Ten years is a funny age for a tech community. It’s old enough to have inside jokes, battle scars, and at least one
drawer full of “I swear I’ll reuse these someday” parts. It’s also young enough to still get genuinely excited about
a blinking LEDespecially if that LED is blinking because you finally found the ground you forgot to solder.

Hackaday’s 10th Anniversary celebration leaned hard into that sweet spot: a full day in Pasadena that mixed
hands-on workshops, a mini-conference with serious brains, a build-off fueled by equal parts caffeine and audacity,
and a party that proved hackers can be social as long as you provide solder smoke, power tools, and a project table
(or three). This wrap-up isn’t just a recap of what happenedit’s a look at why it worked, what it says about
hardware culture, and how you can bottle that energy for your own community.

A 10-Year Milestone That Actually Meant Something

Plenty of websites hit an anniversary and celebrate by… publishing a banner. Hackaday celebrated by getting people
into a room and giving them reasons to build, learn, and show off. That choice matters. Hardware communities aren’t
built on “likes.” They’re built on shared friction: the moment someone else hands you a spare resistor,
the moment you watch a robot fail in a new and educational way, the moment you realize the person next to you is
also quietly terrified of lithium batteries (but is acting cool about it).

Pasadena wasn’t random. It was a practical nexusclose to the organization behind Hackaday and the infrastructure
needed to host a day-long maker mash-up. More importantly, it gave the event a “real place” feeling, like the
internet had briefly turned solid.

The Day’s Blueprint: Build, Learn, Listen, Celebrate

The schedule was basically a love letter to how hackers actually operate: start building early, learn by doing,
absorb big ideas in the afternoon, and then reward the entire mess with a party. That structure wasn’t accidental.
It creates momentumeach segment feeds the next.

1) The Build-Off: Competitive Creativity Before Breakfast

The day kicked off with a build-off focused on alternative gaming controllers. This is the kind of challenge that
sounds like a joke until you realize it’s secretly a masterclass in human interface design, prototyping under time
pressure, and embracing weird constraints. You’re not building “a controller.” You’re building a statement:
“This is what input could be if we stopped accepting defaults.”

Build-offs also do something else: they force collaboration. Even brilliant solo builders eventually need another
set of hands, a second opinion, or someone to say, “Are you sure that wire is supposed to be smoking?”

2) The Workshops: Skill-Building with Immediate Payoff

Workshops ran in the morning, and they weren’t theoretical. They were the kind you can’t fully “learn” from a blog
post because the learning happens in your fingers.

• Line-following robots: a soldering-and-systems exercise disguised as a cute bot. You build,
  you debug, you watch it veer into a wall, and then you become emotionally invested in the concept of sensor
  calibration.
• Lockpicking basics: equal parts mechanical intuition and “wow, that’s… surprisingly subtle.”
  It’s a lesson in how real-world systems fail, and also a reminder that security is often about design choices,
  not movie-magic.
• Universal lithium cell chargers: practical electronics with a side of healthy respect for
  chemistry. Participants assembled chargers and learned the “care and feeding” basicsexactly the kind of
  knowledge that prevents future garage fires and makes you the hero of your group chat.

The workshop mix was smart: one project that rewards perseverance (robots), one that rewires how you think about
physical systems (locks), and one that upgrades your “adulting with electrons” skills (lithium charging).

3) The Mini-Conference: Big Ideas, Short Talks, No Fluff

In the afternoon, the event shifted into a mini-conference formatmultiple speakers plus short hardware lightning
talks. This is a killer combo for hardware crowds. Long conferences can turn into passive consumption, but
lightning talks keep the energy up and the stakes low. You can share something half-finished, weird, or
wonderfully nicheand the room will still cheer because that’s the point.

The speaker lineup hit a satisfying range: space engineering, homebrew computing, cryptographic puzzle design,
unconventional computing, and embedded multi-core thinking. That variety is important. It signals that “hardware
hacking” is not one hobbyit’s a whole ecosystem of obsessions that occasionally share tools.

Talk Highlights: Five Different Ways to Be a Hacker

The talks didn’t just deliver information; they modeled different hacker identities. If you’ve ever wondered,
“Do I belong in this scene?” the answer at this event was basically: “Which flavor of weird are you?”

Steve Collins: Hacking Your Way to NASA (Yes, Really)

One of the most compelling through-lines in hardware culture is the “side projects become a career” pipeline.
Steve Collins’ story leaned into that: hacking isn’t merely youthful tinkeringit’s skill formation. The details
mattered: early experiments, iterative problem-solving, and the ability to improvise when real systems fail.

The deeper point is that space missions don’t run on inspiration. They run on rigorous engineering habitshabits
that hobbyists can accidentally practice for years while building “just for fun.” When a room full of makers hears
that their tinkering maps to real aerospace work, it doesn’t just motivateit validates.

Quinn Dunki: “Veronica” and the Joy of Building a Computer the Hard Way

A homebrew computer project is the hardware equivalent of deciding to bake bread by growing your own wheat.
Completely unnecessary. Completely glorious. Quinn Dunki’s “Veronica” project is beloved because it’s both
technically serious and emotionally relatable: start on a breadboard, learn what you don’t know, then keep going
anyway.

The project also works as a cultural bridge. It connects modern makers to the DNA of early personal computing:
systems you can understand end-to-end, where “because I can” is a sufficient design requirement.

Ryan Clarke (a.k.a. 1o57 / LosT / Lostboy): Cryptography as Performance Art

Hacker conferences love puzzles, but the best cryptographic challenges aren’t just cleverthey’re engineered.
Designing puzzles that scale across a roomful of talented, stubborn people is its own craft. It’s part security,
part psychology, part storytelling. A good puzzle doesn’t simply resist; it invites.

The meta-lesson here is broadly useful: when you build any systemhardware, software, or socialyou’re shaping how
people behave inside it. Puzzle design just makes that truth impossible to ignore.

ThunderSqueak: Non-Binary Computing and the Courage to Be Weird

Non-binary computing (including ternary approaches) is the kind of topic that instantly divides a crowd into two
groups: those who are fascinated, and those who are fascinated but pretending to be skeptical. The value of a talk
like this isn’t only “maybe we’ll all switch to ternary tomorrow.” It’s the reminder that the defaults in computing
are historical choices, not laws of physics.

Hardware hackers thrive on reconsidering assumptions: voltage levels, logic families, architectures, even what
counts as a “bit.” The practical takeaway is mental flexibilitythe willingness to ask, “What if the base
assumption is negotiable?”

Jon McPhalen: Multi-Core Embedded Thinking Without the Headache

Embedded systems are often taught like a rite of suffering: interrupts, timers, edge cases, and the inevitable
late-night stare into a logic analyzer trace that looks like modern art. The appeal of multi-core embedded design is
conceptual clarity: sometimes you don’t need a single brain juggling knives; you need multiple small brains each
doing one job well.

Talks like this land especially well at a maker event because they connect immediately to what people are building:
robots, controllers, instruments, and devices that behave better when their tasks are cleanly separated.

The Hands-On Highlights Everyone Remembers

Every event has a few moments that become instant lore. This one had several.

The “Duck Hunt, But Make It Hackable” Moment

The party featured a hacked take on Duck Hunt that used rotary encoders as controllers. This is
exactly the kind of ridiculous, delightful idea that only works in a room full of people who can both imagine it
and execute it. It’s nostalgia with an engineering punchline: “Sure, we could play the original… or we could make
it weirder and better tonight.”

Tools, Community Muscle, and Hackerspace Energy

It’s hard to overstate how much “having the right tools on hand” changes a build-heavy event. Soldering stations,
hand tools, test gear, spare partsthese aren’t amenities; they’re oxygen. The event benefited from serious community
support, the kind that turns a venue into a temporary hackerspace. And once a room feels like a hackerspace, people
behave differently: more helpful, more experimental, less precious about being “done.”

The Real Takeaways: Why the Format Worked

If you strip away the party cups and the robot wheels, the 10th Anniversary succeeded because it solved three
problems that many community events fail to solve:

• It gave beginners a win: workshops that produced real objects and real understanding.
• It respected experts: talks that weren’t watered down and lightning sessions that rewarded
  niche enthusiasm.
• It created crossover: builders met speakers, coders met hardware folks, security brains met
  robot brainsand everybody stole at least one idea.

The event also balanced “planned” and “unplanned.” The schedule provided structure, but the real magic happened in
the gaps: impromptu debugging circles, side conversations about parts sourcing, and those quick “wait, show me that”
moments that turn strangers into collaborators.

How to Recreate a Hackaday-Style Anniversary in Your Own Community

You don’t need a massive budget to recreate the vibe. You need thoughtful constraints and a commitment to making
the day build-first.

A simple, proven recipe

1. Morning workshop block: pick two to three workshops with different skill profiles
   (electronics + mechanical + “conceptual weirdness”).
2. One build-off: something playful but real (controllers, instruments, kinetic art, “make a tool
   that solves a silly problem”).
3. Afternoon talks + lightning: four talks max, 15–20 minutes each, plus 5–10 lightning talks.
4. Evening social: keep it casual; give people a reason to demo what they built.

Workshop ideas that match the anniversary spirit

• Build a tiny robot (line follower, wall follower, or light seeker)
• Battery safety + charger build (practical and confidence-boosting)
• Lock basics (mechanical locks, digital locks, or bothkeep it legal and educational)
• One “weird computing” demo (ternary logic, analog computing blocks, or FPGA basics)

The key is to make it approachable without making it shallow. Hackers don’t mind hard problems. They mind problems
that don’t go anywhere.

Conclusion: A Wrap-Up That Feels Like a Beginning

Hackaday’s 10th Anniversary wasn’t successful because it was polished. It was successful because it was
alive: people building, learning, and laughing at the exact moment their project betrayed them. The event
didn’t just celebrate a site’s historyit celebrated the culture that the site helped amplify: curiosity, generosity,
and the stubborn belief that you can understand (and improve) the physical world if you’re willing to pick up a
soldering iron and try.

Ten years is a milestone. The real win is what happens next: more meetups, more workshops, more strange little
machines, and more people realizing they’re allowed to build things that don’t exist yet.

Experiences: of Hackaday Anniversary Energy

If you’ve never been to a build-heavy maker event, it’s hard to explain the vibe without sounding like you’re
describing summer camp for adults who think oscilloscopes are “kind of relaxing.” You walk into a room and the first
thing you notice is the soundscape: the soft hiss of soldering irons heating up, the tiny click of cutters,
the occasional triumphant “YES!” followed immediately by a horrified “NO!” as someone realizes they soldered the
connector on upside down. Nobody judges. Everyone has done it. Some people have done it twice.

The second thing you notice is how quickly strangers become teammates. You don’t introduce yourself with your job
title; you introduce yourself with your problem. “My robot keeps turning left,” you say, and within 30 seconds
someone is kneeling beside you like an emergency room doctor, asking about sensor placement, looking for a cold
joint, and gently suggesting you might have wired your motors with the kind of optimism usually reserved for
startup pitch decks. You trade parts like currency: a resistor for a header pin, a spare LED for a promise to share
your schematic later. That’s not networking. That’s survival with manners.

Then there’s the workshop moment when learning becomes physical. Lockpicking, for example, feels like gaining a new
sense. You stop thinking of a lock as a monolithic “closed” object and start feeling the internal negotiation:
tension, feedback, tiny mechanical decisions. The lesson isn’t “go pick locks.” The lesson is that systems have
interfacessometimes hidden onesand understanding them changes your relationship to the world.

Battery work has a different emotional texture: respect. Lithium projects make even confident builders slow down and
double-check. You see people who can hand-route a board in their sleep suddenly become careful, methodical, almost
ceremonial. Someone says “current limiting,” and the room nods like a choir. You learn that safety is not the enemy
of hacking; it’s what makes hacking sustainable.

By late afternoon, after the talks, the room is buzzing in a quieter way. People repeat phrases they just heard
because they’re testing them in their own minds: “multi-core design,” “cryptographic puzzles,” “non-binary logic,”
“homebrew computer.” You can watch inspiration happen in real time, like a status LED turning on behind someone’s
eyes. It’s not starry-eyed motivation. It’s practical: “Wait, I could do that. Not today. But soon.”

And then the party portion hits, and the seriousness melts into playful competence. Someone demos a hacked game
controller that looks like it escaped from an art museum. Another person explains, with straight-faced sincerity,
why a rotary encoder makes a classic game funnier. You laugh, you learn, you remember that engineering can be joyful.
The best part is leaving with more than a souveniryou leave with new techniques, new contacts, and the quiet
confidence that the next weird idea you have is worth trying.

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