Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

The Large Hadron Collider is the latest step in the continuing endeavour of particle physicists to understand our universe. Colliding hydrogen nuclei 40 million times every second the LHC is a powerful microscope looking into the world of the microcosm. Experiments like ATLAS are detecting the products of these collisions. The large amount of data generated by these detectors are analysed by an in...

Most people know that you can have your ashes launched into space, or made into a diamond once you’ve been cremated, but being cremated is far from your only option. From alkaline hydrolysis to freeze-drying, there are many (legal) ways to dispose of a body. Whether you want to nourish fungi, roses, a coral reef or the minds of trainee doctors, your remains could make the world a better place. Why...

At EMF it's easy to see lots of cool things and think you "that's awesome, but I couldn't possibly do that!": this talk is about how to overcome that feeling and get started in a new domain. Two years ago, despite having not done any woodwork since high school, I decided to turn my hand at building electric guitars; with success enough that people are now commissioning me to make them for them. Bu...

We spent thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours building the most awesome 110kg combat robot ever to be dreamt up and then the BBC goes and cancels Robot Wars. Here's the story how Deadlock was thought up, designed and made by 3 people in a garage as well as what our plans are now. about this event: https://c3voc.de

In 1976, in an amusement park in Southern California, the crew of The Six Million Dollar Man were setting up a scene in a fun house. They moved a waxwork dummy, accidentally broke off its arm, and discovered that rather than being made of wax, it was made of a real dead guy. With a bit of investigation, the coroner discovered it was Elmer McCurdy, a failed bank robber who died in 1911. Between his...

When you share an office with a CT scanner you start to look at the world differently, it's like having X-Ray vision (because it is X-ray vision really); you know you can look inside just about anything you like (as long as it is dead and will fit in a Pringles can.) Over the last 10 years or so I've been developing different types of CT scanner and finding uses for them that are not just the usua...

Our ability to measure time has become so good that we've run into a problem. The Earth isn't very accurate. Which is awkward. Leap Seconds are our current best effort to bridge the widening gap between Atomic Time and the actual rotation of the Earth. But the addition of a leap second causes no-end of headaches for technology systems that often prefer to ignore it. In this talk I'd like to trace...

Over a ten year period the sculptor James Capper has investigated methods to combine engineering and technology with sculpture to create machines. Known as 'Mobile Sculptures', they record and challenge what we recognise in daily life as machines, in a world that relies heavily on engineering. The talk will cover all areas of the sculptors practice along a slide presentation. The sculpture MOUNTAI...

ArduTouch makes way cool sound, music, and noise! It is an open hardware, Arduino-compatible musical instrument with a touch keyboard, amp, and speaker. It is easy to build -- designed for total beginners to learn to solder together. It provides a very low cost, yet powerful, method for making music/sound/noise, and a fun way to learn Digital Signal Processing (DSP) for generating music/sound/nois...

Modern processors are amazing devices: small, fast, low power and getting better with every generation. But the most amazing things about modern microprocessors is that they work so incredibly reliably despite all their incredible complexity. This talk is about the battle between complexity and correctness and about how new formal verification tools can be used to help you design higher performanc...

Standup comedy from scientists and technologist and futurists who work at the cutting edge of tech. Jokes and stories from comedians who know their graphene from their gravity beams, their innovation policy from interstellar probes. Lydia Nicholas, Scary Boots, Cerys Bradley and Anna Ploszajski will light up your night with no crossed wires. about this event: https://c3voc.de

Falling generally is consider bad. It hurts at best, sometimes fatally. However some folks like to jump out of planes and actively seek to fall even faster. Earlier this year, CBBC wanted to accelerate a TV presenter to the speed of a diving peregrine for the series “Beyond Bionic”, this required extra speed and thus the “Jet Boot” project was born. This talk will cover the technologies we used to...

Quick

What are the tools to effectively manage a hackerspace? In this talk I’ll walk you through the infrastructure and services that we chose to set up at our lab, as well as the rationale behind the choice. We’ll explore how can people communicate better with the right tools, and what is needed to maximize collaboration potential. The talk starts with what is in our experience needed to communicate ef...

After attending the last EMF camp, I fell in love with the tweetable LED inflatable bunny. I wondered if it would be possible to take the idea of LEDs controlled by twitter and put them all over something wearable, in this case my wedding dress. My talk will go over the tech I used (suitable for absolute beginners), the mistakes that I made and the lessons I learnt along the way. From learning to...

These are not the zombies you've fragged! A bioarchaeologist and an applied philosopher will take you on a historical zombie adventure beyond Romero's shambling hordes and stories about Haitian Voodoo. Did you know that the D&D wondrous item: Hand of Glory was inspired by real artefacts? Or that miasmic "zombification" in some video games reflects medieval ideas about contagion? What do past ideas...

There are a number of emoji that, when used in digital communications, don't always refer to their original meaning. The peach emoji, for example, has been found through research conducted by emojipedia to refer most often not to the fruit, but to buttocks. Other fruit and vegetables emoji have suffered a similar fate. In this talk I will explore the ways that emoji are frequently misunderstood or...

You should be afraid of your smart home. Really afraid! I've wired up my house with dozens of Internet of Things gadgets. Some spy on me, some let in hackers, some send all my data back to China, some give me electric shocks, some betray my medical information to the police. Find out how I've ruined my domestic bliss and made my vacuum cleaner self-aware. Learn how to protect yourself and how to c...

LoRaWAN is a long-range and low-power communication system used to connect physical devices to servers. It is a set of physical and logical protocols used to connect ultra low bandwidth devices across a large area. This talk first gives an overview the technology used, why you would use it, and giving some examples of where it is being used today. It then follows the challenges of rolling out a re...

A short summary of how this year's EMF Badge came to be, the challenges we faced this time and some of the amazing things people have done with it in only three days. [alternative title, depending on circumstances: "why you don't have a badge this year"] about this event: https://c3voc.de

The 20-year mission to make an old game run properly on a new computer, with many side quests along the way. Woven together are threads of reverse-engineering (of both hardware and software), 1980s computers (in particular the original IBM PC from 1981), emulator coding, game design, electronics, microcontrollers, web services, the demoscene, test-driven development and even a bit of pure mathemat...

Have you ever wondered how to make music without buying into the world of commercial software? Are you a musician who wants to get into multitrack recording? Are you an electronic artist looking to build a digital studio? Or just curious about the tools people use to make music? The free and open-source world contains a rich selection of music software, from synths to sequencers, drum machines to...

Earlier in the year i was confronted with an ANPR system at the garage at my house so i started playing with it. The talk covers methods legal in the Netherlands where the PoC was made. I focus on the technology, on the implementation as Parking Garage access control. The topic does cover areas of speed control and other forms of law enforcement. I have not attacked those but assume that the attac...

Chromatouch & Coral will showcase new research in collaboration with Gravitational Wave researchers at University of Birmingham, with a synth connected a Michelson interferometer; not sonifying data, but using direct control voltage information to make music. Chromatouch [Leon Trimble] is a digital artist who works in audio visual performance, specialising in immersive video and audio synthesis. C...

The talk gives an overview and describes the built-in support for prototyping, testing, and running Simulink models on Raspberry Pi®. It covers how to build a basic robot that demonstrates autonomous behaviour based on vision from the ground up. The Simulink built-in support for hardware enables hobbyist, engineers and students to access the hardware capabilities of the popular credit-card sized,...