Hack 33 – January 2023

Quite a romp to ring in the new year, and the first hack of 2023 was a full deck of wild cards and wacky characters!

Things people did

• Dan fixed his dementia clock and hacked on a birdbox camera

• Ryan dropped the news that Cossimo is dead, long live boring espresso machine, and then he also ordered a bunch of meal options using Ruby

• Joe saved a hedgehog

• Pete found zero XSS vulnerabilities in his company’s React code, and also worked on a test framework to automatically detect buggy tests and dependencies precluding parallel test runs

• Adam declared that during the next hackday he would try to create and register a company in the UK

• Hugh dropped a bunch of sweet data API resources and then learned how Raspberry Pi Pico’s PIO coprocessor works and made it blink some LEDs in order to figure out how to control a charlieplexed LED grid that ended up not working which is a matter for a future hack day

• Piers and the Boys (catch them on tour in 2023!) continued hacking away on all things camper van, developing an ESP32 microcontroller using MicroPython and Ultrasonic Distance Sensor for an oil tank level sensor, pushing levels over MQTT to a Raspberry Pi Mosquito server, and THEN worked on a Django app to log the telemetry!

• Ben got hungover while doing the washing up, and then recovered and received some Classic FM from a Software Defined Radio