2024 Supercon: Third Round of Super Speakers  Elliot Williams | amznusa.com

I’d like to talk about the physics of sonar and small insect detection, with a focus on the off-the-shelf electronics that allow us to study it cheaply. I’ll talk about ultrasonic phased arrays, why nature (bats) uses ears instead of phased arrays, what the optimal wavelength is for ultrasonic detection, and cover automated target recognition. You’ll learn how accessible ultrasonic sonars are to the average hacker, and how much they can teach us about the physics of radar and wave propagation.

This talk discusses the design challenges and promises of future wearable and implantable devices. Join us as we take a look at wireless health monitoring with tiny chips, and the hardware-software co-design for Brain-Machine-Interfaces (BMI).

This talk is about my ongoing journey from a work-from-home electronics prototyper to a complete system prototyper working on a multi-disciplinary project as part of a startup. I’m putting an airbag in a basketball shoe. I’ve got a shoe-string month-by-month budget and am documenting my journey. Of course there’s plenty of electronics involved, from wireless charging, flexible full custom pressure sensor arrays, and real-time signal processing. And explosives.

This talk explains three technology pillars: 1) End-to-end simple breakdown of how all smart-glasses work 2) The gamut of HW options to safely display light within the device, since getting the photonics right is key glasses functioning properly 3) The various optical Hw solutions one can use when building an HMD (Head-mounted displays)

There was a time when printed circuit boards were either boring, bare beige or coated with a “luxurious” green solder mask. Since then, solder mask materials have expanded to include a handful of color option, but generally only one per board. Makers have cooked up various techniques within the limitations of one solder mask color, the copper layer beneath, and white or black silkscreen markings to create amazing visual effects on PCBs. However, we’ve longed for more creative power. The time for that power has finally arrived. In 2024, mainstream board houses started offering full-color printing on PCBs as part of standard production orders.

X1Plus is the first known custom firmware for the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon 3D printer. In some ways, X1Plus is a very standard custom firmware: it jumps into a custom kernel, launches a patched userspace, and provides a handful of interesting features to users. And in some ways, X1Plus takes a relatively well-trodden path of exploiting relatively usual cheap IoT device security vulnerabilities that have been passed around from hand to hand for a while.

In this talk, we’ll all get to laugh together a little bit about classic silly IoT security errors, we’ll paint a picture of the architecture of a firmware patchset designed for ordinary users, and we’ll enjoy a little bit of hope at the concept of at least one vendor who found it more interesting to collaborate with their users than to fight them.

In this two-part presentation, Cat Morse will take the audience through the story of the PCC Time Machine, a retro-tech clock, and Kino DeVita will talk about curating and designing the first-ever community-sourced exhibit dedicated to electronic display technology.

In this talk, I would like to share some of the methods I used to design, build, and manufacture Ubo open source home pod. In particular, I am going to focus on techniques that can be helpful in small volume production and incremental builds that reduce cost, increases flexibility, and make mistake less costly. I cover various aspects of design and manufacturing of electronics and mechanical parts.

This talk discusses my adventures in ocean technology from a single Arduino-based drifting buoy to deploying hundreds of ocean sensors around the world. I’ll discuss how it all started, the hardware and software lessons-learned, and the network of collaborators necessary to turn a hobby into an ocean technology side-hustle.

After 7 years operating science instruments and spacecraft at the Moon, Saturn, and our own planet Earth, Janelle will be uncovering the pillars of spaceflight operations. During this talk, she will take you behind the scenes of mission control from the perspective of a Flight Director to share how we navigate the stars, survive the uncertainty of space, and make a difference for humanity.

Think that electronic textiles are only for clothing? Thank again! This talk explores the technical use cases and pros and cons of using e-textiles over other flexible electronic technologies in robotics, automotive and more. From knit e-textile to good ol’ regular PCBS, this talk is all about technology comparison and highlighting where electronic textiles can help solve your biggest electromechanical challenges.

This talk introduces a wearable motion monitoring device using low-energy Bluetooth (BLE). It features an interactive game-based interface for children and generates detailed medical reports, providing therapists with valuable insights for effective rehabilitation.

Allie, Samy, and Al will lead a panel of reverse engineers who will talk tips and tricks about how to get inside of various devices. The ability to think in reverse is also important for your forward-engineering, so don’t miss this one.