A hardware conference worth attending

The Hackaday Superconference touches on challenges regularly discussed on the Supplyframe Hardware Blog

Chris Gammell
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

This blog covers the space between hardware design and manufacturing. We not only write about it here, we also cover the monthly events that happen at the Supplyframe San Francisco office called the Hardware Developer Didactic Galactic (HDDG). If you’ve read this blog before, you’ve seen that we cover talks by people working on a variety of hardware challenges. They might be trying to assemble PCBs in their garage or they might be creating electronics for extreme environments. Each has a similar theme of hardware creation in some form; you don’t need to produce millions of units to experience significant challenges around creating a product.

Taking the garage mainstream

Personally, I’ve always thought of Hackaday community members as the engineer working in their garage late into the night or on the weekend. Hackaday.com (the blog) has been around for 10+ years now and Hackaday.io is a vibrant community of people building and documenting their hardware. But these garage engineers are the same people who are full-time engineers during the weekday. They are either reapplying their talents to a project they are passionate about, building a future business venture or dipping a toe into a new area of hardware (or software…or whatever).

The Hackaday Superconference is billed as the “the greatest gathering of hardware hackers, builders, engineers and enthusiasts on the planet”.

After attending for the past two years, the Superconference has delivered on this promise. Though a small conference, not many other hardware conferences have brought together a core group of engineers and enthusiasts working on the different stages of hardware. Sure, there are larger scale conference covering some niche topics like ultra high speed signals or military embedded applications. But the Hackaday Superconference is different because of the high-level discussions about hardware. When I think of “hardware”, I think of a group of people considering the entire process. A group of generalists not by profession, but by necessity. Often these engineers are working on their own projects and on their own time. In other scenarios, they are working to prototype something inside a larger organization and need to consider the entire ecosystem to properly address the challenges at hand. Here’s a great example we’ve covered in the past:

These conversations now take place in an alley between the Supplyframe DesignLab (view some of their videos here) and the neighboring Los Angeles College of Music (LACM). They will again on November 11th and 12th, 2017. The strength of the talks and programming last year was only outstripped by the conversations and connections that took place in the alley; we assume the same will be true this year.

The interesting thing about this conference is it exists outside many traditional hardware conferences. It’s affordable (at least compared to the thousands of dollars for typical professional conferences) and it’s on the weekend. This means that it probably will not attract the employees looking to use up their training budgets or relax at a large corporately funded retreat. The past attendees have been groups of hardware enthusiasts with a wide range of skill levels. But everyone there is interested in sharing and contributing to the hardware community.

Join in

We write about it today because the Call for Proposals is now open (and will be until August 14th). People who read this blog and work on hardware are likely a great fit for this event. This conference encourages speaker applications from people out in the real world, building things every day.

If you’re more of the strong, silent type, you can also buy a “true believer” tier ticket, starting today. This is a reduced price ticket available for purchase before the speakers are announced. For the unacquainted, see the speakers from 2016 and 2015 or check out all of the videos of their talks on the Hackaday YouTube channel.

Supplyframe (who run this blog) also are the parent company of Hackaday, so we’ll be there! We hope you decide to join as well.

Supplyframe

Discussing the business of hardware and hardware manufacturing.

Chris Gammell

Written by

Chris is a person who enjoys hardware.

Supplyframe

Discussing the business of hardware and hardware manufacturing.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade