Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

Closing Ceremony about this event: https://c3voc.de

The first self-balancing skateboard was made by Ben Smithers in Norfolk around 2007. This inspired me to build my own in 2008 and along the way I discovered how to program in C, Arduino's, IMU fusion algorithms, not realising this would be as hard as it turned out to be. A gyro was £160 back then, a 3 axis IMU is now about £5, how things have changed. Since then I have built one and two wheeled bo...

A while ago, I started building a robot that would find the developer who'd broken the build and call them a cock. Because of depression, I never finished it, and the robot came out weird anyway. More recently I started on a cuckoo clock that calls you a pillock, among other things. This talk will be an attempt to explore why I keep building abusive machines. There will also be live demonstrations...

As Pi Wars approaches its 5th year, we want to tell you why and how we put on a two day competitive event that challenges teams of school children, their teachers, families and adults to make robots. The robots are all built with the Raspberry Pi as the main controller, but apart from a size limit, teams can do whatever they like. And what they do even surprises us! Come and find out how robots ar...

Light is managed using lenses, objectives, telescopes. In theatre or TV, it is common to see spotlights following characters and laser lights creating special effects. Similar control on sound is difficult: you need expensive sets of speakers, like the ones in musical festivals, in ultrasound scanners, and in haptic devices. In this talk, I will introduce another way: using 3D-printed materials, s...

Some of you may have seen them in a pub, betting shop or even a casino. What I'm referring to are video slot machines, and they are the most popular item at any one of these places as well as the gaming expos where players can put money in and spin the reels in the hopes of getting a combination that will get the big rewards. But how easy is it to develop games for these machines? What goes into m...

Often we use graphs and charts ('visualizations') to display information in a way which makes understanding the data they show seem intuitive. They are used by well dressed individuals to show their projected quarterly earnings, by primary school teachers introducing exciting new ideas to wide eyed children, and by news organisations trying to explain that it's definitely ok to drink that 5th cup...

High Street clothing brands are developing digital machines to replace mass production with mass customisation. They aim to give customers more choice, but still as consumers rather than makers. We will explore how makerspaces could adapt these tools for DIY clothes making and show some of the tools that are accessible now. Using new technologies, you no longer need to be a specialist to design cl...

Maybe you've been doing too much for too long. And if you have, there's the very real possibility that this is going to hurt you. Occupational burnout is the too common outcome of extended, seemingly-inescapable stress. In this talk we'll look at the impact of burnout, how to manage your way through it and a potential, unexpected upside. Come along to learn more about burnout, cognitive psychology...

Since the dawn of time (well, Web PKI) certificates have been used to ensure that internet users are actually talking to the websites they think they are. Since civilisation began (well, the mid-90s) Certificate Authorities have been trusted to Do The Right Thing™ when issuing these certificates, and watch out for baddies trying to get their hands on certificates for domains they don’t own. But wh...

Technology seeks to ease our aging years with humanoid resources to replace care workers and improve our quality of life. But is that the answer for our 'golden' years? How do we plan and prepare for what's ahead? Depending on our genes and our jeans, we could live into our 100s but a lot rides on our perception of ageing and whether we want to do what our parents have done. Edye is a social anthr...

In this talk, I will talk about some interesting applications of maths to video games, including how the find the shortest possible route to complete Pac-Man and the 3- and 4-dimensional shapes that 2D video game characters spend their time on. about this event: https://c3voc.de

A talk which will appeal to anyone who has an interest in making their own electronic music instruments and noise makers. Starting simply, with creating your own contact mics and spring reverbs, progressing all the way to creating your own midi controllers and fully programmable digital audio effects. The concept is to show you how easy it is to get started (I had no formal electronics background,...

BrightSign is an assistive wearable technology designed to translate custom hand gestures to text and speech by employing advanced machine learning software. It aims to give people who are non-verbal full control over how they communicate. Sign language and speech can be personalised to a chosen voice, accent or language, making BrightSign applicable on a global level. about this event: https://c3...

Spider silk is the strongest natural fibre known to man - stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar, spider silks act as natural glues, cements, elastic capture webs and physical gills, all to enable spiders to survive and hunt on 6 out of 7 continents on Earth (the exception being icy Antarctica). I've spent the last 4 years researching spider silk at the University of Nottingham, learning how spi...

At the beginning of 2017 I joined a volunteer Data Science community called Data for Democracy and became involved in a project focused on putting together a submission for a worldwide competition run by UNITE ideas (part of the United Nations) on behalf of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) in Geneva. The main aim of this challenge was to build a machine learning-driven tool that...

Along with my friend Sawn, I run a Youtube channel where we build kids' invention ideas. From jam firing rockets to flaming pianos, from the last year and a half we have brought to life a different kids' invention ever month. We never know what we are building or what might go wrong until the last minute, so we've learnt to embrace failure, not take ourselves too seriously and cause havoc in publi...

One of us had a shed full of antique pipe organ parts, the other had a Zil-131 dumped in a hedge at the bottom of his garden. We decided to start building a portable, fully playable musical instrument with a variety of audio-visual effects including singing Tesla coils, propane cannons and fog horns. Because why not? It is still very much a work in progress, but in this talk we will explain and de...

Weight and temperature measurement for non-intrusive monitoring of a beehive. Total cost well under £100. Data transimission every 15 minutes via wifi link to Thingspeak for generating realtime data curves on a browser on a PC or mobile phone. Benefits of curves throughout the year will be described eg. swarm detection, advance warning of swarm preparation, need to feed colony, colony collapse, pr...

A brief history of folklore and technology. At EMF2016, I talked about numbers stations - mysterious, Cold War shortwave radio stations. After doing that talk, I realised that the thing that I find most interesting about the numbers stations is how they became an urban myth, a living legend of the networked age. For EMF2018, I'll examine the intersections of technology and folklore. I'll have a lo...

Tudor Tarlev is an ex-nomad and university dropout turned researcher of lifelong human learning, with a Degree from the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris. In 2015 Tudor visited maker spaces across the globe (http://bit.ly/2KWnqT9) to document how people learn by doing. That trip inspired the launch of experimentQ.org podcast - a show about rebel teachers, scientists, and entrepr...

Information security is a big deal nowadays as more and more people start to take their privacy online very seriously. But what's the point of protecting yourself if the web services you use are vulnerable to big scary hackers? If you want to catch a glimpse of penetration testing, come along and learn about concepts such as discovering vulnerabilities, running through them, exploiting and patchin...

This talk will provide an introduction to software-defined radio and start by asking why we need SDR, before proceeding to taking take a look at the key components. The open hardware LimeSDR platform — which is being used to provide a GSM network at EMF Camp — will be covered in some detail as we explore its high level architecture. Details of example applications will be provided and there will b...

The talk will follow Matt’s progress through his career designing, developing and deploying animatronic control systems from the mid 1990's to present day, with the goal to make animatronic performances more lifelike and simpler for the puppeteer. Including creations from films such as: Lost In Space, Harry Potter, The Worlds End and the latest Star Wars episodes including The Force Awakens, Rogue...

A talk on my recent works involving the physical sensation of sound, and how we can trick the senses to create the perception of a "loud" environment for one person at a time. Let's create music equipment that is accessible for a DJ who is profoundly deaf. Let's create VR experiences that let us feel the vibrations of the virtual world around us. Join me down a polymathic rabbit-hole where we can...