to work!
