Karsten Becker

3D printers are almost everywhere, but not on the moon yet. We want to change that and this talk gives you a little insight into the how and whys of 3D printing on the moon.

Having a printer in space is a great idea, it allows you to produce things in space, without having to actually launch it with a rocket. Some want to mine asteroids for that, we want to use lunar regolith. This would make it possible to build structures on the moon that are essential for build a permanent outpost there. Even further down the line one might build the first interplanetary refuelling outpost in space for rockets and go even deeper into space. We want to show you how this dream could become reality, what techniques are of interest, and how it could be implemented.

At the 26C3 we first presented our vision of sending a rover to the moon. We're still in the pursuit of doing this and are closer than ever. Many things have happened in the past 5 years and we want to share our story with you. But this talk is not just about us, it is also about you! You will have the possibility to contribute to our mission, just tune in to get all the details :)

In the past five years, we developed several lunar rovers. Each got more and more sophisticated and better suited for our mission. In this presentation we will also unveil our latest upgrade to the the well known R3 rover, as well as the latest camera technology. Those two allowed us to participate in an interims competition of the Google Lunar X Prize. This interims prize enables us to further pursue our dream of sending a rover to the moon. In our mission to the moon, we also have the ability to bring payloads up on the lunar surface for the first time in a few decades (unless you have some good connection to the chinese who were there last year). We are calling out to you, to develop an interesting payload, that we could potentially bring to the surface of the moon!

Other people: Robert

Learning to program an FPGA is time consuming. Not just do you need to download and install 20 GB of vendor tools, but you also need to wrap your brain around the strange ideas of hardware description languages like VHDL. PSHDL aims to ease the learning curve significantly and provide more people with the ability to program FPGAs.

At the 29C3 I gave two 6 hour workshops on programming FPGAs in VHDL. This was not an extensive course with plenty of extra features. It was a crash course that got you barely started in a "I will throw you out of a plane and during the fall I will not just explain to you how to attach the parachute to your body, but maybe before we splash on the ground you might actually be able to open it as well" way. Some of the problems to learn to program an FPGA are certainly caused by the complexity that is involved in thinking HW vs. SW. The other problems however can easily be addressed, such as providing an IDE that is actually pleasant to use AND guides the user towards solving his problem by meaningful error message and helpful documentation. You can't do that with VHDL because the language is too fucked up. So in this lecture I want to propose a new language that has a much better syntax similar to C, so that most developers will easily understand it. Yet at the same time it is very powerful to get even complicated jobs done. Additionally, you will not need to install anything to start playing with it. The big picture here is that I want to create the Arduino for FPGAs and I need your help to get there.

In this talk I want to show you around in the mysterious world of Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or short FPGAs. The aim is to enable you to get a rough understanding on what FPGAs are good at and how they can be used in areas where conventional CPUs and Microcontrollers are failing upon us. FPGAs open up the world of high-speed serial interconnects, nano-second event reactions and hardware fuzzing.

In this lecture I will present you the basics of how FPGAs work and how to program them. I will also show-case some tasks where FPGAs really shine. As an example I will show how a 200 MHz FPGA can perform a discrete wavelet twice as fast as an 2.6 GHz i7. I will also show other applications where FPGAs are almost unbeatable, compared to a CPU. At the end I will give you an overview of the market. What are hacker friendly boards, which vendors tool chain sucks the least etc. After this lecture you should be able to decide whether a CPU, a GPU or an FPGA could solve your problem the most efficient.