Hackaday Europe: Call For Proposals

Note: This article is an editorial guide based on real Hackaday Europe information and widely accepted conference proposal best practices. It is not an official Hackaday announcement.

Why the Hackaday Europe Call For Proposals Matters

Every great hardware conference has a secret engine. It is not the coffee machine, although that certainly helps. It is not the badge, even when the badge has more personality than some laptops. The real engine is the community of builders who step forward and say, “I made something strange, useful, difficult, beautiful, or mildly terrifying, and I want to tell people how it happened.” That is exactly what the Hackaday Europe Call For Proposals is about.

Hackaday Europe is a gathering for hardware hackers, firmware wranglers, open-source builders, electronics artists, mechanical tinkerers, embedded developers, educators, and makers who believe that a good project is even better when someone has drilled one extra hole in the enclosure at 2 a.m. For 2026, Hackaday Europe moves to Lecco, Italy, near Lake Como, with the event planned for May 16 and 17 and a pre-event meetup on May 15. The call for participation invited both talks and workshops, and the submission deadline was extended from March 18 to March 25, giving classic “procrastineering” just enough runway to taxi, wobble, and take off.

But the bigger story is not just a date on a calendar. A CFP is an open door. It is a chance for someone who has built a drone, repaired an old instrument, designed a badge add-on, reverse-engineered a forgotten interface, taught a robot to misbehave politely, or squeezed firmware into a chip with the memory capacity of a polite sneeze to share that work with people who actually understand why it matters.

What Is Hackaday Europe?

Hackaday Europe is the European sibling of Hackaday’s hardware conference culture. Think of it as Hackaday brought into physical space: talks, workshops, badge hacking, demos, soldering, hallway conversations, food, music, and the kind of networking where “What do you do?” quickly turns into “Can I see the PCB?” Previous editions have taken place in Berlin, including events at MotionLab, and the conference has featured talks, workshops, lightning sessions, and plenty of project show-and-tell energy.

The event has roots in earlier Hackaday gatherings in Europe, including Hackaday Belgrade editions in 2016 and 2018, followed by more recent Berlin events. The 2026 move to Lecco gives the conference a fresh setting while keeping the same core personality: practical engineering, creative problem-solving, friendly curiosity, and a healthy respect for projects that look impossible until somebody opens a laptop and says, “Actually, I made a repo.”

Unlike polished corporate conferences where every slide seems to have been approved by seven departments and one very nervous brand manager, Hackaday Europe thrives on real-world invention. It welcomes the messy middle of making: failed prototypes, lucky fixes, surprising measurements, strange tools, clever shortcuts, hard-earned lessons, and the glorious moment when the demo works because you brought the exact cable nobody else packed.

What the Call For Proposals Is Looking For

The Hackaday Europe CFP is designed for people who want to give talks or lead workshops. A strong proposal does not need to sound like an academic paper, a startup pitch, or a TED Talk wearing safety glasses. It needs to show that you have something useful, interesting, and specific to share with a hardware-minded audience.

Talk proposals

A good talk proposal should make the review team understand three things quickly: what problem you tackled, what you built or learned, and why the Hackaday Europe audience will care. A talk might explain how you built a high-endurance drone, created open-source medical hardware, mapped caves with custom tools, designed a narrative PCB for tabletop gaming, built a strange display, hacked a badge, or solved an embedded systems problem that made you question your life choices but improved your debugging skills.

Workshop proposals

A workshop proposal should be even more practical. The question is not only “Is this interesting?” but also “Can attendees actually do the thing?” If you want to teach a small group how to use a tool, assemble a device, prototype a sensor system, program a badge, build a tiny robot, or understand a fabrication process, your proposal should explain the activity, required materials, skill level, time needed, and what participants will leave with.

Lightning talk ideas

Lightning talks are perfect for compact, energetic topics. A seven-minute slot can cover a project update, a hard lesson, a weird measurement, a tool recommendation, a teardown surprise, or a quick “I tried this so you do not have to” story. The trick is focus. A lightning talk is not a compressed doctoral dissertation. It is a bright spark, not a welding arc aimed directly at everyone’s eyeballs.

Topics That Fit the Hackaday Europe Spirit

Hackaday Europe has a broad hardware and maker culture, so the best topics often sit at the intersection of engineering, creativity, and hands-on experimentation. If your idea includes hardware creation, firmware, software tools for physical systems, electronics design, product prototyping, fabrication, repair, open-source engineering, robotics, test equipment, radio, sensors, mechanical hacks, or unusual interfaces, you are already in the right neighborhood.

Specificity is your friend. “Robotics” is too broad. “What I learned building a swarm of cheap line-following robots for a workshop” is better. “Open-source medical devices” is interesting, but “Design trade-offs in an open-source blood pressure monitor prototype” is stronger. “Badge hacking” is fun, but “How I turned a conference badge into a low-power mesh messaging experiment” gives reviewers a clearer reason to keep reading.

Here are a few example angles that would feel at home in a Hackaday-style CFP:

• Failure analysis: What broke, how you found the fault, and what the fix taught you.
• Design trade-offs: Why you chose one architecture, chip, radio module, enclosure, or manufacturing method over another.
• Open-source hardware: How you documented, licensed, tested, or improved a project so others can build it.
• Tool-building: A custom jig, test rig, firmware workflow, simulator, or debugging method that saved time.
• Creative engineering: Electronics used for art, music, games, storytelling, education, or public installations.
• Workshops: Hands-on sessions where attendees learn by building, soldering, measuring, flashing, assembling, or debugging.

How to Write a Strong Hackaday Europe Proposal

A CFP submission is not the talk itself. It is the promise of a talk. That means your job is to make the reviewer believe you can deliver something clear, useful, and memorable. The best conference proposals usually have a sharp title, a focused abstract, practical takeaways, and a speaker bio that explains why you are the right person to tell the story.

Start with a title that earns attention

Your title should be clear enough to explain the topic and interesting enough to invite a click. Avoid titles so vague they could fit on any conference schedule. “Adventures in Embedded Systems” sounds charming, but it does not say much. “Debugging a Solar-Powered Sensor Node That Only Failed at Sunrise” is more specific, more memorable, and instantly more Hackaday.

Write an abstract with a problem, journey, and payoff

A strong abstract usually answers these questions: What problem did you face? What did you build, test, or discover? What will the audience learn? Try to keep the abstract direct. You do not need to describe the full history of computing, electricity, copper mining, and your childhood fascination with blinking LEDs. A few tight paragraphs are better than a heroic wall of text.

Show practical takeaways

Hackaday readers and event attendees like ideas, but they love usable ideas. Tell them what they can apply. Will they learn a debugging technique, a low-cost testing method, a design pattern, a better way to document hardware, a warning about a component, or a repeatable workshop format? Practical takeaways make your proposal feel useful rather than merely interesting.

Do not turn your proposal into a sales pitch

Community technical events usually reward learning over promotion. If your talk involves a product, company, or commercial tool, frame the proposal around lessons, trade-offs, and engineering principles rather than “Please admire our shiny thing.” The audience wants honest knowledge. Give them the real story, including what went wrong. Especially what went wrong. Makers can smell marketing fog from three solder fumes away.

Explain your experience without over-polishing it

You do not have to be a famous speaker to submit. Hackaday’s culture is friendly to first-time presenters, as long as the idea is real and the speaker is prepared. Your bio should connect you to the topic. Mention relevant projects, documentation, repositories, workshops, meetups, published builds, field experience, or hard-earned expertise. If you have spoken before, include that. If you have not, explain how you plan to prepare.

A Simple Proposal Structure You Can Use

If the blank form is staring back at you like an unflashed microcontroller, use this structure:

1. Title

Make it specific, active, and useful. Example: “From Breadboard to Field Test: Building a LoRa Sensor Network That Survived the Rain.”

2. One-sentence pitch

Summarize the entire talk in plain language. Example: “This talk explains how I designed, deployed, broke, repaired, and improved a low-power outdoor sensor network using affordable modules and open-source tools.”

3. Abstract

Describe the problem, your approach, the key technical details, and the audience takeaways. Keep it lively, but do not hide the substance behind jokes. The jokes are seasoning. The project is dinner.

4. Audience level

State whether the session is beginner-friendly, intermediate, or advanced. Mention prerequisites if needed. A workshop involving surface-mount soldering, firmware flashing, or radio configuration should be honest about skill level and materials.

5. Why it fits Hackaday Europe

Make the connection obvious. Explain why hardware hackers, makers, embedded developers, engineers, or creative technologists will care.

6. Speaker background

Briefly explain your hands-on experience. Linkable proof is useful if the form allows it: project pages, GitHub repositories, videos, blog posts, photos, documentation, or prior talks.

Common CFP Mistakes to Avoid

One common mistake is writing a proposal that is too broad. “The Future of Hardware” sounds grand, but it gives reviewers very little to evaluate. Another mistake is hiding the actual content. A mysterious abstract may feel dramatic, but reviewers are not buying movie tickets. They need to know what the audience will learn.

Another trap is submitting a proposal that only describes features. “My board has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LoRa, an OLED screen, and six sensors” is a parts list. A stronger proposal explains the design decisions, mistakes, measurements, limitations, and lessons. The story is not that the board exists. The story is what building it taught you.

Also avoid copying and pasting the same generic proposal into every conference. Hackaday Europe has a distinct audience. Show that you understand it. Mention why the project belongs in a room full of people who enjoy open hardware, firmware, badge hacking, creative engineering, and practical experimentation.

Why Submitting Is Worth It Even If You Are Nervous

Many excellent talks begin with a nervous maker wondering whether their project is “big enough.” The answer is often yes, if the story is specific and useful. You do not need to have built a moon rover. You might have built a test fixture, fixed an obscure bug, designed an educational kit, documented a repair process, or learned a clever way to make a cheap sensor behave. The Hackaday audience appreciates the craft behind the work.

Submitting a proposal also forces you to clarify your own project. What was the actual problem? What did you try first? What failed? What finally worked? What would you do differently? That reflection can improve your documentation, sharpen your design thinking, and turn a pile of notes into a story other people can learn from.

Experience Section: What It Feels Like to Answer the Hackaday Europe CFP

Imagine the experience from the maker’s side. You have a project on your desk that has slowly evolved from “quick weekend idea” into “why is there a logic analyzer in the kitchen?” Maybe it started as a sensor node, a musical circuit, a tiny robot, a badge add-on, or a piece of open-source lab equipment. You know the project works, mostly. You also know it has scars: bodge wires, rewritten firmware, mounting holes that migrated between revisions, and one component that still seems personally offended by humidity.

Then you see the Hackaday Europe Call For Proposals. At first, you think, “Cool, someone should submit something.” Then the dangerous thought arrives: “Wait. Maybe that someone is me.” This is the moment when many makers hesitate. The project feels too small, too weird, too unfinished, or too hard to explain. But that is exactly why it may be a good talk. Hackaday-style audiences do not only want perfect finished products. They want the process. They want the puzzle. They want the reason you abandoned revision two, the measurement that surprised you, and the hack that looked ridiculous but worked beautifully.

Writing the proposal becomes a miniature engineering project. First, you define the problem. Then you scope it. Then you cut unnecessary features, because a conference abstract has no room for every tangent, even the tangent about the cursed USB cable. You try three titles. They are all terrible. You try ten more. One finally makes you laugh and explains the talk. Progress!

Next comes the abstract. This is where you translate bench experience into audience value. Instead of saying, “I made a device,” you say, “This session shows how to design, test, and debug a low-power device in real outdoor conditions.” Instead of saying, “I used LoRa,” you explain what range, power, antenna, enclosure, and regulatory trade-offs taught you. Instead of saying, “The firmware was hard,” you explain the exact constraint that made it hard and the method you used to solve it.

The workshop version of this experience is even more concrete. You have to think like an instructor. Can participants finish in the available time? What tools will they need? What happens if five people install the wrong driver? What is the backup plan when a laptop refuses to recognize a board with the stubbornness of a cat near bathwater? A good workshop proposal proves that you have thought beyond the fun idea and into the logistics of helping real people succeed.

If the proposal is accepted, the experience changes again. Now the project becomes a story with a deadline. Slides get written. Photos get organized. Measurements get checked. The demo gets simplified, because live demos are tiny goblins wearing HDMI adapters. You practice explaining the hard parts without drowning the audience in details. You make peace with the fact that someone will ask a brilliant question you did not anticipate.

At the event, the value of submitting becomes obvious. A talk turns a private project into a public conversation. Someone in the audience has solved a similar problem. Someone else wants to build on your work. Another person knows exactly why that one chip behaved strangely. Hallway chats become design reviews, debugging sessions, collaboration pitches, and friendly arguments about connectors. This is the real magic of Hackaday Europe: the CFP is not just a path to the stage. It is an invitation to join a room where unusual technical curiosity is normal, useful, and celebrated.

Conclusion

The Hackaday Europe: Call For Proposals is more than an administrative form. It is a signal flare for builders with stories worth sharing. Whether your project involves embedded systems, open-source hardware, drones, robotics, medical devices, radio, fabrication, creative electronics, badge hacking, or the noble art of making a stubborn prototype behave, a thoughtful proposal can turn your experience into a session that helps others.

The best submissions are clear, specific, practical, and honest. They explain the problem, reveal the journey, and promise takeaways that matter to a hardware-savvy audience. They do not need corporate polish. In fact, too much polish may hide the good stuff. Hackaday Europe is at its best when people bring real projects, real lessons, and real curiosity. So if you have built something, broken something, fixed something, measured something, or learned something the hard way, there is a good chance someone else would love to hear about it.