Hack Club Fallout 2026!

I wanted to make a little personal hardware project a while back, so I decided to join a Hack Club YSWS (“you ship, we ship”) event for funding because hardware is an expensive hobby (especially here in Indonesia) 🙂 Initially, I settled on Hack Club Blueprint as my friend also joined the same event, but the deadline was quite tight—I had just a month to design the hardware. And while I technically have finished it by Blueprint’s deadline, I was quite busy that time to polish and tidy the GitHub repository for the project.

Eventually.. I transferred the project to Fallout, another Hack Club event. I had a way longer deadline and I was soo sure I could build the project IRL before the deadline! And, well, I did! As a little (okay, not so little!) bonus, I chose to attend Fallout’s IRL 7-day hardware Hackathon in Shenzhen, China, from July 1st to the 7th. 60h of building was needed to qualify, and luckily I had just the perfect 67h which was quite enough for travel stipends as well!

Part 1: how did I suddenly agree to attend??

Lowkey, going to Fallout was a joke between my friend and me.

March 6, 2026

friend: let’s go to shenzhen for fallout /j

March 16, 2026

friend: are you grinding for Blueprint or Fallout?

me: Blueprint definitely

March 29, 2026

friend: fallout shop »>

me: wow that’s a cool shop item wishlist

March 29, 2026

me: you know what, I’m transferring my project to Fallout

May 31, 2026

friend: do you plan on going to Fallout?

me: y e s

And the rest is history (also known as: travel paperwork in a MONTH by someone who has never went abroad before).

Part 2: TRAVEL PAPERWORKS

This is the most boring part of the preparation. First, flight. I got mine for about IDR 6.9 mil (about $385 currently). Not bad at all. I then got my passport on June 12. Lots of headaches later, I got my Chinese visa on June 24.

The visa paperwork specifically was genuinely insane. I had to wait days for my visa invitation letter from Hack Club. An entire day just to fill the form and write parental consent letters (which I mostly wrote myself, funny enough). Fortunately, my friend applied earlier so I just copied their form and it passed the online review just fine. I actually paid extra for my online form to get approved faster 💀

But yeah, the wait was really worth it.

Part 3: Flight Flight Flight to Hong Kong

My flight was at midnight, so I traveled to the airport (CGK) at 6 PM and arrived at like 8-9 PM. Somehow, someway, my suitcase’s handle decided to give up and my parents ended up buying an overpriced as hell suitcase for me from an airport store 🥀

Oh, right. Why Hong Kong, you may ask? Hong Kong is next to Shenzhen, so all we needed to do was to take a bus to Shenzhen Bay Port! My parents required me to go to Hong Kong as it’s the only airport of which the Fallout staffs would help pick us up.

HOWEVER.. upon our arrival, we met a group of other Hack Clubbers looking to go to our residence. We then joined them, and travelled ourselves. Yay. Defeated the entire purpose of going to HKG; might as well travel directly to SXZ in Shenzhen.

The view near HKG was so pretty. Lots of mountain ranges and ocean views, yet packed with tall buildings. Combine that with fresh morning air and the warm sun. I was absolutely in love. However, on the bus, I was surprised by how a local treated us, tourists. Someone told our group to shut up.. I’d say in a quite rude manner of shouting in Cantonese (as if we all understand..) and hitting a chair (happens to be mine, imagine) 💀 oh well. Oops.

At Shenzhen Bay Port, most of us passed the immigration just fine, including me—they only asked for my passport and my flight ticket. However, some of us got a bit stuck and were questioned—especially if you didn’t pass the body temperature check. But at the end, all of us made it!

We then took the Shenzhen metro at line 13 down to Shigu, the closest Metro stop to our residence! I was worried that my metro QR code wouldn’t work there, so initially I bought a physical ticket with my WeChat Pay.. until I accidentally dropped the ticket and somehow cracked its plastic housing. Luckily, the NFC still worked, so I exited just fine. The hassle made me wish to try using my 乘车码 (“Cheng Che Ma”) public transport app later for my next metro rides (yes, it worked flawlessly).

Part 4: Chinese Tech™

I was really relieved to arrive at our residence (Vanke Port Apartment). My roommate had arrived to the residence the day before, which means.. the check-in had been done, and I could literally go to my room directly, skipping the insanely long queue of participant check-in! Yipee!

I proceeded to enter the elevator to get to my room, only to then get confused with why I couldn’t click on the 40th floor button (the location of my room). A local told me something, in CHINESE.. maybe they think I’m a local too¹. Anyway, I panicked and asked my roommate about this. It turned out that I entered the wrong elevator, and that an understandable sign for the correct elevator was written on the lobby walls this whole time. Oops.

I then got to the front my room, only to be greeted with a confusing passcode entry. All I had to do was write the room’s password.. and then.. what? There were only numbers, a # sign, and another symbol I forgot. Very helpful! I asked my roommate again, and apparently # means to validate the passcode. Why not use a >, checkmark symbol, or literally anything else? 😭

I finally got to the room. Really clean, cool city view, many useful appliances (even a fridge and a washing machine!), and lots of free amenities. Yay! I placed my suitcase and everything else. I then got curious about the door to the balcony. Tried to open it but I couldn’t. Turned out to be a sliding door with a door handle that looks like it’s a normal hinged door. I felt really dumb in here, everything works so differently hahaa 😭

I then tried to increase the room temperature because it was too cold for me, but I had no idea what the remote buttons were saying. Tried to Google translate them but still had no idea. After some clicks here and there, I accidentally made the air conditioner scream in jet engine and the AC remote stopped displaying text. Oh god, what a wonderful day. The remote died. Luckily, I brought with me AAA batteries (for my multimeter) that I could just pop into the remote. Tried to open the remote and struggled a bit.. apparently you needed to apply some downward pressure to the sliding lid.

Anyway, my roommate later showed how to increase and decrease the temperature (idk how ppl can figure things out on their own here). Turns out, I had to press the button I was already thinking about from the start but didn’t bother to try. In hindsight, I should’ve realized that the AC remote at my home is also made in China 😭

Later that day, I took my first shower after the flight. It was really refreshing. Nothing’s too special about their bathroom, I guess. Just a normal shower head, normal water heater, normal bottles of soap. Just that there’s no bidet there 💀 I brought my own portable bidet, which is ironically made in China.

Part 5: First Trip Around Shenzhen!

I wanted to tour around the city with my friend but they left first, misunderstanding my text 😭 luckily, as I was travelling down to the lobby with the elevator, I met a Fallout staff who then brought me and some 14 other attendees for a lunch at a nearby shopping mall and a tour at Window of the World (only in front of the entry gate ofc) and Huaqiangbei.

Shenzhen is absolutely gorgeous and clean. The air was surprisingly very clean and fresh, as many people (if not everyone) uses electric vehicle there. Their metro is also really good. We didn’t have to wait long until the next train comes. Everything from payment to the gates are really snappy.

Huaqiangbei is awesome too. We visited a few stores there. I’m not sure about the names, but one of them is the SEG market! I got myself two Raspberry Pi 5 active coolers there, for the price of just one in my country².

Part 6: Convenience Store

The next morning, my roommate bought herself some kind of Korean instant noodle with tteokbokki (in a trip to China.. seriously?) from a convenience store. I love tteokbokki and instantly went to the same store as her to buy the same food, along with some other random stuff like a hair tie I really liked, a pack of chewing gum, Oreo (I was curious if they taste any different ok?), and a cup of strawberry smoothie that was blended freshly with a machine (that was genuinely impressive). The strawberry smoothie was the best thing I ever drank, I have no idea how they can make strawberry taste THAT good omg.

The convenience store staff who were in their shift at that time was really friendly. They helped me with a few things, and we even had a nice chat! They also told me that I looked like a local… which explained people speaking Chinese to me this whole time 😭

Part 7: PCB Badge

Later that day, we were challenged to make PCB badges! I wanted to try something exotic, so I decided to make a multi-color silkscreen PCB keychain design with JLCPCB’s UV printing tech. However, the only way to get the multi-color silkscreen printing is if you use EasyEDA, JLCPCB’s EDA. I have never used EasyEDA before in my life so I struggled a TON.

I ended up finishing everything a bit late, after the submission got closed. However, the next day, they opened the submission page again and I then got my merch yay (an epic water bottle).

Part 8: LOCKED IN

From the third day onwards, we started building our main project. Initially, my team were going to build a drone. However, the parts to build a drone were not in the Fallout hardware store so we would have to spend money buying parts ourselves.. and we didn’t like that idea.

I then thought of making something Soup (our mascot)-themed! We came up with Soup that eats anything you put to its mouth. The build process was rather challenging as neither of us were experienced with mechanical engineering and our project involved moving parts. We had to figure out a safe mechanism that lets us open Soup’s mouth without trapping people’s hands. Luckily, I somehow brought a yarn (idk why) I could use as a string for a pulley system that pulls Soup’s mouth up and down!

The Motor Drama

We got a DC motor, a motor controller, and an ESP. For whatever reason, we could not turn on our motor correctly and control it using our ESP. Fortunately, I brought a random Arduino Nano I have and after I tried to wire the motor to my random Arduino, the motor worked just fine. Strange. Perhaps this has to do with the horrible pin header joints of our ESP, as they absolutely sucked (we didn’t get leaded solder “for safety reasons” and the lead-free solder for some reason was utterly horrible 😭).

Free Stuff 🤑

I was initially a bit sad that to get hardware from the Fallout hardware store, we need to spend currency. I imagined that doing a hackathon in Shenzhen would mean near unlimited hardware nextdoors, 24/7, for everyone. But a while later, the staffs were so overwhelmed with everyone’s hardware orders that they decided to make every item from the shop FREE! 😭 It really was like a dream. We could go to the makerspace (Chaihuo Makerspace, really cool btw) to grab anything from them that we wanted!

3D Printing Big Things? Horrible Idea

We wanted to 3D print our Soup, but since he has to be somewhat big, 3D printing him would’ve taken ages (to be precise, maybe around 12 hours). Actually, it could’ve been fine, if not the model issues we had that repeatedly threw our model to the back of the queue. We were later told to use something like cardboard, which we did. Hahaha. Never have I expected to do manual CNC-ing in Fallout.

Back Pain ™

Back at my home I would work on my desk with a back-supporting chair. I absolutely wrecked my spine trying to work on the floor of our venue there during the 5th to 7th of July. Even with bean bags and cushions, my horrible back could not handle working for an entire day there. After going back home, my back hurt for an entire week every time I sat in a slightly weird posture (it has never happened previously). Luckily, I’m good now ✌️

Sleeping in Vanke Design Commune

One of the most memorable things from Fallout is sleeping on the floor of our venue, because we could absolutely not be bothered to clean up our space filled with cardboard flake and tools. My teammate and I “slept”³ 2 nights here, with debugging sessions here and there with our faithful half-awake souls. Absolutely hilarious. However, we couldn’t get the whole gang to sleep because one of my teammates preferred to sleep in our residence.

Magic Motor

To this day, I’m really grateful of our awesome yellow DC motor. This motor thing decided to stop working like a few hours before our exhibition starts. We tried our best to re-wound the pulley string a few times with no luck. Eventually, the motor decided to behave but it started to move Soup’s mouth erratically, and I had absolutely no idea if it looked better or not than how it originally was. I really didn’t want to gamble trying to further fix it, so we just went with that funny erratic motion for our exhibition. Somehow, SOMEWAY, the motor worked flawlessly during our exhibition up until the end, behaving correctly for everyone who went to our stand. Probably used our annual luck for that single morning…

Part 9 Bye Bye : (

After our exhibition, we voted for the top projects! We didn’t get to the podium unfortunately, but honestly I didn’t mind as I came here to mostly just have fun together with my friends! I was really happy too to bring Soup home!

The Fallout staff escorted us to HKG as soon as the event ended. I really appreciate the punctuality, as our flight was quite early at 7 PM. The walk to the metro stop was quite tiring, having to bring a suitcase and my heavy aah backpack and still walk at a fast pace.

We took the metro at line 13 until like the very last stop at Shenzhen Bay Port, I have no idea what it’s called though. Afterwards, we went through immigration checks. I passed just fine, having to show only my passport and tell my name.

And then, our group was going to take the bus back to HKG. However, for some reason, my debit card and my friend’s were rejected by the bus’s payment system. It did not happen when we were going from HKG to Shenzhen Bay Port. Luckily, one of the staffs helped us by getting me, my friend, and another attendee also with rejected card to a bus stop with a taxi that accepts whichever payment method the staff used (I think it was Hack Club’s HCB Visa debit card?). I was really grateful for going along with the staffs, as my friend initially pitched the idea of going to HKG earlier without any guidance 💀

We tried to take the bus again from the terminal, unfortunately still with rejected cards. This time, the staff from earlier helped pay for our fares (thank you so so so much).

Soon, we arrived to HKG. We said goodbye to each other ;( Me and my friend then caught our flight and went back to Jakarta!

Thoughts

Attending Fallout felt like a dream, honestly. I really cherish every moments of it. I never thought I would finally be able to step outside my country and see so many people from around the world, doing something that I love and meeting others who share the same passion. I’m absolutely grateful that it happened.

Thank you to Hack Club for this awesome event, as well as the staff who had worked really hard to make Fallout happen. And to my teammates, I really loved working with you.

1. I’m a Chinese Indonesian but I can’t speak Mandarin; only a local Chinese dialect. ↩

2. and then, while I was installing it at home, I somehow broke my Pi in the process. I might’ve applied too much pressure and cracked a solder joint or a trace. Be careful, these SBCs are fragile… rip insane amount of rupiah ↩

3. blessed 2 to 3 hour sleep ↩