Episode 6: Supersized for Supercon

Welcome

Welcome to The Bootloader! This week we are doing something a little different. Tod recently attended Supercon and shares some of his favorite talks and presentations. Paul and Tod also share one interesting thing.

Full transcript available here.

Show Notes

Hackaday Supercon

• What is Hackaday Supercon?

  • Annual get together in Pasadena of talks & workshops on stuff you’d see in Hackaday.com
  • A way for me to see friends I’ve only really talk to online
  • It’s held at the Supplyframe DesignLab and at Los Angeles College of Music next door
  • In between is an alley where there’s hardware hacking and snacks
  • The workshops are held at Supplyframe HQ, up the street a few blocks
  • One of my favorite conferences, before pandemic
  • This Supercon was first in-person since 2019
  • It was so nice seeing everyone, but wow I am out of practice being amongst people

• The SuperCon Badge

  • Hacker conferences have these “badges” that don’t really function as IDs any more
  • Instead, they’re a playground for electronics experimentation
  • This year, the badge was a microcontroller-based board that acted like an old switches-and-lights computer from the 1970s.
  • Designed by Voja Antonic, a Serbian inventor, created the “Galaksija” build-your-own-computer in 1983, inspiring thousands to learn computers
  • Check out the Video badge walkthrough by Voja
  • You program it the way computers used to be programed: hand keying in bits one-by-one, and clicking the “load” switch to enter a single machine code instruction, one at a time

• Some of the talks I liked

  • Nick’s DIY Vacuum tubes
  • Adrian’s Soviet chips
  • Chris Comb’s “How to Hang and Sell Your Blinky Goodness as Art” (on the DesignLab stage, so recorded but not streamed)
  • Also, Bradley’s talk about ‘showing up’ and making a difference, disguised as a talk on hacking electric scooters
  • Lastly, Samy’s “random walk” exploration that resulted in a flexible wearable tesla coil to light up his breathe in a glass ampule

Python in the Browser (Paul #1)

• MicroPython in the browser
  • Builds on Pyscript, announced this past PyCon by the founder of Anaconda, Peter Wang
  • Great podcast at Talkpython.fm sharing more, including the technical details
    • Included Brett Cannon, Fabio Pliger, and Nicholas Tollervey
  • Pyscript can use the MicroPython as a runtime
    • Reduces the size of Python in Pyscript from 11MB to 300k using MicroPython
    • Pyscript is a framework the developers see building on top of
    • PyScript Runtimes - MicroPython Technical Preview

PicoStepSeq in The MagPi Magazine! (Tod #1)

• My PicoStepSeq project made it as an article in The MagPi
• Also in the print version (and the PDF)! (and it’s a slightly different, longer article.)
• PicoStepSeq is a tiny 1980s-style MIDI sequencer, using these lever switches with embedded LEDs (called “step switches” by Adafruit)
• It was desgined, coded, and built in the two weeks leading up to CircuitPython Day 2022
• It has both a CircuitPython-firmware and an Arduino-based firmware
• See it in action in John Park’s Workshop from November 30
• I’ve slowly been considering a 16-step version, but it’s complicated for various reasons

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