Hackaday Europe 2025
My Hackaday Europe 2025 Experience
It was a blast!
This was my first time in Berlin and attending a hardware-related event.
I arrived on Friday evening. There was a meet and greet at a Biergarten in Berlin. Sponsored by CrowdSupply! They are not only helping me with my crowdfunding campaign, but they are pretty involved in this community. I even met my CrowdSupply contact Helen Leigh. She was showing us a bit of her fabric for electronics projects!
Welcoming community
Since I was traveling alone, I felt a bit lost the first couple of minutes. But that was over fast. After getting a beverage, I moved to the next group of people and asked if I could join. Thanks very much for being so friendly and inclusive! (Shoutout to Lefki, Peter, Marijn, Lukas, George, Francis and probably more!)
The crowd was super diverse. All kinds of countries (US, Netherlands, Slovakia, Tschekisloawai, Sweden,etc). All kinds of backgrounds. Artists, embedded engineers, industrial engineers, business owners, professors, PhD students, you name it. Nerds in every direction. Everybody was passionate about what they were doing, making every conversation interesting and fun!
In the beginning, I did not want to talk much about my PokyPow project. I had the feeling that this was nothing compared to what everybody was doing. But after some time, I did open up, and it was nice. The whole flow with the development of hardware, software (ESPHome and ESP Web Tools), and how the next steps will be. Also found a few people interested in the project.
Next time, I will bring a business card with a QR code to let people sign up quickly when they are interested.
Talks
Even though I am not really in the hardware and embedded space, the talks were interesting!
One of the Arduino founders (David Cuartielles) talked about biodegradable PCB manufacturing: What if the Future [of Electronics] was Compostable?
Bunnie was there, which I knew for some reason I can not remember. He seems to be pretty well-known in the community and has shown the latest research on how you can scan property chips with cheap/affordable off-the-shelf parts like a microscope and webcams. Seeing Through Silicon with IRIS (InfraRed, in-situ) Imaging
The talk about Developing a NFC Decentralized Payment System was also super interesting!
Check out their YouTube Channel for all the talks. You might have different interests. 😉
Badge Hacking
The ticket did include food and drinks for the whole event, a t-shirt, and of course, the badge.
Since the interface was public just before the event, people started hacking at home. It was crazy what people came up with. Even though I am not that into badge hacking myself, it was fun watching people go crazy and enter the contest as well.
10 out of 10, would go again
I hope to attend again and recommend the event to everyone slightly interested.
Have a great day! ☀️
