• Advanced Microcontroller-based Audio (Saturday Morning)

Advanced Microcontroller-based Audio Project page

In this hands-on workshop run by Teensy creator Paul Stoffregen, you'll wire up parts on a breadboard to get them playing, synthesizing, and analyzing sounds in real-time. Some prior experience with Arduino is recommended. Bring a laptop computer capable of running the Arduino software. Recommended to bring headphones.

BRING: Laptop & (optional) headphones. All the hardware will be provided. We're going to cover a lot of ground with hands-on activity. It's critical that everyone use identical hardware which precisely matches the written steps. That's why the audio workshop costs a bit more.

For anyone who's ever been frustrated with audio on a microcontroller... it didn't sound great, it used too much CPU time, your program was burdened with fast low-latency data movement so you couldn't use delays or simple blocking libraries like Arduino's Wire for I2C, you couldn't play or synthesize several sounds, or apply complex effects, or get high res spectral analysis in real time with proper overlapping windows, this is definitely the workshop to see. If you're used to the limitations of 8 bit chips, I believe you'll be pleasantly surprised what good a 32 bit microcontroller can do for audio!

• Simple RF Circuit Design (Sunday Afternoon)
  Michael Ossmann will show specific examples from his own designs including Ubertooth One, HackRF One, and YARD Stick One. Participants with prior experience designing non-RF circuits should be able to walk out of this workshop with the ability to design boards to use RF transceiver ICs.

• Squeezing Blood From A Stone: Getting Back Memory and Performance (Sunday Morning)

Squeezing Blood From A Stone: Getting Back Memory and Performance Project page

We’ll* guide you through a series of labs to explain how to measure performance and memory, then the basics of improving them based on your goals.

Since this is a hands on but very short workshop focusing on using the following free tools (Download and install it yourself BEFORE the workshop or you’ll be sad) and cheap hardware:

• Windows-enabled computer (MacOS with bandcamp or other VM could probably work)
• Github repo or the project on my HackADay profile.
• Keil MDK-Lite v5.16a for ARM Cortex free version (limited to 32kB)
• IDA demo from Hex-rays
• STM32L476 Discovery Board (Provided by workshop or here)
• (2 items here)ST-LINK V2 SW (util, driver, and firmware update)
• (Optional) Portable logic analyzer/oscilloscope.

*I am looking for volunteers to help me make sure everyone gets the most of out of this workshop. If you are comfortable with C, compilers, and know/can figure out the basics of the above programs, reach out to me by contacting me at volunteer *at* rebelbot.com or tweet at me. You’ll get in the workshop as well as the conference for free and meet some of the most interesting people in SF working on hardware. Totally worth 2 hours of work.

• Crowdsourcing Control with the ESP8266 Thing (Saturday Afternoon)

Crowdsourcing Control with the ESP8266 Thing Project page

Toni Klopfenstein will give a general overview of the ESP8266 Thing and show basics of creating circuits that can be controlled via WiFi. There will be an interactive demo that the entire audience can participate in controlling, to show the crowd-sourcing capabilities of IoT devices.

• Kicad 101 (Saturday Afternoon)

Kicad 101 Project page

A 4-hour version of Anool Mahidharia's popular introduction to design your own 100% custom PCB using Kicad. This workshop is tailored for the electronic enthusiast who has been breadboarding circuits but has never used an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) / computer aided design (CAD) program.

• USSSSSB: Talking USB From Python (Sunday Afternoon)
  2014 Hackaday Prize finalist Colin O'Flynn, will walk you through implementing a simple USB firmware project using an Atmel USB board.
• Designing with Antimony for use with custom skeleton-physics simulations (Saturday Morning)
  Using the 3D design software Atimony, Erin Kennedy will show you how to use Antimony to design and then create a physics simulation to observe how the forces affect your object. You will also learn how to code your own scripts for Atimony. You'll need a laptop with Atimony installed (download here: https://github.com/mkeeter/antimony), and will be using Processing with the traer.physics library.

• Learn Circuit Simulation using SPICE (Sunday Morning)

Learn Circuit Simuation using SPICE project page

Using LTspice (Windows) or NG Spice (Linux/ OSX), Tom Anderson will briefly go over what a simulation is and the common types (time domain, frequency domain, and noise). He'll also explain how they work and what happens when you run them. You'll have a chance to build simulations of an RC filter and find out how to simulate the time and frequency domains to show a Bode plot. You will also build simulations of an opamp using a voltage-controlled voltage source, plus other simulations. Come with your laptop and LTSpice or NG Spice installed.