About the Community
Bitstream Hackers is a hands-on hardware community at SAINTCON. We bring the tools of the trade to the table — chip clips, EEPROM programmers, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes — and teach you how to use them on real hardware, no experience required.
Every visitor walks away having learned something. Stick around long enough and you can also take on our badge challenge: a three-tier contest that takes you from reading a chip, to writing one, to capturing a live signal off the wire.
The Contest
The badge challenge is built around a community minibadge with an empty chip socket. Each tier teaches a new skill and, if you solve it, hands you the tool for the next one.
Read
Clip onto an EEPROM with a chip clip, pull the data off, and decode it.
Write
Flash new content onto your own minibadge using our purpose-built programming station.
Capture
Use a logic analyzer to sniff live traffic across four bus protocols simultaneously and decode what's hiding in the noise.
At the Booth
We'll have a handful of laptops set up for the contest — or bring your own. Our programming tools run right in the browser over WebUSB, so there's nothing to install and it doesn't matter what operating system you're running.