27C3: International Computer/Hacking/Science Conference

The 27th annual Chaos Communication Congress (27C3), the largest hacker conference in Europe, will be Dec. 27 - Dec. 30. Lots of excellent talks are scheduled, including several relevant to robotics:

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A hacker's view on motor control and robotics

The web is full of exciting tutorials and projects for controlling stepper motors, servos and brushless DC motors -- and they're basically all wrong!!

This talk wants to introduce the hacking community to good motor control from the ground up. After a short primer on physics, the underlying relationship between voltage, current, speed and torque is shown.

I'll give an introducting to both brushed and brushless motors, hall sensors, sensorless control and all the needed hard- and software.

We'll take a look on how to design a good power stage and discuss the various PWM schemes with all their merits and shortcomings. We'll have a look at how to interface a microcontroller, how to get good measures of voltage and current and how a typical control program can be structured.

Last but not least we'll peek into state-of-the-art motion control -- cascade controllers, jerk constrained trajectoriy generation and feed-forward control to get great results for CNC applications.

If I can have a desk in the hacking area, I will bring along hardware for a hands-on demonstration of the topics.

Cybernetics for the Masses
implants, sensory extension and silicon - all for you!

Lightning talk on biohacking, complete with cyborg speaker, implant demonstrations, and knowledge of how to hack your own perception of electromagnetic radiation for approximately thirty Euros. Can be done in .de, .fr or .uk. All expenses paid by yours truly. Please please please.

I'd like to do a lightning talk on what's become my specialty - biohacking, or meathacking, whatever you wanna call it. I've got a full set of home-brewed implants, a subdermal RFID, a sort of cult on the Internet and more enthusiasm than you can fit in three people, plus things like proven designs for cheap EM sensory nodes, experimental verification of that shit I'm claiming, etc. I have videos of procedures, photos of what I've been doing and the like, and will happily make gory slides for all to see. Can do demos of the EM nodes and RFID chip as well. I'm pretty good with public speaking.

I will sign any stuff you need me to regarding not telling people to cut themselves up for hacking, since that's what I do. I just want to tell people about the grinder movement - underground biohacking - it's my life. My article in H+ Magazine about it got called a "call to arms for biohackers" - well, I want to go one better and call out to potential biohackers in person.

I can do this in German, French or English, or all three, but English would be better. I can get to the congress and pay all expenses myself. In fact, I'd pay -you- to be able to speak to so many people about something so underexposed and yet so potentially fascinating to hackers.

Please please pretty please. I'll love you forever.

File -> Print -> Electronics
A new circuit board printer will liberate you from the Arduino-Industrial Complex

Are you ready to wake up from the cult of Arduino? Tired of plugging together black-box pre-built modules like a mindless drone, copying and pasting in code you found on Hackaday? You've soldered together your TV-Be-Gone, built your fifth Minty Boost, and your bench is awash with discarded Adafruit packaging and Make magazines. It's time to stop this passive consumption. It's time to create something that is truly yours. It's time, my friend, to design your first circuit board. And you'll need a machine to print it.

Outsourcing printed circuit board (PCB) manufacture can be expensive and slow. You want your board now, for free. And designing PCB's is hard. You'll make mistakes, and some boards will be wasted. You can etch your own PCB's at home but the process is fiddly, and notoriously difficult to perfect. What if you had a printer that could make PCB's? A rapid prototyping machine for circuit boards.

In this talk I will present my progress towards an inexpensive PCB printer by reverse engineering Epson inkjet technology. And I'm not talking about the crappy print-and-bake method you might have seen on the internet. Come and learn about the miracle of microfluidics within the modern consumer inkjet printer, and how to push it to do new, exciting things. I'll be describing some reverse engineering techniques, a bit of electronics circuit design and the potential for 3D microfabrication with inkjet technology.

A PCB will be printed and etched live, on stage, at 27C3!

From robot to robot
Restoring creativity in school pupils using robotics

Today, hacking is reserved for the microscopic fraction of the population who manage to shake themselves free of the suppressive education regime. Student Robotics is the beginning of the solution. By fostering creativity through competition to solve engineering challenges, we provide the inspiration society desperately needs. We develop an open platform for robotics and provide it to schools to open students' minds to the world of hacking.

Student Robotics pushes engineering into schools by running a robotics competition between 16 to 18 year-olds. We send university students into schools to mentor the participating teams. The organisation is run entirely by students, who also develop the hardware and software for the participants to use.

Student Robotics involves a whole range of software and hardware development, including including microcontroller programming, computer vision, and web-apps. This year we've started shipping the BeagleBoard as the robot's main computing device, providing us with a lot of scope for future hacking.

In this talk I will:

Discuss the motivation behind Student Robotics
Provide a technical overview our current hardware and software
Discuss the future of Student Robotics in Europe

Hey Teacher. Leave them hackers alone.

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There are many other non-robotics talks that many Botballers would find interesting. All talks will be live-streamed. And no, you don't have to be a master hacker to have a good time watching the talks. The full list of talks is available at: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events.en.html

Botball Community members can use this thread to discuss these 27C3 talks, or any other talks from 27C3 that you found interesting.