Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

What is the meaning of life? I once wrote to every philosopher in the UK to ask them. Their answers were meagre and dispiriting. One even included a death threat.

Since then I've moved on study why babies have such a great time being babies. Anyone who has met a baby knows how much they delight in the world. As a baby scientist I set out to discover why babies laugh so much more than the rest of us and what it tells us about the human condition. I've written a whole book about this but to save you reading it I will summarise the secret of babies happiness and reveal how it fits in nicely with the best answers to the meaning of life.

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Members of the EMF infrastructure teams (network, power, lighting, video, telephony) will give some insight into how we delivered these services this year. We'll talk about our workflow, some of the new services we've delivered, and share some statistics on how they were used. We'll also talk about some of the automation we've developed to ease our workload and enable consistent and rapid build-up on the field.

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Planet Labs, PBC operates the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in history, collecting data of the entire landmass of our world on a near-daily basis with over 200 CubeSats. Planetary Scientist Dr. Tanya Harrison will discuss these CubeSats and how scientists are using them to better understand our ever-changing Earth.

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Over the past year or so, I've become way too interested in tracking London Underground trains with greater precision than anyone else so far. Transport for London provides an API ("TrackerNet") to get departure boards for all the stations -- but (ab)using that information to track the journeys of each individual train has proven much harder than expected.

I'll explain how I built a system to squeeze useful insights out of an API not really designed to provide them -- including a fair few workarounds for TfL's capricious signalling systems, way more graph theory than I have any right doing, and why I now really hate the District Line. You'll be able to see how applying a carefully tuned pile of random maths lets me go from a chaotic jumble of data to a near-perfect model of the Tube map!

I'll also cover the practicalities of running this system, explaining how I packaged it all up into a website people can actually use without getting banned by TfL for using their API too much or overloading the server I run it on.

Don't let the mention of graph theory scare you off; this talk should be appropriate for all audiences, and should appeal to anyone with a casual interest in railways, open data, or infrastructure.

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The results and winners of the Field-FX weekend demo competitions. We will show all the best demos and other productions and highlights from all the best submitted over the course of the festival.

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Fashion tells a story of who we are, expressing the opinions and positions of both wearers and designers. Fashion-tech -- fashion embedded with programmable electronics -- offers more dynamic expressions for fashion. This talk will first discuss the importance and direction of fashion-tech in our society today and in the future. We will also discuss lessons learned from our collective 15 years of experience as fashion-tech designers and common issues designers face creating such garments. From our experience, we have begun research and development of a kit, that requires no coding and no soldering, to help designers move past technological barriers and enable more creative exploration during the design process. Lowering technical barriers not only affects fashion-tech but opens new possibilities for art and innovation.

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I’ve made some installations and art robots over the years, getting gradually more ambitious, and somehow this has turned into a job and a robot company, Air Giants.

This talk is about that process, and about how taking a daft idea more seriously than seemed sensible at the time has turned out to be the right thing to do.

I’ll also be talking about luck and money and logistics, all the things that need to happen to make it work.

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Back in 2018 I got involved in an arts project called Pick Me Up and Hold Me Tight, by ZU-UK.

The goal was to raise awareness of male suicide by making all 34,000 UK pay phones ring at 11am on New Years Day.

Initially I backed their crowd funder as it seemed like a good cause and also I was curious how they were going to make that many phone calls technically. This is the story of how I ended up as the technical lead on the project and what we did to make a lot of phone calls in a very short space of time.

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Using end of life or 'scrap' EV & Hybrid parts and opensource firmware I'm making an electric motorbike, having got tired of making dirty diesel ones!

The scrapyards are now filled with slightly broken EVs and Hybrid cars, and almost no one knows what to do with them. As a result the parts they are made from are very affordable and available for repurposing and hacking into your own projects.

The project is far from complete so there is nothing to bring to the show as I was hoping but there is lots to talk about and discuss regarding the state of play of hacking scrapped and discarded power inverters.

The motorbike project uses a battery from a BMW i3 electric car, the motor is from a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV & the main power inverter for driving the motor is from a hacked Prius running open source firmware with the motorcycle running gear from used motorbikes and a whole host of other bits connected together in ways never intended.

The project is only possible using the work done by the EV car hacking community Openinverter.org and their community forum which have reverse engineered the EV power controllers allowing you to run open source firmware on them with some minor alterations.

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The USB type-C connector has become the universal connector for modern devices. It is able to transmit USB, video, power, and more, Often doing several of these at the same time. All, while maintaining backwards compatibility with older hardware using relatively simple adapters.

This talk will explore the methods used to make this possible and the consequences of not following the spec (e.g. Invalid charging cables, or the issues on the raspberry pi type 4). Some basic electronics knowledge will be beneficial to understand everything in the talk but definitely not essential. For those looking to start using the connector in their own projects the talk will give the knowledge to do so.

about this event: https://c3voc.de