Crowd Supply
Teardown Session 43: Zeke Wheeler and Satellite Tracking
updated
Join us live to find out more!
steieio.github.io/pico-dirty-blaster
*About Supercon*
Supercon is a fantastic event to geek out with your fellow hackers, and to share the inevitable ups and downs that accompany any serious project. Like last year, we’ll be featuring both longer and shorter talks, and hope to get a great mix of both first-time presenters and Hackaday luminaries.
Source: hackaday.com/2024/05/15/hackaday-supercon-2024-call-for-participation-we-want-you
*Key Moments*
_Coming soon_
*Links & Resources*
- Supercon 2024: hackaday.io/superconference
- Sensor Watch on Crowd Supply: crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-watch
- Sensor Watch GitHub repo: github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch
- Cyber City Circuits: cybercitycircuits.com
- Oddly Specific Objects: oddlyspecificobjects.com
- Thunderscope GitHub repo: github.com/EEVengers/ThunderScope
- Hackaday project page: hackaday.io/project/180090-thunderscope
- EEVengers: eevengers.com
- Thunderscope on Crowd Supply: crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope
- Jumperless V5 on Crowd Supply: crowdsupply.com/architeuthis-flux/jumperless-v5
- Jumperless V5 GitHub repo: github.com/Architeuthis-Flux/JumperlessV5
- Crowd Supply Field Report submission page: crowdsupply.com/field-reports
- Teardown Sessions home page: crowdsupply.com/crowd-supply/the-teardown-sessions
Twitter/X: @helenleigh, @crowd_supply, @josecastillo @arabidsquid
*About the Teardown Sessions*
Welcome to The Teardown Sessions, a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests. Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers.
Come on by and see what our creators are making: https://www.crowdsupply.com.
Join us on Discord to chat with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and the community at large: discord.gg/mAgtHAw
**Don't forget to Like, Link, and Subscribe!**
#opensourcehardware #hardwarehacking #crowdfunding #opensource #hardware #teardown #maker #hacker #electronics #crowdsupply #manufacturing #hackaday #supercon
In this Teardown Session, Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh talks with Alpenglow Industries' founder, Carrie Sundra, about running great hardware events, from workshops and meet ups to conferences. As well as sharing their experiences running and attending hardware events around the world, they will discuss ways to make events accessible, inclusive, and appealing. Sundra will also be giving us a sneak peak as some of the things she is preparing for this year's Makerfaire Bay Area.
*About Our Guest*
Carrie grew up on the island of St. John in the US Virgin Islands, then attended Harvey Mudd College where she proudly scored a 19 on her first electrical engineering exam. Electronics felt esoteric and un-relatable, so she subsequently chose to pursue more mechanical and manufacturing courses. But shortly after starting her first job, she got thrown into fine-pitch SMT soldering and sensor research for a 6” micro air vehicle (and this was in 1999, this stuff didn’t exist yet). Suddenly, faced with a super cool application and concrete “thing” to build and make work, electronics got a lot more interesting. Ever since, she’s designed custom PCBs and helped develop products for a variety of applications - from avionics for small UAVs that are now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, to livestock thermometers, to waterproof power scrubbers, to assistive devices for freezing-of-gait Parkinson's symptoms, to her own yarn-winding and twisting devices. She now lives in San Luis Obispo, a coastal California town which is home to a burgeoning tech and maker community. She climbs, snowboards, knits, makes stuff, and teaches soldering to anyone who wants to learn.
*About Crowd Supply*
Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers. The Teardown Sessions are a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests.
Come see what our creators are making: crowdsupply.com
*About the Teardown Sessions*
Welcome to The Teardown Sessions, a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests. Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers.
*Links & Resources*
* Alpenglow Industries:alpenglowindustries.com
* Makerfaire Bay Area 2024: makerfaire.com/bay-area
* Teardown 2024: crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024
* Hardware Happy Hour: hardwarehappyhour.com
**Don't forget to Like, Link, and Subscribe!**
#opensourcehardware #hardwarehacking #opensource #hardware #teardown #maker #hacker #electronics #crowdsupply #crowdfunding #manufacturing
In this episode of the Teardown Sessions Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh celebrates the launch of the Thunderscope oscilloscope with Aleksa Bjelogrlic.
*About ThunderScope*
ThunderScope packs the power of expensive, bulky high-end oscilloscopes into a portable and affordable package. While traditional scopes are limited by their built-in processing capabilities and cramped user interfaces, ThunderScope is designed to stream the complete 1 GS/s of sample data in real time to your computer for processing and analysis. ThunderScope’s fast connections (via Thunderbolt, USB 4, and PCI Express) and unique software-defined architecture allows it to be used for everything from simple measurements to complex protocol analysis.
*About Our Guest*
[Via Hackaday] Aleksa is an electrical engineer who loves test equipment and open-source hardware. For the last several years, he combined those two passions to design an open-source oscilloscope from the ground up to be faster, more flexible, and accessible to all.
*Links & Resources*
* EEVengers: eevengers.com
* Thunderscope GitHub repo: github.com/EEVengers/ThunderScope
* NG-Scope Client: ngscopeclient.org
* LiteX FPGA dev tool: https://www.litex.dev/
* The Open Hardware Summit conf: 2024.oshwa.org
* Hackaday Prize 2021 Demo: youtube.com/watch?v=TIc-xa1BUYk
* Hackaday project page: hackaday.io/project/180090-thunderscope
* Thunderscope on Crowd Supply: crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope
* AMD's FPGA Playground: crowdsupply.com/amd/fpga-playground
* AMD-Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA: mouser.com/ProductDetail/Xilinx/XC7A35T-2CSG325C?qs=rrS6PyfT74epuZxLpm8mMg%3D%3D
*About the Teardown Sessions*
Welcome to The Teardown Sessions, a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests. Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers.
Come on by and see what our creators are making: https://www.crowdsupply.com.
Don't forget to Like, Link, and Subscribe!
#opensourcehardware #hardwarehacking #opensource #hardware #teardown #maker #hacker #electronics #crowdsupply #crowdfunding #manufacturing #electronicsrepair #oscilloscope #thunderscope #electricalengineering #thunderbolt #xilinx #artix #fpga #amd #PCIe #oscope
FlippyDrive is an optical disc drive emulator for the classic GameCube game console that installs without any soldering, can be used in conjunction with your physical disc drive, and fits neatly inside the cube itself with no case modifications — preserving the appearance of the system.
Discs can be backed up directly from your physical drive and loaded via the microSD card or stored and loaded from your local network. The onboard Wi-Fi provides experimental support for loading disc images (subject to network conditions), while the Ethernet add-on offers a reliable connection to your network storage.
FlippyDrive is an all-in-one mod that allows you to run homebrew and game backups.
*Key Moments*
00:20 CS News and What's New
01:43 Prize giveaway rules
2:28 Introducing Chris and Trevor
4:20 Flippy Drive's origins: just a hack for a few nerds...
5:07 What is Flippydrive, exactly?
6:48 The role of FPGAs
7:54 Why the RP2040
10:24 The challenges and compromises of doing hardware in software
11:50 Audience Question: "Is it possible to apply the FlippyDrive technology to other consoles and do something similar, i.e., Dreamcast?"
13:50 How they reverse-engineered the drive
14:52 AQ: "How did you figure out the pass-through cable?"
20:11 Showing off some hardware...
21:26 First prize giveaway!
21:55 What features are coming next?
22:40 Add-on Ethernet board, Bluetooth, wifi
25:57 AQ: "How have you both felt about the community response to the project?"
28:08 Community contributions, impacts
31:49 What was the motivation for open source hardware?
34:11 AQ: "What resources would you recommend to someone who wants to explore hardware hacking?"
39:52 AQ: "What the best cube color?"
42:20 Hacking is about making things good
43:57 Prize giveaway number two!
45:53 AQ: "[Will] the first batch systems ship before the Crowd Supply campaign closes?"
48:39 AQ: "Has any other device on Crowd Supply taken down the site...?"
50:02 AQ: "Any plans for separate backplate colors or Ethernet add-ons after the campaigns?"
53:49 What's up with the current shipping dates.
58:17 Attack of the Giant Sticker
1:00:17 Helen's sticker collection
1:01:30 How to stay in touch
*About Crowd Supply*
Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers. The Teardown Sessions are a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests.
Come see what our creators are making: crowdsupply.com
*About the Teardown Sessions*
Welcome to The Teardown Sessions, a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests. Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers.
*Links & Resources*
- FlippyDrive campaign: crowdsupply.com/team-offbroadway/flippydrive
- FlippyDrive documentation: docs.flippydrive.com
- Team OffBroadway: teamoffbroadway.com
- Retro-Brite: retro-brite.com
- RP2040 microcontroller: raspberrypi.com/products/rp2040
**Don't forget to Like, Link, and Subscribe!**
#opensourcehardware #hardwarehacking #opensource #hardware #teardown #maker #hacker #electronics #crowdsupply #crowdfunding #manufacturing #gaming #gamecube #opticaldrive #cubeboot #emulator #nintendo
In this episode of the Teardown Sessions Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh talks with Andrew Greenberg from Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS). Join them live to celebrate the launch of Oregon's second satellite.
*About Our Guest*
Andrew Greenberg is the Chief Technical Officer at The TOVA Company, Principal Embedded Systems Engineer at APDM Wearable Technologies (an ERT company), and an embedded systems consultant. At Portland State, he helps teach and manage capstones (senior projects), and helps with the Electronics Prototyping Lab (EPL), a rapid prototyping lab. Andrew also is an advisor for the Portland State Aerospace Society, which builds small rockets, liquid fuel engines, and nano-satellites.
Source: https://www.pdx.edu/profile/andrew-greenberg
*About OreSat*
The OreSat project is managed by the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), an interdisciplinary student-led aerospace project in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University. PSAS started with amateur rockets in the latest 1990s, and now we're building rocket avionics systems, liquid fueled rocket engines, and of course, satellites. PSAS is hundred or so open source space nerds, mostly undergraduates of all majors, some graduate students, a few faculty advisors, and mentors we call "industry advisors".
*About Crowd Supply*
Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers. The Teardown Sessions are a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests.
Come see what our creators are making: crowdsupply.com
*About the Teardown Sessions*
Welcome to The Teardown Sessions, a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests. Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers.
*Links & Resources*
- Portland State Aerospace Society: http://psas.pdx.edu/
- OreSat Ground Station on Crowd Supply: crowdsupply.com/psas/oresat
- NASA cubesat launch initiative: nasa.gov/content/about-cubesat-launch-initiative
- Qorvo RF Accelerator program: crowdsupply.com/qorvo/rf-accelerator
- Qorvo: qorvo.com
**Don't forget to Like, Link, and Subscribe!**
#opensourcehardware #hardwarehacking #opensource #hardware #teardown #maker #hacker #electronics #crowdsupply #crowdfunding #cubesat #satellite #psu
ThunderScope packs the power of expensive, bulky high-end oscilloscopes into a portable and affordable package. While traditional scopes are limited by their built-in processing capabilities and cramped user interfaces, ThunderScope is designed to stream the complete 1 GS/s of sample data in real time to your computer for processing and analysis.
Learn more at: crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope
Crowd Supply is a store, distributor, and crowdfunding platform. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.
Fault injection, also known as "glitching," is a process to intentionally cause a system to misbehave in a way that is beneficial to an attacker. The technique is commonly used against microcontrollers to defeat code protection features or affect cryptographic operations. Once employed only by the hardcore, it is now accessible for any hardware hacker to add to their arsenal. In this presentation, Joe will provide an overview, demonstration, and personal stories of injecting faults into embedded systems in order to reveal their secrets.
Joe Grand, also known as Kingpin, is a computer engineer, hardware hacker, teacher, daddy, honorary doctor, occasional YouTuber, creator of the first electronic badges for DEFCON, member of L0pht Heavy Industries, and former technological juvenile delinquent.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/shot-through-the-heart-an-introduction-to-fault-injection
Introducing the PolyKybd Split72, a mechanical split keyboard featuring innovative OLED displays in its keycaps. With 72 keys, each display boasts a resolution of 72x40 pixels. These monochromatic displays offer incredible versatility, allowing you to enhance your typing experience in various ways.
Crowd Supply is a store, distributor, and crowdfunding platform. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.
FlippyDrive is an optical disc drive emulator for the classic GameCube game console that installs without any soldering, can be used in conjunction with your physical disc drive, and fits neatly inside the cube itself with no case modifications — preserving the appearance of the system.
Crowd Supply is a store, distributor, and crowdfunding platform. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.
Nordic leads with the lowest power (and one of the smallest and most integrated) LTE-M modems you can find, the only solution today for DECT NR+, and any given month is 30-40% of qualified BLE designs in the market for our leading lowest power, efficiency, and support. Nordic has even broken into PMIC and Wifi-6 now.
Nordic fully embraces Zephyr as the RTOS of choice for its supplier and hardware agnosticism, and open-source nature. (We will also explore debunking a few RTOS vs. Non-RTOS notions that tend to proliferate the industry. In many cases, it very much does make sense to use one.)
In this talk, we will go through the solution journey for Nordic from start to finish, from hardware to software to real world deployment.
About Johnny Nguyen:
I’m a Nordic Field Application Engineer who previously worked as a firmware engineer for wireless (short-range and long-range) infrastructure deployed across North America. I’ve developed across many platforms, designed CPU architectures, and wrote an open source RTOS. I enjoyed developing with Nordic so much, I decided to join them. If you’ve been outside, you’ve seen my work!
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/iot-development-with-nordic
Presented by Duane Benson:
What the Arduino did for the microcontroller, the ESP32 is doing for wireless devices. With built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, and multiple toolchains available, the ESP32 is one of the easiest ways to get started - and keep going - in the world of wireless connectivity. Join me for an overview of the devices and two of the most popular tool chains: Python and the Arduino IDE with advantages and disadvantages of each. Follow the story of my own ESP32 projects, including a Bluetooth 1935 tube radio simulator and a rotary telephone Bluetooth “numeric keypad.”
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/jumping-into-wireless-with-the-esp32-featuring-python-and-arduino-coding
This is a support group for people that, like me, have used Eagle for long enough to start to question if there really were 4 lights, er I mean that I don’t need a subscription service to have good tools.
I hardly know anything about KiCad, and thats plenty enough to use it to make things, so let me show you just how little you need to learn to make something!
Can we spin an art badge PCB during a talk, from scratch? Let’s find out!
Ben Hencke is a recently reformed and sometimes relapsing Eagle user, who has made a few PCBs over the years. Recently, the Pixelblaze and related boards. Hencke does do not have an EE degree, but he has been making PCBs since he was old enough to buy ferric chloride from RadioShack.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/how-i-switched-from-eagle-to-kicad-with-no-surprises-whatsoever
This talk tells the story of HealthyPi, an open source patient monitor concept that we made, and how it evolved to the HealthyPi Move, a wearable monitor that can be used for continuous monitoring of vital signs, and also everything in between.
The talk covers the challenges faced in making a wearable device, the design decisions that went into making HealthyPi, and the lessons learned along the way. The talk also covers the open source hardware and software that went into and came out of making HealthyPi, and how it can be used to make other medical devices too.
Ashwin Whitchurch is part of a company called ProtoCentral Electronics, an India-based developer and manufacturer of open source hardware, mainly focused on open source healthcare applications. They have launched a number of projects on Crowd Supply and getting ready to launch the next one. Whitchurch is a software and hardware engineer by education, with Masters degrees in both subjects. Currently interests include developing medical embedded devices using the Zephyr ecosystem.
Sponsored by @NordicSemi
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/from-making-an-open-source-patient-monitor-to-making-it-wearable-the-healthypi-story
I’ve been involved in some way or another with every project ever launched on Crowd Supply. I’ve seen a lot of great things. I’ve also seen a lot of mistakes. This talk will cover the latter as a means to increasing the former. No one will be publicly shamed.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/mistakes
Ayesha will share examples from her own projects, showcasing how these whimsical PCBs can be used as tools for outreach projects. Join this session to discover the creative potential of PCB badge projects and their role in making PCB design education exciting and inclusive for all.
Ayesha Iftiqhar-Wilson is an Electrical Engineer fully dedicated to advancing Climate Tech through her work with startups. Additionally, she is passionate about STEAM Outreach initiatives, mentoring underrepresented youth by introducing them to Electronics and programming through engaging workshops. As part of these workshops, Iftiqhar-Wilson designs imaginative and artistic PCBs, ensuring that participants leave with both knowledge and a keepsake of their experience.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/pretty-pcbs-for-steam-adding-art-into-electronics
Microcontrollers, sensors, all sorts of dedicated chips make up the building blocks of the devices we create when designing circuits and PCBs. Someone makes these... that someone could be you! What was unthinkable just a few years ago is now possible: thanks to TinyTapeout and an ecosystem of open source tools, you can learn and actually produce fully custom ASIC designs. And if you want to hold real silicon that you've sculpted in your hands, it's possible at a fraction of traditional cost. Digital, analog and mixed signal designs are all possible, and I've created ASIC projects, and made demoboards, software and extension modules that interact with each of these. I'll walk you through my adventure and show you how you can enter the world of nanoscopic design, regardless of your level of expertise.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/making-chips-with-open-tools-and-tinytapeout
Presented by Paul Cox:
I co-designed the Arduino Engineering Kit, a collaboration between Arduino and The Mathworks (the makers of MATLAB). The kit includes three projects: A self-balancing motorcyle, a little forklift two-wheeled bot, and a whiteboard bot. I’ll describe the design and making adventure while explaining the choices along the way.
Paul Cox is an EE at Nike. Among lots of other previous gigs, including building SBC and drive-by-wire systems for autonomous trucks, he was application engineer at The Mathworks for 6 years, presenting in webinars and at conferences about embedded code generation and real-time testing.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/designing-the-arduino-engineering-kit
Discover how MicroPython revolutionizes the process of developing embedded systems, enabling everything from rapid prototyping to a seamless transition to production. Learn how this powerful open-source platform brings speed, simplicity, and joy to your hardware projects.
Ned Konz has been doing embedded systems firmware and hardware development for over 40 years. He was the technical reviewer for Packt Publishing’s recent "Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition", and has designed embedded systems for consumer, industrial and medical clients. His interest in dynamic languages for microcontrollers grew while he was working on the Squeak Smalltalk platform while working for Alan Kay. His latest projects that use MicroPython include a smart toothbrush system that will be available Q4 2024 and an add-on for vintage Fluke multimeters that provides a continuity measurement beeper function.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/prototype-to-product-with-micropython-faster-and-happier-embedded-systems-development
3D printing is an amazing tool allowing anyone to make their ideas a reality. The last few years have seen huge improvements in technology and pricing for consumer 3D printers, making them more accessible than ever. In this talk we will go over the various types of 3D printers, their components, how they function and how they compare to each other.
This talk will also cover the strengths and weaknesses of 3D printing, especially compared to other common manufacturing methods. After this talk you should have the skills to look at most 3D printers and understand how they work and what the various components are. It should also give you the tools to decide which 3D printer is right for you and your project.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/todays-3d-printers-what-they-can-do-and-how-they-work
SynapticRewrite is a cyber-physical researcher focused on embedded and mobile device security. With a background in lockpicking, nanotechnology, and a Master’s in Applied Computer Science, they moved from SOC analyst to security researcher. They combine scientific rigor with a passion for hardware hacking and rapid prototyping.
So you know connectors right? There’s like prolly like a bunch of "generic" ones you see all the time. But do you ever wonder what they are actually called? Who makes the "official" ones? What crimp tools are you supposed to use (instead of the ones you bought of amazon for like $30)? How are you supposed to use them? And wire, what do all those numbers and colors mean? and what’s with those weird military connectors? And their corresponding weird tools? And actually, why do all the crimp tools look the same? Well, after falling down a rabbit hole far deeper than I am willing to admit I have answers. We’ll also cover some history, crimping theory (yes that is a real thing), Tips n’ Tricks and other random nonsense I learned along the way.
Sen Hastings is an FOSS and SBC enthusiast, Linux user and occasional Kicad user. Another lifetime ago he had a job working in aerospace where he learned a ton about connectors, wires, and application tooling (crimp tools), which was the inspiration for this talk.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/crunch-time-everything-you-wanted-know-about-wires-contacts-and-crimping-but-were-afraid-to-ask
OpenFlume is a bench top flow tank designed for fluid mechanics research in the Harris Lab. Throughout the process of building OpenFlume we ran into many challenges; from technical details of acrylic tank fabrication to what CAD software to use, getting the project certified by OSHWA, making generalizable build documentation, and finally preparing for publication in an open hardware journal. Come hear about our research and why we choose to make it open source!
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/openflume-designing-an-accessible-flow-tank
Thanks to Open Source EDA such as KiCad and the near absolute domination on embedded devices’ OS by Linux (and GNU/Linux by extension). It has never been easier to develop complex, computer-like products. On this talk, participants will get an overview of my development journey making an Open Source Linux Tablet.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/developing-an-open-source-linux-tablet
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/dont-panic-debugging-hardware
Margalus will highlight the unexpected synergies between user engagement, storytelling, and iterative design from gaming that can help us invent new hardware. Join us to unveil how a designer’s mindset leads to innovative solutions in hardware development.
Jayson R. Margalus is a maker, designer, computer scientist, and outdoorsman. Margalus is the Johnson Professor of Entrepreneurship and Leadership, and Director of the Connolly Center for Entrepreneurship at Washington & Lee University. Prior to that he was the founding Faculty Director of Maker Innovation at DePaul University’s Idea Realization Lab(s), and a Professional Lecturer of Industrial and Game Design in the School of Design in the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media.
Margalus concurrently runs Spacelab NFP, a non-profit makerspace, and Margalus, LLC, a design studio that develops toys and game platforms. He holds an MS with distinction in Human-Computer Interaction from DePaul University, a BS in Political Science from North Central College, and various design certifications from Cornell, MIT, Harvard, and Pratt (pursuing).
His work has been featured on outlets from the Chicago Tribune to NPR, and he has given keynote talks for organizations ranging from Chicago Public Schools’ Googlepalooza to the American Medical Association‘s ChangeMedEd. He was invited to the Obama White House in 2015 for his work on makerspaces.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/from-game-design-to-hardware-innovation
Nathan Jones is an active-duty Army officer and Assistant Professor at West Point Military Academy. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College and his master’s degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. One of Nathan’s favorite things is making neat electronic devices and then teaching people how to do the same.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/building-a-simple-command-line-interface
The Serberus is an evolution of the TIMEP, created by a fellow Google employee a few years ago. It has a similar level shifter design to allow you to connect to any logic voltage between 1.65V and 5.5V, there is even a setting to allow you to match the voltage of your target if it is using a non-standard voltage.
The project is free and open source with all board layouts, design files and schematics published.
Patrick Kiley - Principal Consultant, Mandiant has over 20 years of information security experience working with both private sector employers and the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). While he was with the NNSA he built the NNSA’s SOC and spent several years working for emergency teams. Patrick has performed research in Avionics security, embedded systems and Internet connected transportation platforms. He even bricked his own Tesla while trying to make it faster.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/introducing-serberus-a-multi-headed-embedded-hardware-interface-tool
Leanna Pancoast graduated as an electrical engineer and has worked on various projects throughout her career from tiny MEMS devices to furniture photography robots to sensors in an MRI machine.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/responsive-and-glowing-pcb-wedding-invitations
I wrote this talk for myself five years ago: an ambitious but stuck tech-opportunist. I expect people at this conference are generally quite good at working though technical challenges and questions that start with "how do I?". But most interesting questions are the ones Google & ChatGPT can’t answer for you:
"What should I be making & will people buy it?"
"How can I tell if the juice is worth the squeeze before diving in?"
"What’s the next right move?"
"What are my unknown-unknowns?"
For people like us the hard part of starting a maker business isn’t problem solving. It’s finding the right problems to solve, and then learning how to best use your limited 24 hours a day to solve them.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/starting-a-maker-business
When possible, Griffin tends to use recycled, salvaged, or repaired electronics in his projects, so this will be less of a recipe and more about the adventure he found using an ancient Raspberry Pi as the foundation of his puppy buttons. Griffin hopes to inspires you to build something for someone else, make the most of the electronics around you, or at least be entertained by some cute doggy pictures.
Peter Griffin is an electronics and embedded systems enthusiast. He loves making awesome and useful things from stuff that other people would call junk. Next time you’re cleaning out an electronics bin, maybe you’ll consider taking something apart or giving it to someone who wants to. Who knows, it just might end up pictured on someone’s blog a few years later!
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/making-puppy-buttons
Straithe is an open source maintainer and supporter. She works for Great Scott Gadgets as technical community manager. Her day-to-day involves community management, marketing, writing technical documentation, and anything else vaguely related. Outside of work she is a photographer, model, and dancer.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/wireless-hacking-on-a-5-budget-with-microcontrollers
KiCad is an open source software suite for Electronic Design Automation. The goal of the KiCad project is to provide the best possible cross platform electronics design application for professional electronics designers.
Wayne Stambaugh is the KiCad project leader. Before KiCad he was a full time EE for 32 year with a broad range of electronics design experience and embedded and application software development. Stambaugh has been with the KiCad project since 2007 and the project leader since 2011.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/kicad-project-status
Dr. Nadya Peek is an assistant professor at the University of Washington where she runs Machine Agency.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/machine-agency
Greg Steiert is an embedded systems engineer and perpetual tinkerer. He has designed printed circuit boards professionally but now designs them mostly as a hobby. He presently works in technical marketing at Altera.
As well giving this talk, Bhoite will be displaying a selection of his sculptures as part of Teardown’s hacker art exhibit.
Bhoite has been making circuit art since the 90s, including a planetary lander inspired circuit sculpture with cellular connectivity, a tiny VU lander and a BLE satellite.
Mohit Bhoite works as a senior hardware engineer at Particle, where he designs and builds their flagship IoT products. He is also an avid maker who dedicates his personal time to building free-formed electronic circuit sculptures. He combines his background in electronics and robotics to create static and kinetic sculptures that convey information fetched over the internet through sound, light, and motion. These sculptures sometimes take on an anthropomorphic form thereby leading the viewer to attach personalities and emotions to them.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/space-themed-free-formed-circuit-sculptures
Zeke Wheeler has been making waves on the engineering circuit. When he was 8 years-old, Zeke began a multi-year project to contact the International Space Station over ham radio using homemade antennas, circuit boards and satellite trackers. Zeke has a popular YouTube channel (@KJ7NLL) where he documents his engineering projects.
When he was 11 years-old, Zeke Wheeler was a featured speaker at two engineering conferences: CadenceLIVE 2023 and DAC (Design Automation Conference) and has been written about in EEJournal. In the fall of 2024 his 5-year mission will finally be fulfilled: he will help students communicate over ham radio with an astronaut aboard the International Space Station via NASA’s educational outreach program ARISS.
Zeke recently won Best of Fair, Middle School, at the Northwest Science Expo, as well as the Lemelson Early Inventor Award for his “Affordable, Portable, Orbital Desktop Satellite Tracker.” He loves to share his projects with the engineering community.
Thanks to @Qorvo for sponsoring this talk!
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/affordable-portable-orbital-desktop-satellite-tracker
This short talk will demonstrate OpenWSN on a Windows 10 laptop and a set of OpenMote-B wireless microcontroller boards and briefly introduce the network stack and the concept of time-slotted channel hopping. The demonstration will also be available to see ad hoc during the day Friday. This talk is led by members of Portland State University’s Wireless Environmental Sensor Technology (WEST) lab.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/open-source-wireless-sensor-network
This talk will recap the development of that oscillator from iCEBreaker FPGA and ULX3S development boards, through release and manufacturing, and then discuss the various pitfalls and discoveries we have made in prototyping since then.
Eric Schlappi is an a hardware engineer and musician who has been designing and manufacturing Eurorack synthesizer modules full time since 2018.
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/post-synthesis-adventures-in-using-fpgas-for-eurorack
James, also known as Bald Engineer, has extensive experience and a passion for talking about capacitors. His past role as a field application engineer gave him a unique understanding of the common pitfalls of these devices. He has written numerous articles, spoken at various events, and made educational videos on the humble capacitor. You may already be familiar with James from his work on AddOhms, Hackster.io, and the element14 Community (Workbench Wednesdays.)
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/stop-using-the-wrong-capacitors
Thanks to @AMD for sponsoring this talk!
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/short-talk/making-e-ink-go-fast
Nathan Seidle is the founder of SparkFun Electronics and has been building wacky projects and products for over 21 years. His latest endeavours have sent him down the rabbit hole of GNSS.
Recorded on June 21, 2024 at Teardown 2024
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2024/long-talk/einstein-made-google-maps-work
**HealthyPi Move** is an open-source biometric monitor in a watch form factor. It supports continuous or intermittent monitoring of vital biometric signals like ECG, heart rate, HRV, PPG, SpO₂, blood-pressure trends, and respiration. HealthyPi Move is designed as a platform for innovation and customization, enabling users to integrate health tracking into their projects and personal wellness routines.
Crowd Supply is a store, distributor, and crowdfunding platform. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.
In this Teardown Session, Crowd Supply's Helen Leigh talks with Rajeev Piyare from Conexio, the creators of the Conexio Stratus and the soon-to-come Conexio Blitz and Conexio Stratus Pro cellular IoT prototyping platforms.
*Key Moments*
00:19 Crowd Supply News and What's New
05:31 Introducing Rajeev
06:44 About Conexio and the Stratus origins
07:46 The use case that inspired a product
09:50 Manufacturing challenges during the chip shortage
11:29 Changing a design midway through a Crowd Supply campaign
12:50 Shipping catastrophe!
14:40 Stratus Pro compared to original Stratus
15:09 The new Nordic NRF 9161 has advantages
17:10 Exciting New Feature! An on/off switch.
18:47 Programming the Stratus boards, the SDK
21:10 Good documentation matters
22:30 What is Zephyr and why?
26:37 Join the Stratus community: Discord, GitHub
27:38 Why open source? Did it help?
28:58 Did open source build engagement?
31:10 A peek at the Conexio Blitz and its chipset
33:49 The Stratus Pro campaign is live!
35:19 How did community feedback on the original Stratus influence the Stratus Pro?
37:30 The startlingly low power consumption of the Stratus Pro
39:10 The software and hardware used to accomplish that low power
41:20 How did they select the platforms to integrate with?
43:19 About the DataCake IoT platform
44:36 Who is Conexio? A mystery revealed...
46:30 The Chicago hacker scene
47:22 What's in the future for Conexio, upcoming projects
49:02 The pandemic origins of the Stratus!
50:13 Why Conexio Stratus is the best! (It's the community...)
52:40 Checking out some hardware and some pro tips
54:33 Working with Hackster and Hackaday
57:00 The Cory Doctorow Approach: Publish Everywhere
57:45 Their approach to social media and communicating with the community
*About our Guest*
Rajeev Piyare is an entrepreneur, wireless systems engineer research scientist and photographer originally from the beautiful islands of Fiji and now living and working in Chicago, USA.
*Links & Resources*
* Rajeev on GitHub: github.com/rajeev1986
* Rajeev's Homepage: rajeevpiyare.com
* Conexio Technology home: conexiotech.com
* Conexio Stratus Pro campaign page: crowdsupply.com/conexio/conexio-blitz
* Conexio Blitz campaign page: crowdsupply.com/conexio/conexio-stratus-pro
* Nordic Community Hub: crowdsupply.com/nordic/community-hub
* Nordic Developer Academy: academy.nordicsemi.com
* Nordic home: nordicsemi.com
*About the Teardown Sessions*
Welcome to The Teardown Sessions, a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests. Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers.
Come on by and see what our creators are making: https://www.crowdsupply.com.
Don't forget to Like, Link, and Subscribe!
#nordic #opensourcehardware #hardwarehacking #opensource #hardware #teardown #maker #hacker #electronics #crowdsupply #crowdfunding #manufacturing #iot #devkit #wifi #cellular #supplychain
Learn more at crowdsupply.com/conexio/conexio-stratus-pro
Crowd Supply offers curated crowdfunding for engineers, designers, and creators of open source technology. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life. We help creators launch with the funding and support they need to deliver thoughtfully crafted products to delighted backers. crowdsupply.com
True Wireless Valve from Uhome offers a completely wireless experience while operating on battery power and reducing installation complexity, cost, and safety concerns. Additionally, TWV enables smart monitoring of a manually operated valve. Its seamless integration with Home Assistant and compatibility with the Zigbee protocol overcomes limitations often found in other water management devices, offering you more flexibility and control.
Crowd Supply is a store, distributor, and crowdfunding platform. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.
Inkplate 6 MOTION is a versatile, hackable tool for makers, designers, thinkers, and others who are ready to take advantage of e-paper display technology. Its adaptability, paper-like aesthetic, daylight readability, and extremely low power consumption make it ideal for a wide range of applications, whether you're a creative professional, a product designer, an engineer, a student, a writer, a smart-home enthusiast, or anyone else who engages in creative, technical pursuits.
This advanced Inkplate variant includes a 6-inch e-paper display with significantly reduced latency. Its 11 frame-per-second refresh rate dramatically reduces visible lag when rendering dynamic content such as animations, videos, keyboard input, graphical UX elements, and scrolling text. Combined with a powerful, 32-bit **STM32H743 microcontroller** and enhanced connectivity options, this display is perfect for high-performance e-paper projects.
Crowd Supply is a store, distributor, and crowdfunding platform. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.
Esparagus Media Center is a series of three ESP32-based audio products designed to modernize aging stereo speaker systems with cutting-edge internet streaming capabilities.
These standalone devices connect to your existing hi-fi system, offering a fast and simple upgrade. All three boards are based on the ESP32 microcontroller, so they barely use any power while idle, and boot up in seconds.
Esparagus Media Center boards come with firmware that runs Spotify Connect, Apple AirPlay, and Logitech Media Server, and can receive Bluetooth audio from a local source like a smartphone. They can be used to build multi-room audio systems. And, because they use open hardware and firmware, they can be customized to run your own software.
Crowd Supply is a store, distributor, and crowdfunding platform. Our mission is to bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.


