I've been going to linux.conf.au for 18 years now (since 2001), and presented a fair amount of linux talks related there, but the big change for me was the open hardware miniconf that started in 2010. Thanks to its projects every year, I got to learn a lot about microcontrollers and some about electronics.
This talk was my first non linux talk which detailled everything I learned from those miniconfs and projects I worked that stemmed from them. I presented it at LCA 2019 Christchurch.
you can find the talk pdf here: http://marc.merlins.org/linux/talks/Using_Open_Hardware/Using_Open_Hardware.pdf (you'll want this one to get all the clickable links in the slides)
you can view the talk slides in html here or below:
Talk video below:
I arrived the sunday before the conference and helped out the open hardware organizers with a bit of last minute setup. I also got to do some last minute testing and tuning of my panels:
hacked up ESP32 with level converters on breadboard to run 3x 64x32 SmartMatrix panels with SmartMatrix::GFX
64x64 P3.8 SmartMatrix::GFX panel vs 3x 64x32 SmartMatrix::GFX P4 flexible panels vs 4x 16x16 FastLED::NeoMatrix P10 panels
After finishing the code tuning and demos just in time, gave a 20mn miniconf talk on the history of linux.conf.au hardware miniconf. I went through how much I learned from those confs and what I was able to achieve as a result. I sure got to learn a lot about microcontroller and driver programming:
I wasn't able to bring my burning man 4096 neopixel matrix, it doesn't even fit in my car, but the irony is that my small 64x64 rgbpanel has the same resolution and fits easily in my backpack
The 64x64 compact display is showing the hand X-ray here
A few days later, I gave the longer version of my talk at the main conference. By then it had grown to over 160 slides in a 45mn slot, or 16 seconds per slide. Ooops...
The full talk went into details on what I learned in the hardware hacking field, a lot of it was simply electricity, U=RI, wires, pre-made components (small inline volt/amp meters, DC-DC converters, and so forth).
and for good measure the talk ends with how I was able to apply some of that knowledge to design simple solutions for hardware testing racks for Google's Fuchsia on arm platforms.
Hopefully the talk and/or slides are useful to you. Links:
This year, the Open Hardware Miniconf team designed a donkeycar for us at LCA 2019 Christchurch. It's a car that navigates by itself using its onboard camera connected to a Raspberry Pi using training video data gathered and analysed offline by tensorflow. That sure was an ambitious project!
I arrived the day before to help finish up the kits for the next morning:
the cars were eager to perform :)
Andy and Jon who ended up working all night to make sure the kits would work the next morning
The next morning, we showed up to build the kit:
rPi with custom last minute hat for the donkey car
done!
Jon gave a talk about the car design
Nice way to support 5V neopixels on 3.3V microcontrollers
