Back from the hackers event “May Contain Hackers”

MCH2022 is a nonprofit outdoor hacker camp taking place in Zeewolde, the Netherlands, July 22 to 26 2022. The event is organized for and by volunteers from the worldwide hacker community.

Knowledge sharing, technological advancement, experimentation, connecting with your hacker peers and hacking are some of the core values of this event.

MCH2022 is the successor of a string of similar events happening every four years since 1989.
These are GHP, HEU, HIP, HAL, WTH, HAR, OHM and SHA.

I’ve bin to several of these big events. Besides these big events are many different smaller events (wannull, ne2000 etc).

First one i’ve been was HIP97. I went with Bigred at that time.
I had to get the tickets at that time, he didn’t had a handle at that time. It was Monique who came up with his new nick.

After HIP97 there was HAL2001 WTH2005 and OHM2013 which i was present.
HAL2001 the whole ICEcrew was present, WTH a part of them, OHM a few and i was with a few PRUTS friends.

Now i was with my girlfriend, AND with Bigred again!
Loads of fun and memories. Had not seen Bigred since a inbetween hacker party at my place.
So ’97 and now ’22 .. jeez 25 years!

So MCH, it was great again.
Loads of stuff to do and to see.
Weather was … okay. Two days where really hot, one day some light rain but a load of wind. Our neighbours tent collapsed, beer tents where reenforced.
First campsite with a supermarket!
Music stage was awesome, lasers and fire!

I went to a lot of talks, even my girlfriend found some she was interested in.

This was the last time i’ve brought my “Windows free zone tape”
This big roll of tape was used on many occasions.
I got this roll somewhere < 2000, I did a search but couldn’t find anything mentioning it on the web. Maybe some archive.org entry?

• Starting a Home Computer Museum (which i almost did in the past)
• streaming 360 video (going to try this with my Vuze XR Camera)
• Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159…
  (Really enjoyed this one)
• Hacking the genome: how does it work, and should we?
• And more

Besides the talks i’ve done some workshops:

• Micropython on the badge (see my other post)
• Kicad – PCB designing

Meanwhile we where looking at all the villages and hackerspaces. Loads of interesting people to meet. Like our neighbour two tents futher, he was also a home-brewer, and he brought a minifridge with beer taps connected to it.

When back at our tent or Bigreds Campervan, we talked about differences now and then. New technology, what we’ve been upto in the last years and tinkering, loads of tinkering.

I’ve brough a big plastic container with .. ehh “things to do ….”

• My 6502, bigred helped me debugging the 16*2 display.
  (Luckily his campervan was packed with electronics!)
  We cannibalized one of his projects for a display, and re-flashed his eeprom programming arduino to test my display. ( The arduino i had to reflash later to program a rom he had given me for my 6502. )
  Other toys he gave me: Print for the programmer, and a C64 Cartridge print for Exrom and Game.
• Mini C64 with a little screen and raspberry zero.
• 5050 ledstrip (didn’t had time to reprogram this for our mood-light)
• Handheld gamehat: Bigred found some old games he played when he was young
• Mikrotik router, because i wanted to make a dmz for my girlfriends laptop. (MS)
• Playing around with my Vuze XR camera
• Huskycam, which i’m planning to use on a racetrack
• DVB-T DAB FM Stick, got some hints and tips from Bigred.
  (Note to myself … fix the antenna!)
• My Arduino touch bagpipe player with i2c
• The wifi deauther, which has a display which i wanted to use to make a programmable clock for my 6502. Using a rotary encoder and the display to control the speed in Hz.
• I spend many hours playing with the Badge and Kicad

Wrote some 6502 assembly, arduino sketches, php, bash and micropython.

While playing around with the badge i got some things working easily.
Spinning logo and blinky leds.
Next goal to achieve was, to get the gyroscope to control the angle of spinning.
Most of the code worked, but the gyro values stayed zero!
(After many hours …. you have to start/enable the chip/measurements on the bno055 first! .. duh! )

I didn’t had my dev directory from my main battlestation synced in my nextcloud, so changing things for the 6502 was a b*tch.
Used vasm and acme to generate a bin file to use to fill the rom.
Didn’t like the eeprom programmer program, because i could not easily check the rom contents.
Have to look into that later on.

While learning to use Kicad, which i only had been using to draw schematics (besides fritzing) , i learned to create a pcb.
Which gave me the idea to make a print for the power-on-reset for the 6502. Which is going to be the first PCB by ordering, instead of the old skool messing around with DIY print making. (see next post)

….. Oh, why my display was not working?
I even connected my 8bit logic analyzer to the pins of the display.

Everything was correct.
But i didn’t use a variable resistor for the contrast. Just a simple resistor i could find. Luckily … bigreds stash.
All those hours debugging, all for one resistor!
(I have to mention, we had a suspicion halfway. But it was too hot and we where too lazy to go to Bigred’s campervan, to get a potentiometer. )