Make no mistake, just getting a hacker con off the ground is a considerable challenge. But the really hard part comes after. To be more than a one-off success story, you’ve got to expand the event year after year in a manageable way. Go too slow, and attendees might lose interest. Move too fast, and you run the risk of going broke if your ticket sales don’t keep up with your ambitions.
Luckily for hackers living in the Philadelphia area, the folks behind JawnCon have once again demonstrated they’re able to thread the needle. While the ticket price remained the same as in 2024, this year an additional track of talks was introduced as well as expanded activities throughout the con. Even though it only wrapped this past weekend, there’s already buzz about what the event will look like in 2026.
Until then, let’s take a look at some of the projects that were on display at this year’s JawnCon. If it’s the talks you’re after, they’ll be edited and uploaded to the event’s YouTube page in the near future. In the meantime, the Friday and Saturday live streams are still available.
Meshtastic Spreads its Web
While it wasn’t officially part of JawnCon’s considerable network infrastructure playground, Meshtastic ended up being a big part of the two-day event. Members of Philly Mesh had a table where they were showing off a wide array of commercial and DIY nodes, the crew behind the Hacker Pager were offering up a special edition of the faux-retro portable communicator, and it seemed like every other attendee had brought their own mesh-capable gadget with them.
The end result was easily the most active Meshtastic environment I’ve ever personally found myself in. Wandering the con venue you could expect to see more than 100 individual nodes in the area, with the majority of them happily chattering away. Even during the off-hours on Friday and Saturday night, there was still plenty of mesh activity between the two main hotels where many of the attendees were staying.
Having a relatively active mesh added a new dynamic to the con. Occasionally, pieces of real-time information would make its way through the net, such as what time the nearby cafe was opening, or which talk was currently taking place. A few times it allowed for quick response to semi-emergencies, such as when some hackers which shall remain nameless ended up causing a minor spill, and found themselves in need of cleaning supplies.
It also provided even more data to pore over — since the con wrapped, an SQLite database containing every packet that went through the mesh has been floating around for anyone who wants to analyze it. Hope nobody said anything they’ll regret…
Wardrive All the Things
This year, [BusySignal] returned with another big box of radio hardware. Unlike the impressive wardriving rig he showed off during the first JawnCon, this new build isn’t limited to just WiFi and Bluetooth. The concept has now evolved to include other wireless signals thanks to a bank of software-defined radios (SDRs), ranging from a handful of RTL-SDRs for the easy stuff like 433 MHz wireless sensors, and a HackRF for when things get a bit more serious.
The rig, enclosed in a rugged orange case and powered by batteries, exists at least in part so that [BusySignal] can show off the considerable capabilities of Kismet. He argues that the open source wireless sniffing suite is capable of much more than casual users may realize, and wants to inspire developers and hackers to add new protocols to the already impressive array of signals that it’s able to ingest and display.
This exploration of Kismet’s capabilities was the subject of his Saturday talk, Get More Radio Frequency Curious. Definitely one to keep an eye out for when the edited talks start hitting the JawnCon YouTube channel.
GameTank Comes Out to Play
Tucked away in one corner of the chill out area was an 8-bit game system that the passerby might have thought was a relic from the 1980s. But on closer inspection, its 3D printed shell quickly gives away the fact that is no classic machine.
The GameTank is an open source hardware retroconsole designed around the 6502, more specifically, the modern W65C02S variant. Clyde Shaffer created the system in the spirit of other fantasy consoles like the Pico-8, with the key difference being that he started from the physical console and worked his way forward from there. It features a modernized development and debugging environment for both C and Rust, including an emulator that will run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS. In fact, if you can take a hit to the performance, the emulator can even run right in the web browser — making it easy to check out the GameTank’s library of games.
We’ve actually covered the GameTank here on Hackaday in the past, but seeing it in person, you really appreciate all the little details. The cartridges specifically are a very nice touch. Of course, we know that a single modern SPI flash chip could allow the GameTank to hold hundreds (if not thousands) of games internally. Yet there’s just something so nostalgic about rummaging through pile of cartridges, searching for a particular game, and then slamming it home into the console.
But is it any fun to play? To that end, I’m happy to say it passed the test with a few of the kids that ended up coming to JawnCon with their parents. I overheard someone at the lock picking table saying that their son had abandoned his expensive Nintendo Switch on the table in favor of pulling up a chair to the GameTank and basking in its CRT glory. Maybe the kids will be alright after all.
The Next Jawneration
It’s obviously very early to predict what the next JawnCon will look like. After all, a lot can happen in the next 359 days.
But having had the good fortune to attend all three of these events and see its trajectory, I can say in my mumble opinion that JawnCon is approaching an inflection point of sorts. While the area of Arcadia University that’s been made available for the con since its inception has never been particularly large, this was the first year it actually started to feel small. It’s no exaggeration to say that on several occasions, I struggled to find a surface flat enough to put my laptop down — whether it was lock picks, stickers, payphones, or even just cabling — literally every table in the room had something on it.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the worst that can be said about a hacker con was that it had a lot of people and so much interesting stuff on display that you couldn’t find a place to sit down, count me in. But in the same way keeping a plant in a pot that’s too small can stunt its growth, I think JawnCon will need to find a way to stretch its legs if it’s to remain healthy over the long term.
That being said, I plan on being there in 2026, and if you’re in the Philadelphia area, so you should you. Even if it means we might have to take turns sitting in each other’s laps.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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