Marc's Public Blog - Linux Hacking

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

We then had a few talks:

Including mine on the history of linux.conf.au hardware miniconf

After the miniconf, we had a few tries at getting our own cars to self drive after training:

I decked out my car with neopixels, because bling! :)

nice car parked outside

The first day, I went to the Open Hardware Miniconf to build a monkey car with video analysis fed to tensorflow

LCA had lots of attendees as usual, enough ot overfill the main keynote room. The usual suspects/friends were there as usual:

Ah yes, the shirt and glasses, that's because of my talk Using Open Hardware from my shirt to OS testing for Google's Fuchsia

Lots of talks, thankfully they were recorded as there were 2-3x as many talks as I was able to see:

really nice keynote showing how to hack insulin dispensers to deliver the right amount at the right time

Commodore 65 slide presentation program

fpga based cell phone running alongside a commodore 65 fpga, awesome

Rusty's keynote for the win :)

the first LCA in 1999

Rusty gave a few talks since then :)

very interesting talk on how painful it was to take over grsecurity maintenance

Random pictures:

love this little laptop I found

As usual, nice parties in the evenings: speaker dinner, professional DNS, Penguin Dinner, and nice adhoc BBQ on friday:

And just like this, it was conference close:

next year will be the Gold Coast

thank you, come again :)

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...

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2015-01-06_Driver-for-direct-driving-single-to-3-color-LED-Matrices-with-software-PWM.html

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2017-04-03_Arduino-328P-Uno-Teensy3_1-ESP8266-ESP32-IR-and-Neopixels.html

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2017-04-24_Adafruit-GFX-on-NeoMatrix-and-RGB-Matrix-Panel-Demo.html

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2017-06-02_LED-Pants-and-Shirt-Programmed-With-Arduino-on-ESP8266.html

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2018-04-23_FastLED_NeoMatrix-library_-how-to-do-Matrices-with-FastLED-and-Adafruit_GFX.html

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2018-05-29_EDM-Party-Shirt-powered-with-FastLED_NeoMatrix-and-Adafruit_GFX_-plus-160Wh-_10Ah-4S_-worth-of-lipos.html

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2018-07-13_AnimatedGIFs-for-SmartMatrix-or-NeoMatrix-_Neopixel-WS2812B_-from-SDcard-or-SPIFFS_-on-Teensy-3_x_-ESP8266_-or-ESP32.html

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2018-07-30_Building-a-64x64-Neopixel-Neomatrix-_4096-pixels_-running-NeoMatrix-FastLED-IR.html

https://github.com/marcmerlin/SmartMatrix_GFX

Hopefully the talk and/or slides are useful to you. Links: