Intro

I had to drive almost five hours from the North of California to be present in one of the most important conferences about hardware in the world. It was going to be my first presentation and first time in a hackaday #Supercon, and I could not deny it: I was very excited. I arrived the night before. Reserving an Airbnb close to the venue was not a problem. Basically, I was in the heart of Old Pasadena!

 

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The #Supercon is a different conference focusing mainly in hardware. When I say hardware, I mean hacking hardware, creating, training, designing or implementing prototypes. This year the conference took place in Pasadena, California, and I had the privilege to be part of the speakers team, yeaahh!!

It is a good feeling to see your name around your idols, people that you really admire for their impressive contributions to the community and their hard work:

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I was very exited to be part of a hardware conference as speaker. The reason: I was going to present my recent tool, BlueSpoof. Hackaday is not like any other infosec conference; it is a place to learn, ask, join and drink in a higher level. People for many different places came to share techniques, knowledge and the most important thing: experiences about hardware. If you ask me what is the most daunting researcher, without hesitation, I will say a hardware hacker.

The badge

I will mention my impressions of this impressive device. Being a hardware conference, I did not expect less than a perfect badge, from the hackaday post: “So, what does this badge do? It’s a camera. It has games, and it’s designed by [Mike Harrison] of Mike’s Electric Stuff. He designed and prototyped this badge in a single weekend. On board is a PIC32 microcontroller, an OV9650 camera module, and a bright, crisp 128×128 resolution color OLED display. Tie everything together with a few buttons, and you have a badge that’s really incredible.”

Honestly, the Supercon badge hacked my exceptions, and I stated them clearly:

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I am not going to write technicals details about the badge because there is a complete post in the hackaday page about that, but I will tell you how I felt when I start playing with “Taken”. Yes, I baptized it. When I get a badge, the first thing I do is to analyze the hardware balance around the board, the geometrical shape, the colors, the SMD alignment, inputs, outputs, how it smells(creepy hu?). The flash light for the camera was a beautiful touch, twisting the LED :D!

Some impressions from the Osh Park experts:

This badge was really enjoyable to play with and seeing people hack them was a plus:

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Some terrific hacks:

Conference

One thing that Supercon has and I personally did not see at any other conference is the progressive participation of professional women as speakers. I had the opportunity to attend three presentations of them, and their talks were extremely stunning:

 

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Other talks that you will see on hackaday YouTube channel soon:

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Some pictures of the venue and people having fun at the conference:

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It was really a pleasure to be part of Hackaday conference. Hoping to be there next year. Thanks to all of you that somehow made this Supercon what it is.