Lightning Talks - EMF 2026

Hello, welcome to stage C. We have lightning talks now uh which is going to be run by Thor. >> Okay, EMF, we are back. Lightning. Yes. Um, you're not going to have anything like as much of my vamping this time because we have got a super pack schedule. So, we are just going to get on with it. Here's Chris. [applause] >> It's like a video game, but in real life. Is a phrase that has existed almost as long as video games have, but it's a phrase that's used so much that it needs disambiguation. You've got to specify what type of video game. But in real life it is one particular type of video game in real life uh is anologist to real life cooperative Mario party and it's a little genre that's more popular than you might think. It's existed since the 20th century. There's more than 250 commercial installations around the world in more than 30 countries. A lot of these are one-offs, but there are some multinational brands as well, notably Prison Island and Activate. Often these centers stand alone, but a lot of the time they're in family entertainment centers. They tend not to compete with each other too much. While you can identify commonalities between games with similar formats, there's some fairly limited recognition of them as a genre. They're mostly discussed in the escape room space. The French language escape room space has settled on the term leakual games for them. But in the English language space, we just about agree with the term challenge arcades. My definition of a challenge arcade is a site where teams play many large quick physical or mental games chosen from a wide selection. Now, it's a fairly flexible sort of definition. The term arcade is chosen to connote a site with a choice of physical machines and which physical machine you choose determines which game you're going to play. There's also a more consolelike form where there's only a single room but it has image mapped walls and you get to choose which game that you play on those and that's the immersive game box brand. The best games in challenge arcades have got size and spectacle. They have interesting unusual input methods. A common gameplay style is to present a game without instructions and part of the game is to work out what you have to do in order to win. Many of these games get lost very quickly after which the team will leave the room, but they may choose to come back in straight away with the new information they've learned and do a bit better the next time. Right. Uh, there are a few limits as to what sort of games can be played in a challenge arcade, and the best of them give you a high-end toy box to play with in an adventure playground. Physical games can involve traversing spaces with the floor is lava being a common sort of trope. They might involve lasers to dodge. You've got small mazes to to go through. You've got balls to throw at targets. Mental games could involve ciphers to decode. There could be pattern matching. There could be clues, deductive or inductive puzzles, riddles, much much more. The photo on the right is going to be the photo on the left is a site called Bodabborg in Torps Hammer, Sweden. This is the first uh challenge arcade, at least in the main evolutionary line. It opened as far back as 1995. um Sweden and uh brands and the Benlux nations remain hotbeds of reform. One colon cultural touch point between them all is a Fort Bayard game show which makes the miniame format instantly relatable. Fort Bayard inspired the the Crystal Maids here in the UK which has its own uh related live experiences. I think it's very much not coincidence that the places and times at which Fort Bayard was most popular are the ones that most inspired challenge arcades. In the UK, most of the uh challenge arcades are concentrated in London and northwest England. The Activate brand is licensed by a company called We Do Play, which operates the Flip Out trampoline centers and the Laser Quest brand. But they've promised 30 Activate centers across the UK and Ireland in five years. Close to here, there's one coming soon to Cardiff called Vault City. So, look out for that. I like the analogy of uh escape rooms as being like restaurants. Um, you go to a restaurant, you go to a steak restaurant if you want to eat a steak. You go to an escape room if you want a horror escape room if you want to play a horror game. Sometimes you're in the mood for an uh buffet restaurant and if that's the case, you want a challenge arcade. Q&A's in the Q&A tent in a bit. >> Thank you. Hope that was okay. >> That's great. All right. Thank you, EMF. Give it up for Chris. Next, we have only like give it up at the end. UH DAVID [applause] Alan Turing, you are known for a lot of things. You are known for codereing, but you're also the father of modern computing and AI. In fact, there are very few scientists in the history of humanity who have had as much of a distinct contributions to as many distinct fields as you have. You enjoyed watching movies, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. You went to watch that in the cinema. You almost qualified to play in the Olympics in the marathon under team GB. And here's a photo of me graduating from Manchester University, the Alan Turing Building in Maths. age 23 you wrote this paper which pretty much put you in the position of the father of modern computing but war broke out in that time so you couldn't take it further because wars are not one on the battlefield but rather with information there was the enigma machine that would decode one letter into another letter and it was incredibly complicated and so the British army decided to recruit people to solve it to put into perspective using today's computers it would take an entire year to decode code one single message by brute force. So there had to be alternative ways to do that. They recruited code breakers including crossword champions, linguists, chess champions and only a couple of mathematicians and they found you and you went alongside them. The crossword champions and the linguists decided to use pen and graph paper to decode it. But you decided to build a machine. This is a photo of the machine here. And you could do that by reducing the number of possibilities. For example, you worked out that Hile Hitler was in pretty much all the SS messages. So that could give you clues as to how you could decode it because of the machine that you built. The beach the beach landings on D-Day happened and many other Allied victories and Winston Churchill said that you were the single biggest contributor to Allied victory. Historians estimate that the war was cut short by two years because of the work you did. And we estimate what might have happened. an atomic bomb probably would have been dropped on Berlin instead of on other places. So after the war, the computer that you hypothesized, the British government tried to build it, but they thought it was impossible, so they gave up. Uh, and you can tell them that you had been involved in this very similar one a couple years earlier. Alan, you were the reason why I have a smartphone in my pocket, why we're all using computers, and why AI exists today the way it does. But the thing is, a lot of the papers you wrote were not accepted at the time, and everything was burnt of what you had done during the war. You were destined to die a nobody. But compared to what happens next, I really wish that's what you would have got. Cuz in 1952, there was a burglar that broke into your home. And when the police came to investigate, they decided not to arrest the burglar, but to arrest you because they found evidence that you had been in relationship with another man, which at the time was not only illegal, but the majority of the British public thought that it was the worst thing that could happen. You ended up being given the choice of going to prison or chemical castration. You ended up taking the latter and you lost your job and went into a depression as a result. And then you decided to recreate a scene from one of your favorite movies. You took an apple, you put cyanide in it, and age 41, the age that I am today, you took your own life. Soon afterwards, they did actually build the computer that you hypothesized. And after that, a lot of the papers you wrote were accepted. But it wasn't until the 1990s that your name was eventually clear. And after that, historians and scientists started asking, why is he not pardoned for what he's done? When you were arrested, you didn't listen to your family or friends. You confessed to everything because you had this crazy idea that a man could love another man and that might be okay. A crazy idea that in 2013 the rest of the world started to believe. That same year you got the pardon from the queen. But then everyone started asking why just him? And the most amazing thing happened after that. your one final legacy because four years later, every single gay person that had been arrested for similar actions got pardoned. Alan, you are the reason. You're the reason why I went to Manchester University. And I wish you were alive today to see all the people who are. I wish you were alive today to see students sharing their love for maths at the Alen Turing Building. But most of all, I wish you alive today to see that you are remembered not as a criminal, nor as a [ __ ] but as one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known. [applause and cheering] [applause] Next up, we have Arona. >> [applause] >> This has gone out of sync. I don't know. >> Back to the start. >> Sorry. Um, this isn't you though. This is >> This is me, but you're beyond just advantage. I'm >> so [laughter] sorry. No, it's >> Don't worry, I won't tell. >> It starts with the first slide. >> That's light. >> Yes, it is. >> I didn't even make noises. >> That's how fast we are. I am so sorry. >> That's perfect. >> That's >> That's the wrong name. >> That's the wrong name. THAT'S RIGHT. >> HELLO. THAT'S NOT ME. I'M ALONA. UH, I'm a fairy. >> I have autism. Let's talk about this. Content warning for body horror. I have 64 slides. Um, that's just the introduction. Ono Moriconei was asked by John Carpenter to do music, but Daniel Moricon uh made the music in the style of John Carpenter, so it was effectively pointless. Um, this spaceship used in the introduction has 128 incandescent bulbs in it. Um, this is a bin bag uh in front of a a fish tank full of smoke which slowly burned the thing in play, revealing the letters the thing. Uh, this is um it was filmed on location in two places. Uh, uh, British Columbia and, uh, a hider in Alaska. Uh, that's a dog called Jed. Jed is a good boy. We'll get back to Jed. Um, uh, the actor playing Windows in the background there is playing the only other piece of music that plays in the only diagetic piece of music that appears in the thing. Uh John uh Kurt Russell playing uh RJ McCriedi. His backstory is that he is a uh a Vietnam uh helicopter pilot because why else would you be a helicopter pilot who hated being a helicopter pilot? Um this is filmed in British Columbia. You can tell because of this blue barrel here. Everything on this side of the blue barrel is British Columbia. Everything on that side of the blue barrel is in Alaska. Um that's the base. They built it in uh a town called Hiler in Alaska. Um they had to all the cast and crew had to get a bus up every day. John Carpenter flew in the helicopter. Um they actually blew up the helicopter on site and they didn't take it with them when they left. Naughty naughty. 40 years after the thing was uh released, a whole bunch of people went up there and they got bits of the helicopter and brought them back down. It was really dangerous. Um the actor who plays Windows in the um in the script, his character's name is Sanchez. He came onto the set one day wearing sunglasses and said, "I want my name to be Windows." And John Carpenter was like, "Okay." Um, in a deleted scene, you see that they have a hydroponics warehouse at the back of the thing where they are growing all that weed. Um, the helicopter pilots uh they had were all absolutely [ __ ] insane. And uh they let Kurt Russell fly the helicopter. If you look at the scene where it takes off and then it goes, that's where he's flying it. Um, this is Jed. Jed is an excellent dog. Uh Jed um uh did this whole scene where she walked all the way through, stopped, looked forward, stopped, looked forward, looked into another room in one take. Um Jed is also the dog that was in Balto, I think. So um the other one, but uh so canonically, Bolto is the thing. Um this scene, uh that is not any of the charact any of the actors in the film. That is Kurt Russell Stuntman who suffers under the amazing name of Dick Warlock which implies the existence of penis sorcery. Um unfortunately he does look quite a lot like the actor who plays Norris. So this whole thing was kind of pointless. Um the Norwegian base and it looks very similar to the base you just saw. Yes, they blew up the base at the end of the film and then they filmed the Norwegian stuff there. Um all the Norwegian stuff is filmed from inside the base to imply a sense of being watched and claustrophobia by the cinematographer Dean Kundi. Uh, the dog is watching them arrive because the dog is evil. Um, in this scene, which John Carpenter calls a 12-man acting contest, all the all the characters are breathing in AB smoke. AB smoke is toxic. Um, this uh the two-headed thing there. Does anyone recognize him? Uh, this is uh Robert Picardo, the doctor from Star Trek Voyager. Uh, Robert Batine, the propmaster for the show, had a head of of this made for the howling and just reused it for the thing. Um, John Carpenter is a staunch supporter of animal rights, as you all [ __ ] should be. And this dog is being shot in the face with carbopole, which is the ingredient in the middle of Twinkies. Um, this is the only full frontal nudity in the film. Um, this scene here, uh, this is the only scene which Robertine didn't actually do the special effects for because, um, he worked himself to exhaustion filming the like making the props for the show. Uh, that dog has somebody's hand up from underneath it, wiggling it around. Uh, these tendrils are all filmed in reverse, so they go back into the thing and they play the film backwards. It's a really good effect. Um, this thing is made up of hundreds of little dog teeth, but you don't dog tongues with teeth attached, but you don't really see it in the film because it's 5 seconds. Uh, skip that one. Um, he touches he touches the thing with that, then he touches it to his mouth. He's a [ __ ] idiot. He's [laughter] supposed to be a scientist. Um, one of those is John Carpenter. Uh, that is a um MAP PAINTING. THERE'S A [ __ ] DUDE HERE. THEY DIDN'T TAKE HIM OUT THE SHOT. UM, this is filmed in the uh in the Universal Studio lot. They just This is a big map painting. Uh they they didn't think they thought this scene was unrealistic because computers would not be powerful enough to do these effects. Um this is Chad GPT. Um [laughter] uh this guy, uh he is freezing to death because this was the only special effect they filmed on site in Alaska. Uh they made him get naked. My best friend says that his hands look like made of pepper aramis. Um, you can't see uh the actor um playing forgot his [ __ ] name in this because uh he is not I'm out of time. Um it's a good thing. [applause] [cheering] [applause] Thank you Arona. Next up, we have got Andy. >> Oh, hang on. [applause] >> Hi there. You have to excuse me. I've got a bit of hay fever. I may sneeze a bit. Um, so I'm going to do a quick talk about how you can make your own chili sauce. So, who likes chili sauce? Anyone? Hey. Okay. So, most of the chili sauce you get in the UK is [ __ ] As far as I'm concerned, the stuff you get in the supermarket is either tremendously banned. It says super hot, you know, will burn you to death and you eat it and it's it's not very hot. And often the stuff that is hot tastes absolutely ghastly. So, um, I came across this stuff in the States. It's called Ring of Fire. And despite the name and the logo, it's actually not that hot. It's quite sort of moderate heat, really tasty, really nice. And I used to be able to get it in the UK, just can't seem to get it anymore. And it cost an absolute fortune to get it sent across to the US. So, I thought I'd have a go at making my own chili sauce. And it's not actually that hard. So the process is a thing called lacto fermentation. And this is where lactobacillus in a salty brine environment will convert sugars in fruits and vegetables into lactic acid. It changes the flavor, tends to kill off the back bad bacteria and apparently also has some probiotic effect. So I'm told. Not that I really care about that. So you can use most whatever your favorite fruit or vegetable is. Um you put it into a usually a glass container. You cover it in salty brine. That's usually about 3% um 3% salt by weight. You let it ferment for a week or two depending on what sort of effect you're trying to get. You chuck away most of the brine and then you add some vinegar. And you can just buy this in bulk fairly cheaply. Um just sort of cider vinegar for example. Uh and then you blend [clears throat] it all up and then you can just bottle it at that point. But what tends to happen is the fermentation continues. the CO2 builds up and then suddenly one day you get a big bang uh come from your bottle and there's glass and chili sauce everywhere and your wife gets very upset. Um so what I tend to do is I put it in a in a saucepan and I simmer it and that has the effect of thickening it a bit cuz it boils off a lot of the fluid but it also kills off all the bacteria that were causing the f fermentation which means it's stable and it it shouldn't continue to to ferment. Okay. And then finally, you pour it into a bowl. And I just use a old source bottles. Okay. A couple of important things to mention. When you're doing the fermenting, you can either sort of loosen the lid and let the carbon dioxide out, but if you forget, things will go bang. So, it's much better to have one of these like little bubbler things here to keep any little fruit flies and things out and make sure you clean it, keep it nice and sterile. Um or you can get like a for about10 pounds in Amazon or or whatever your preferred supplier you can get a glass jar with a little um air lock in it. Okay. Uh disclaimer botulism very bad. Okay. Uh one microgram of inhaled botulism um can can kill an adult male. If you're not careful with um bottling and canning, you can end up getting botuline and bacteria which produces this incredibly deadly toxin. It's one of the most deadly toxins known to man. So if as you need to keep everything clean, either boil it all or use cleaning solutions. Um if anything starts to go furry, okay, nothing against furries, but if any of your fruit and veg starts to go furry, um you need to throw the whole lot away cuz you just don't want to risk it. You can get a white um sort of scum on top of the thing and that's just yeast and that's okay. But if it's furry or weird colored or smells bad, you need to throw it away. Um, I made a batch of stuff with garlic in it and it all went blue and I threw it all away and then I read the next day, garlic goes blue when you lacto ferment it. So, you know, there's a bit there's a bit of trial and error there. Um, so these are some of my results. So, my first attempt I tried to make something like Ring of Fire with chilies uh and onions which I lacto fermented and then I added some canned tomatoes and herbs um and and coriander and things and it it tasted pretty good. Okay, just wrapping up now. Uh, that was not bad. Chilies and pineapple to fermented pineapple plus some tin mango. This was amazing. Better than anything I've ever had at a shop. Chilies and blackberry looked great. Tasted terrible. Chilies and banana. Absolutely disgusting. Okay, so it requires a bit of uh a bit of um experimentation, but it's not difficult. Go away and have a go at it. Keep everything clean. Throw away anything furry. THANK YOU. >> [applause] >> OKAY, THANK YOU ANDY. NEXT up we have Louie. [applause] >> Hello electromagnetic field festival. ARE WE WELL? >> This is my first ever talk here. Uh, so I used to work at Penguin Books in the office next to the guy who made Rough Guides. Give me a cheer if you've heard of Rough Guides. >> Well, in my free time, I made something much more important. This is my quirky guide to London, to South London. Uh, here we have something I built my free time. Um, and I'll take you through some of the curiosities of South London. So, um, give me a shout. The first one you'd like to see. >> Vegan Raster. >> Vegan Raster. I heard sky poolool because this is a PDF slide presentation. So this is the sky pool near Vauhall. We were doing a walk along the temps and came across this. It's a swimming pool between two skyscrapers. Um or perhaps it's a wet shortcut between them. Um next we have I was only working here last uh last week. We have a sumo wrestling tournament in South London. Um it's going to move to Shordich soon. Um, so if you'd like to hear about that, there's a QR code. You can sign up to my um newsletter and find out about it. Um, someone just went, "That's cool." Yeah, it was. Yeah. And I got to hang out. I went to the the closing party of this of this and there were some very drunk sumos. Uh, one guy GO, "COME ON, PARTY. LET'S GO PARTY." And the the little guy on the left, he often won. It wasn't necessarily always the big guy who won cuz he'd run around and trip people up. Um, where should we go next? You don't know. It's going to be ah this is where it all started. This is Canada Water Library Cafe which I think looks a lot like the Star Wars sand crawler. Um so I started and then there I uh started making this on my mobile phone and I started off as a software developer with sort of complicated technology and then over the years I've now there's a sort of beauty in keeping it as simple as possible and being able to update it on my phone. Anyway, I was in there. Um, and libraries these days, they have a hard time because, uh, they have to serve lots of purposes. It's not just quiet reading. It was so noise in there. Uh, it was actually 83 dibels, which is the volume of an automobile according to this app. Um, so you can read about that on neurosities. And then, oh yeah, if I've got time, I'll just tell you quickly. I started doing this when I was made redundant from a tech job. So, and I just bought a flat and then got made redundant. So, I was sleeping on this uh camp bed and walking around my area wondering of app good app ideas that maybe I could do my own business. I didn't think of one, so I made new crossies instead. Uh and finally hit the latest entry that I did yesterday and you can go on the QR code or the website and have a look at this. It's Electromagnetic Field Festival. Someone's got on their phone already. And what I wrote there was it's Britain's answer to the Burning Man festival, but less sexy Californian dancers, more Wallace Grommet inventors. >> Quintessentially British. Well, I would count myself as one of those inventors. Thank you. That was new. My name's Louis Christie. Good night. [applause] >> All right. Thank you, Louis. Next up, we have got Patty. [applause] >> Yeah. Hello. This is going to be a bit of a brief guide to esports commentating. At work, I tend to ask people, "What did you do on the weekend?" They come up with answers like, "Oh, I walked the dog. I went uh I went and watched TV." And but given the kind of people we have at EMF, a lot of people have their weekends dominated by one mega specific hobby. I mean just look at these photos from the last few years. Uh mine is esports. I do a lot of um kind of tournament organization. I do broadcast production and most relevant I do casting. Uh that is me at a tournament in Cologne not too long ago. I've got to go to a few amazing places. Cologne was one of them. Got to go to Vius earlier this year in Lithuania. Got to go to Stoke on Trent. Um the venue was sick. Stoke on Trent wasn't my game of choice. It's a racing game called Trackmania. Who's heard of Trackmania? That was not what I had written in my script. I was supposed to make a joke about how no one's heard of it. That's a pleasant surprise. Uh yeah, it's an arcade racing game. Very high pace, lot of very tight margins. A few of the youngans might recognize it as the background video from Tik Tok when someone's reading a Reddit Am I the [ __ ] story. Um but I want to talk about esports stuff, how it kind of works in general. And one of the things you got to deal with is the fact that you don't get to commentate alone. You always have a pair. And it's trying to work out how do you commentate over a sports event or an esports event when you've got another person. So for me, I tend to try and do a bit of an even split where we try and switch every 30 seconds. It requires a really specific skill of being able to make it very clear that you are about to end a sentence because if you can't do that, the other person doesn't know when to chime in and pick up. When you're at land events, you'll often have someone put up a finger say, "Hey, I've got a point to make." Or give a bit of a signal to say, "Look, I'm about to wrap up." Um, this is how I tend to do it cuz Track Mania is very fastpaced. Most other esports have a split. I didn't change the title correctly. Uh where you have a play-by-play caster and a color caster where the playbyplay kind of gets very excited, SAYS, "OH," AND THEY GO FOR the kill. Whereas a color cer will go into those quieter sections where they sit down and go, "Uh, I think the economics of this situation hasn't really worked out very well." Uh, both equally important. Color caster is terrifying. This is an example of one of the setups I get to use. Uh, this was in Vius at the Baltic Gaming Expo. Um, a really interesting note is the directional microphones are very directional and in order to make sure that we actually speak directly into them, uh, we have our own voices monitoring going back into our ears, which for a lot of people, hearing your own voice would drive you bananas and it took me a little while to get used to it, but it's super helpful. Um, so of course that's, you know, they have these incredibly directional microphones cuz they don't want to pick up crowd noise with our commentating. Um, and they broadcast that out to the audience to be able to be heard online or at the venue. They then got to be very careful not to broadcast it to the players because there's a concept in video games called fog of war where you can't see anything outside the circumstance of Starcraft 2. And the issue with uh esports compared to most conventional sports is it's quite purposeful that things are hidden. There was a very famous incident in the early days of League of Legends where they put the big projection behind the players. So the players just turned around. That guy got sued $30,000 for that offense. um they now put them under the staging which is a lot more sensible or under the screens but that's how they block out the visuals. They got to block out the audio. So an interesting note is most players have a kind of dual headset approach where they have these big bulky aviator headphones and these headphones actually just blast white noise pretty much uh or some kind of generic background sound uh while the microphone does actually feed into the computer. They then have a uh second pair of earbuds that go in um so they can actually hear the game sound and talk to players. This entire setup is basically the sole purpose of blocking out everything I say. Um I like esports. If you want to talk to me about esports, GREAT. [cheering] [applause] Thank you, Paddyy. Next up we have got a [applause] so don't worry the rest of this talk will be in English. Welcome to my talk on Chinese domestic market microcontrollers. So how do you get uh oh wait no how do you get access to Chinese domestic market controllers? This is LCSC. LCSC is an electronics component distributor, but they're based in Asia, but their sister company is JLCPCB. And you might have heard of one or the other because they're really cheap. Well, sometimes. And they know how to talk to Westerners. Well, usually. And on LCSC, we can go into the category called microcontrollers. And in the bottom, you can see you can filter for Asian brands that are in stock. And we have almost 2,000 items. If we if we then take this list and we filter for the absolute cheapest items, we get some of these 8bit things. Don't use these. Don't even try to use these. You will hate yourself. So, if you want something that actually works, here's a vendor that makes parts that actually work. In English, they're known as WCH, and their parts are primarily Risk 5 cores of their own design with STM32 style peripherals around them. But then they start adding interesting IO peripherals of their own. For example, they have stuff with built-in Bluetooth low energy, or they have stuff with a built-in 5 for talking to USB power delivery, so you can ask for extra power, or they have built-in Ethernet. One problem with a bunch of these is that if you're using Bluetooth low energy, which a lot of people want to use them for, that stack is a binary blob. Fortunately, I and a few others have reverse engineered enough of it to transmit and receive packets without using the binary blob. But no one has written a full uh BL stack. So if anyone wants to help contribute, uh please come talk to me. These cores have special additional proprietary op codes um that do kind of normal things but they have different encodings. Um if you need support for that in GRA or LLVM, it is upstream in LVM because I added it. One thing that pe one thing that a bunch of people really hate about most or many of these Chinese microcontrollers is many of them are inspired by the STM32 designs which means that their SDKs are inspired by the STM32 design which many people uh let's just say don't like so a bunch of people have been working on alternatives for example people have been taking the raw registers and creating rust crates and so on but there currently there is a huge lack of coordination between the different groups that are hacking on all of these parts. So if anyone is good at hurting the cats in an open source project also please come talk to me. So now for a quick speedrun of other interesting parts that I have found while browsing LCSC. This is a company called AGM. They make a risk 5 microcontroller that is embedded in an Altera style FPGA fabric. And I have done enough reverse engineering to understand how all of the tiles in the fabric are connected. But there's no place in route tool because that requires a lot of planning and executive functions. So if you want a risk 5 plus an FPGA where the FPJ is connected to the memory bus, also come talk to me. This vendor makes is called Glee that makes the chips in all of the cheap low-end Bluetooth audio thingies. So, a thing that makes noise or like receives Bluetooth or transmits Bluetooth, they're all built around one of these chips. This company somehow managed to make their own in-house clone of the Blackfin DSP architecture that is not that is not binary compatible, but just works kind of similar. So, if you really really like dealing with weird compiler nonsense, they have a hacked up version of like LVM version 4. If anyone wants to make this actually usable, also come talk to me. This company uh Linko Semi makes a bunch of the chips that go in almost all of the escooters that are not using the even cheaper chip. This is an ARM microcontroller with high voltage MOSFET gate drivers. So the microcontroller can directly drive high voltage transistors for controlling motors and it is all built in into one package that doesn't cost very much. Um we just and uh finally for let's end on something wacky. This company makes an ARM microcontroller that somehow has built-in high voltage generation for doing 10. I have no idea why, but it exists. And yes, >> you've got another 45 seconds before. >> No. And yes, that is the end. Uh, come talk to me if you're interested. [cheering] [applause] Okay. How are we doing, EMF? Enough for you. Um, so unfortunately, uh, Mark submitted slides. Um, but missed the briefing. So, unless Mark, you're not in the audience anymore, are you? I think you popped in briefly. Never mind. Um, yes. So, I am just going to move through these. Um, you might want to just like imagine the, you know, music. Thank you. Yep. There we go. Okay. Uh, >> that's it. >> Fine. Right. After that brief interview, next up we have got Ian. [applause] >> Hi. Uh yeah, my name is uh Ian and uh about 10 year well I say about I mean it's almost exactly 10 years ago uh I formed I formalized a thing that I ended up calling uh oh uh holistic howling. Uh and so I'd been howling for a while just kind of informally. uh started I had a had a girlfriend, hard to believe, but uh and I used to I' she had a a flat mate that was a bit funny and didn't like me ringing the doorbell and so I would howl at her window and I thought that was kind of romantic and she would come to the window and she'd come and let me in and it was very sweet. And then uh uh I I in my spare time I like to write neurotic pop songs uh in my bedroom and for kind of backing vocals and harmonies I started using more howls and uh yeah so I' I' I suppose I'd always been been howling a bit and uh in fact let's just let's just do a little little howl. So it's really simple. You start with an R and you end with an ooh and you sort of transition in the back of your throat. So I I'll do one first of all and then you can you can kind of join in. So yeah, so that's the idea. So after three 3 2 1 There we go. There. Thank you. Uh so that's howling. Now the so the methodology of holistic howling is notice how you feel and then do a howl and then notice how you feel again. So let's try it again. So so notice how you feel. Yeah. So like tune inception that's called and then do a howl and then notice how you feel again. And almost I mean I've never heard anyone say they feel worse after a how. Uh, and it's a great unifying thing. It brings people together. I'm just I've only got two slides. I'm going to I'm going to bring on the next thing. So, the the the form it takes now uh primarily is is two WhatsApp groups. There's this one which is uh howling only uh which is literally a WhatsApp group where you howl. I'll just do a quick demo. We use WhatsApp unfortunately because that was I I got really into Elixia uh in the summer of 2016 and uh and WhatsApp was written in Erlang and you know it was all and then Meta bought them like a year later or something and [ __ ] it right up. But uh so here's the here's the the group. So I'm going to do a howling into that. Feel free to join in. that I was doing some advanced techniques there, but I mean, you know, just to show off the uh you can get the hang of it. So, that's now been beamed out to people. We've currently got about 60 members, I think. I don't know. We've lost eight. Yeah, 60 bang on right now. So, uh at our peak, we had 80 uh people come and go. Uh so, yeah, this one's howling. This one is the back channel where we share just kind of like wolfy chat. uh pictures of wolves, pictures of dogs, that sort of thing. Uh what can howling be used for? Uh team building. So if you're doing like, you know, I do sort of motivational howling sessions for for teams to kind of bring them together. We have a howl camp every normally every year. Uh we have missed a few over the last 10, but we've done about six or seven of them and they're always really good fun. We have lasers, sound systems, and a lot of howling obviously. Uh if you lose somebody in a supermarket market, uh very very easy. You can just go and then you listen. There we go. And and they're over there somewhere, you know? So, like echolocation. Uh what else can you use howling for? I don't know. Just being cool, really. Uh the the trick to to howling is really just visualize your head turning into a really cool wolf and then I think you get it. Anyway, THANK YOU SO MUCH >> [applause] >> WELL, I DON'T MIND TELLING YOU, EMF, that was very cathartic. You know, my my nephew Fra is really into howling. Uh, next up, we have got Stefan. Thank you to the one person that got that joke. Next up, STEFAN. [applause] All right. So, I'm usually a developer, but I have a heart for typography and graphic design. And I brought that together in the concept called Walts. This is a German word. I don't know an exact uh expression in English, maybe Germany men's uh years. So, what are we talking about? So basically after your education you go out in the world and you exchange your knowledge with other people's knowledge and usually how it worked in like in the history it started like 12th 13th century. So you went away for 2 years and you brought your knowledge to other uh like locations to other workshops and you took uh knowledge and brought it to others. So it was an exchange that happened not through books but really like through the the profession through a person that brings knowledge to another workshop. So when you are from Germany or Swiss or somewhere close you might know these kind of people they are carpenter they have their uniform and they are still doing it today. So it's kind of a thing in these craftsman uh trades. So it's not an internship. It's really you are already a professional. So it's just like an exchange of knowledge and it's basically to gain also for yourself an experience. So I did that in uh kind of a different setting because I'm not a carpenter. So um and maybe like my experience that I did for only three months uh can I also uh inspire you? So we were two people. Uh in front was uh Michael, his graphic designer, and I was more like the developer. And we did some preparation before we left. So we did our uniform with our logo on it. We did some screen printing at home. We produced some stickers. We produced some flyers so that we were able to advertise when we were in the new city. We did a website where we held a block and then we just went to the states and we bought like an really old car and we did some uh carpenter crafts here and we built uh a little shelf in our van so that we were able to sleep underneath and have still our stock with us. So, and that was then our mobile. We traveled for like as I said three months and we went uh to work in u professional fields sometimes with graphic designers. We were working outside. We were visiting some spots. We got to know some technology. We were co-working spaces where we worked. We had uh like meetings with some professionals. We were uh having meetings with clients. We visited smaller studios but also we made friends. So we at some um houses we were really close with family and we visited big studios and the the deal was always we go there we don't ask for money we just get shelter and food and in exchange we get the experience and as you can see we had like also like really stupid hats. It helps people to spot like okay these are the two crazy guys and uh let's talk to them and why are they dressed like that and why are they in a kind of weird uniform. So it helps to start a conversation. Uh sometimes we were also like invited to like hot springs. We met people for um work in their garden like as our office. We had some chickens helping us. We met some artists and all that was just great. It was a real great inspiration. We had some media attention because as I said it's kind of unusual that the graphic designer and the developer are is doing that and yeah it also brought me here to that stage to the electromagnetic fields and if yeah it goes on so I also hosted other people and yeah if you can help me out and if you have some ideas how we uh can learn in the 21st century come hit me up. Thank you. [applause] EMF, we have come to our last lightning talk for today. Ah, absolutely. Uh, we we started with Chris. I think it is only fitting we end with the Chris. [applause] >> Hello. So, this is sort of really the story of how a small idea ends up turning into a massive rabbit hole that you go down. I think a lot of us in this room have probably experienced that. Um, so I've been making these kind of like cool LED badges for the last couple of years basically. Uh it all kind of started here doing a glass workshop with my mom and she wanted to do it and that's a bit of a strange connection, right? Well, I kind of like saw this thing in preparation for that workshop and thought that could be a PCB. So, it was a PCB, but you know, it's 2022 or whatever. So, it's going to have some LEDs on it. So, you know, and then things snowballed, so of course we have to make a few more. Um, and then I do a lot of stuff with Postgress, so I had to make some elephants cuz that's our logo. So, this is kind of then where the sort of journey got a bit bigger. Um I I first off made some kind of simple ones where we got the actual control uh CPU on the main board and it was all just a sort of one-off. Um and it's all designed in Keycad. So the whole thing is designed with open source software. It's all programmed via Arduino. Um and then I thought, you know, how can I sort of try and make this a bit more feasible to scale up and make a few more of them because I decided I wanted to make a run of them to give away at a conference. And so that's where I kind of came up with the idea of well I need to split the controller off into control module then I can go and make like a thousand of these to just keep the cost down. Um so it's got a little tiny 80 tiny 1616. So we kind of run a whole 4 MHz whole 2 kilob of RAM and whole 16 kilob of storage. Um and then all of the patterns are actually kind of stored like this as originally like hard coding them just used up way too much code space. So I wrote an op code engine which effectively takes a byte array and interprets it. So for example, RX5 is like flash LED 5. Um so this is where project started snowballing a bit. Now kind of got a whole like basically mini computer running inside the microcontroller that can interpret these patterns, but it's all designed to be very space efficient. So effectively to flash one LED is one bite. Um and then of course, well now I to make program this easier, I'll build an assembler. So I wrote a little assembler that we can just like have some simple pneumonics and then compile the bite code from it. Uh and then of course you know I built an entire web- based editor where I can actually just click on and program it. It generates um and then it does all the assembly and it downloads the kind of C header file at that point in time. Um and then you know how can we go about sort of programming this a bit easier. So the actual programming adapter for the chip just needs effectively nothing more than a diode. It just turns a USBTL dongle into the ATML um UDPI program protocol. So I kind of had some spare space on panels. So I built a bunch of little program adapters so I could give to people but wanted to try and make this even more accessible. So can we actually program them directly from the browser without using Arduino Studio or anything like that? And in 1026 it turns out we can. So there's a whole bunch of stuff I had to change both in the code and then also in the whole website to make all this work. So one of the biggest things was I didn't want to have to basically kickstart a compiler off on some server somewhere. So I redesigned all the firmware to effectively just have all of the metadata for all of the programs and the different LED patterns all into one massive bite array that the firmware can then just load and process as a table of contents and that kind of stuff which then sort of ends up with like this is the actual kind of cool part now that's in the code. is just this massive array of bytes that makes no sense. Um, except that we can now basically generate that blob in the browser, mangle it into a hex file, and then we can program it straight onto the chip via web serial uh, straight from the browser. So now we can basically go straight from there to programming onto a badge with nothing more than a diode and a USB TTL dongle. So thank you very much. Uh, check out my [applause] All right, stage C. Another big hand for all of our speakers or a howl. Loving the howling. Uh we are back tomorrow evening on stage B. Oo. Uh we are back on stage B at 10 to 8 tomorrow evening. Uh so if you feel like another uh another grazing platter of information for your ear holes, come along to that. Uh and uh have a great rest of your afternoon. Good night. Good night. Good afternoon. [applause]