Go eth0!
People soldering
Although my visit to this years winter-event was cut short, I’m glad I got to spend some time at the eth0 event yesterday. The winterlan is like a way-scaled-down version of the yearly ccc conferences (of which the 27c3 was the latest edition). There are plenty of differences, but the concept is the same: put a lot of smart people in the same physical space and let them make things happen!
Normally, I travel by car to such events, loading it up with whatever I can grab from my hackerspace, Revelation Space. For reasons I’ll disclose below, this year I had to travel by train and thus light. All I was able to bring was an ikea box full of soldering irons, kits and miscellaneous tools. Luckily, this proved to be enough to provide a soldering workshop on Friday night. It was fun to see how the room reserved for this quickly filled up with nerd-toys, such as a dremel workstation, various lab-bench power supplies, a digital scope, logic analyzers and what have you. Word has that today, a laser cutter, makerbot and vinyl plotter will also arrive.
Meanwhile, in the lounge, I found a friend willing to provide me a crash-course in VHDL. This is the language used to ‘program’ FPGA’s. Basically, you describe a logical circuit built of basic building blocks such as flip-flops, logic gates and function blocks in a high level of abstraction. This then gets compiled into an actual wiring for an FPGA chip. My friend had ported Conway’s game of life into this language and it was intriguing to see how this translated into logic gates. Definitely a subject worth picking up some time.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of fun, educational and simply enjoyable contacts one can have at this event. Tickets are still available by the way, and you don’t have to be a hard-core hacker to attend. It’s in Zevenaar, near Arnhem. So if you’re interested in electronics, computer security, retro-gaming, micro-controllers, lock-picking or any other intellectual challenge, check out the website.
The reason my visit was cut short, by the way, is that I’m currently heading towards Toronto, Canada for the ctrl-x-ethics workshop. Here I will meet the likes of Jacob Appelbaum, Seth Hardy, Rafal Rohozinski, Nart Villeneuve and other such smart and interesting people to discuss ethics in security research. Not an all together lousy excuse to miss eth0, I’d say.
One of the workbenches at the eth0 hardware lab
