The Hardware Hacking Village is back for Kernelcon 2026. This year, we’re taking it off the grid. We are powered by satellite internet, LTE/5G, local AI and questionable decisions!
If you’ve ever wanted to:
- Flash firmware onto real hardware
- Build your own radio station
- Mine Bitcoin on a microcontroller
- Or see what an off-grid hacker space looks like…
- This is your spot.
🔧 What You Can Do
Everything in the village is hands-on. No slides. No lectures. You sit down and build.
🆓 Free Activities
- Badge hacking & mods
- On-prem AI lab (DeepSeek, Gemma + local LLMs)
- Cryptomining village – BTC, XMR, WTF. Hands-on mining setup and learning
- OFF-GRID Expo – See the solar panels, inverters, and other off-grid components powering the HHV
- KERNELCON NOC (Network Operations Center) – Routing, WAN, wireless – come nerd out with us, happy to do some show-and tell with you.
💻 Build + Take Home Projects –
These projects are 100% free to work through. Let’s go! If you want to take the finished project with you when you leave, there is a small fee to pay the cost of materials.
- 📡 DIY FM Radio + AI DJ ($25)
Build a working FM radio from scratch and tie it into an AI-generated broadcast system running live from the conference. Kernelcon radio 91.9, The COB, is live and running. - ₿ ESP32 Bitcoin Solo Miner ($10)
Yes, it’s ridiculous. Yes, it works. Learn how mining actually functions at the protocol level. - 🔌 Smart Plug Firmware Flash ($10)
Take LOCAL control of cheap IoT hardware. No cloud required. No soldering required either - 💡 WLED Light Strip ($15)
Build and program your own addressable LED setup. - 📶 Wireless AP → OpenWRT ($15)
Reflash enterprise gear into fully customizable infrastructure. This AP can also be a wifi client, bridging wifi networks to wired connectivity. - 🛰 Meshtastic Node ($60)
Build a long-range, off-grid communication device. Join the #kernelcon channel. Nerd out - T-Mobile Hotspot Hack ($20)
Vulnerable firmware + guided instruction = amazing, interesting, super useful LTE hotspot…
⚡ NEW: Off-Grid Exposition⚡
This year’s theme is OFF GRID. We’re pulling all bandwidth for the conference from Starlink+LTE/5G, and we are running the core parts of the village on:
- Solar panels – sourced from ebay, used, and cheap of course.
- Battery systems – crazy big, also sourced from ebay.
- Inverters – We’ve got a crazy cheap setup, come talk to us about the capabilities and restrictions we’re dealing with.
- Portable power setups – battery madness everywhere. It’s all safe. We swear.
- Check out our crazy battery setups, we have a purpose-built area that is for hands-on exploration.
Come see:
- How to build resilient power in the field
- What breaks (and what doesn’t)
- How to power a network without utilities
🧠 Why This Village Exists
The goal isn’t just to show you something cool.
It’s to make sure you walk away with hardware you understand, skills you can reuse, and ideas you didn’t have before. No experience required. If you can sit down, we can get you building.
Yell for a human. LFG. Guides and project docs are posted:
www.hackspace.io/projects