This year we challenged the Hackaday community to develop Shitty Simple Supercon Add-Ons (SAO) that did more than just blink a few LEDs. The SAO standard includes I2C data and a pair of GPIO pins, but historically, they’ve very rarely been used. We knew the talented folks in this community would be able to raise the bar, but as they have a tendency to do, they’ve exceeded all of our expectations.

As we announced live during the closing ceremony at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, the following four SAOs will be put into production and distributed to all the attendees at Hackaday Europe in Spring of 2025.

Best Overall: SAO Multimeter

For the “Best Overall” category, we only intended to compare it with the other entries in the contest. But in the end, we think there’s a strong case to be made that [Thomas Flummer] has created the greatest SAO of all time. So far, anyway.

This add-on is a fully functional digital multimeter, with functions for measuring voltage, resistance, and continuity. The design is a pure work of art, with its structure combining stacked PCBs and 3D printed parts. There’s even tiny banana plugs to connect up properly scaled probes. Incredible.

In the documentation [Thomas] mentions there are additional functions he didn’t have time to include in the firmware, such as modes to analyze the I2C and GPIO signals being received. Now that it’s been selected for production, we’re hoping he’ll have the time to get the code finished up before its European debut.

Fun: Etch sAo Sketch

This SAO recreates the iconic art toy in a (hopefully) non-trademarked way, with a 1.5″ inch 128 x 128 grayscale OLED display and a pair of trimpots capped with 3D printed knobs. Drawing is fun enough, but the nostalgia really kicks in when you give it a good shake — the onboard LIS3DH 3-axis accelerometer picks up the motion and wipes the display just like the real thing.

Created by [Andy Geppert], this SAO isn’t just a pretty face. Flipping it over shows an exceptionally clever technique for connecting the display board to the main PCB. Tiny metal balls (or “alignment spheres” if you want to get fancy) mate up with the mounting holes on the OLED board and center it, and a touch of solder locks it all in place.

Fine Art: Bendy SAO

While this wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing SAO might look like the sort of thing that would be outside of a used car dealership, but creator [debraansell] managed to shrink it down so the point that it’s reasonable to plug into your badge. More or less.

There are several fascinating tricks at work here, from lighting the PCB from the back using side-firing LEDs to the integrated slip rings. If this one didn’t look so good, it would have been a strong contender for the “Least Manufacturable” Honorable Mention.

Functional: Vectrex SAO

Creating a replica of the Vectrex at SAO scale would have been an impressive enough accomplishment, but [Brett Walach] took this one all the way and made it playable.

The display is a 7 x 10 Charlieplexed LED matrix, while the “joystick” is implemented with a 1-button capacitive touch sensor. A PIC16F886 microcontroller runs the simplified version of Scramble, and there’s even a speaker for era-appropriate audio.

But that’s not all! This SAO was also designed to be hacked — so not only is all the hardware and software open source, but there’re various jumpers to fiddle with various settings and an I2C control protocol that lets you command the action from the badge.

Honorable Mentions

As usual, this contest had several Honorable Mentions categories — while we would have loved to put all of these SAOs into production, there’s only so much we can do before now and Spring.

[Jeremy Geppert]’s SAO LoRa Walkie Talkie was a judge favorite, for its simple good looks and the extra functionality that it brings to the table. [Scorch Works]’s SAO Infinity Mirror was absolutely beautiful to see in person, and makes a fantastic display when many of them get together. And [MakeItHackin]’s Skull of Fate SAO not only looked super when its eyes scan the room, but it could read your future as well!

Best Communication:

Using I2C to get SAOs to talk to the badge (or each other) was a big part of this contest, but we were also on the lookout for entries which helped facilitate badge-to-badge communications.

The Badge Tag NFC SAO from [Thomas Flummer] is a perfect example of both — it uses the NXP NTAG I2C Plus to provide 2K of read-write storage that can be accessed either internally through the I2C bus by the badge, or externally by an NFC device such as a smartphone. Modeled after a traditional conference name tag, this SAO was designed to make it easier for sharing your contact info with others during a busy con.

Infrared Communication SAO by [Alec Probst] brings infrared communications to the party, while looking like a classic TV remote. Though the original idea was to get this working in conjunction with the badge to act as a sort of TV-B-Gone, it ended up being used as part of a laser tag game during Supercon.

The GAT Nametag SC8 from [true] tackles communication on a more human level by providing a digital name tag for your badge. This compact board’s secret trick is the ability to make sure your name is legible no matter what its orientation thanks to a LIS2DW12 accelerometer that can detect the SAO’s orientation relative to the ground. RGB LEDs catch the viewer’s eye, but it’s the incredible firmware with seemingly endless options for text styling and tweaks that really set this build apart.

Light Show:

There’s little question that Featuring You! from [Nanik Adnani] is a perfect entry for this category. Nominally, it’s a little arrow you can write your name on and use a name tag. But power it up and you can dazzle anyone standing too close with its array of marching white LEDs. In a particularly nice touch, the circuit is implemented with only discreet components — no microcontroller.

The reDOT_RGB from [Alex] is a tiny 5×7 RGB LED matrix with a minuscule ATtiny816 MCU around the back to control the show. At just 8 x 11 mm, it’s hard to overstate just how tiny this SAO is.

While on the subject of tiny boards, the
Persistence of Vision POV Display is another entry not much larger than the SAO connector itself. Using a row of five tiny white LEDs and a ADXL345 accelerometer, [Michael Yim] is able to write text in mid-air thanks to the gullibility of the human eye.

Least Manufacturable:

Simple Add-Ons are essentially an art form, so it’s not surprising to find that they don’t often lend themselves to mass production. Several of the entries this yeah would be a real challenge to make in large numbers, but the one that really keeps us up at night is the ultra tiny smart SAO from [Alex].

This board is designed to fit inside the space between four header pins. Thanks, but no thanks.

Raising the Bar

Our hope this year was to elevate the Simple Add-On from a decorative piece of flair to something functional, and potentially, even useful. The results were incredible, and while we can only pick four winners this time around, every entry helped push the state-of-the-art forward in its own way. It’s hard to imagine how the SAO envelope can be pushed any further, but we can’t wait to find out.

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon is on in Pasadena, but if you couldn’t make it to sunny California this year, don’t worry. We’ve got a live streams of the main stage talks, and all of the second track talks are being recorded and will be put up on the YouTube channel after the con.

If you’re watching from home and want to join the conversation, today might be a good time to join the official Hackaday Discord server.

If you’re hear a rushing noise, don’t be alarmed — that’s just the rapidly approaching 2024 Hackaday Supercon. As hard as it is to believe, a whole year has gone by, and we’re now just a few days away from kicking off our annual hardware hacking extravaganza in Pasadena. Tickets just sold out over the weekend — thank you procrastinators!

For those of you who have tickets to join us this weekend, we’ve got a few last minute announcements and bits of information we wanted to get out to you. As a reminder, you can find the full schedule for all three days on the official Supercon site.

New Events Added!

For those who’ve attended a Supercon before, you know we like to cram as much content as we can into the weekend. But there’s always room for more, and this year we’ve managed to squeeze in a couple extra activities that we’re very excited about.

Halloween Hacker Happy Hour

It just so happens that Halloween is the night before Supercon officially kicks off, and that seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up. So we’ll be throwing a pre-event party at the nearby KingsRow Gastropub where costumes and all manner of blinking LEDs are very much encouraged. Officially we’ll be hanging out from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself still talking to Hackaday folks at last call.

You don’t need tickets for this event, but we’d like to have a rough head count, so if you could RSVP through Eventbrite we’d appreciate it.

Tina’s Junk Challenge

We’ve always wanted to introduce some kind of swap meet aspect to Supercon, but the logistics have always been a challenge. This year though, we’re finally going to get the chance to test out the idea. Former DesignLab Resident Tina Belmont is in the process of moving out of the country and needs to find a new home for her electronic bric-a-brac.

Everything is free, so attendees are encouraged to take anything they think they can make use of. Naturally, an influx of interesting hardware could provide for some very unique badge hacking possibilities. If we can get enough people to graft these second-hand components onto their badges, we just might be able to turn it into a proper category come Sunday night.

A table where folks can offload their electronic bits and bobs has worked well at other hacker cons, so we’re eager to see how it goes at Supercon. If this is something you’d like to see more of, or would potentially like to participate in next year, let us know.

Krux’s Side Quests

Let’s be honest, most of us are already taking our marching orders from the computer in one way or another. So why not turn it into a fun interactive game?

The idea is simple: use the mysterious retrocomputer oracle, and it gives you a quest. Maybe you’ll have to find a hidden item, or solve a riddle. Krux has a run a variation of this game at Toor Con in the past, but the challenges spit out by the computer this time will be tailored to Supercon.

Windows Through Wires Exhibition

You may recall that we asked the Hackaday community if they had any unusual display technology they’d like to show off during Supercon as part of an exhibit.

Well, as you might have imagined, the response was incredible. From gorgeous vintage pieces to completely custom hardware, there’s going to be a wide array of fascinating hardware for attendees to study up-close.

While getting a chance to see various display technologies throughout the years would have our attention as it is, what’s really exciting is that many of the custom-built devices in the exhibit are either projects hosted on Hackaday.io or ones that we’ve covered at some point on the front page.

Considering how gorgeous some of them have looked in photographs, we’re eager to drool over them in the real world — and we bet you are to.

Workshop Technical Difficulties

Hopefully we’ve provided enough good news that we can slip in a bit of the bad. Unfortunately, we’ve had to cancel the “Hands on with an Electron Microscope” workshop that was to be hosted by Adam McCombs and Isabel Burgos. Everyone with tickets will of course be getting a refund, and you should be receiving an email to that effect shortly if you haven’t already.

While we’re just as disappointed by this news as you are, it’s one of those situations where there simply weren’t any good solutions. Long story short, the scanning electron microscope that was small enough to bring to Supercon is down, and there’s just not enough time to get it up and running at this point. An attempt was made to find another small-ish electron microscope on short notice but…well, that’s just as tricky to pull off as it sounds.

Send Us Your Lightning Talks!

To end this update on a high note, we want to remind everyone that this year we’ll once again be going Lighting Talks on Sunday morning. If you’ve never given a talk before, the shorter seven minute format is perfect for getting your feet wet. Or maybe you’ve got something you want to talk about that doesn’t take a whole hour to explain. Either way, the Lightning Talks are a great way to share what your passionate about with the Supercon audience.

If you’d like to give a Lightning Talk, simply fill out this form. You can upload slides if you’ve got them, but they aren’t strictly necessary.

China has a space station — it’s called Tiangong, the first module was launched in 2021, and it’s all going quite swimmingly, thank you very much. That’s essentially what we know about the orbital complex here in the West, as China tends to be fairly secretive when it comes to their activities in space.

But thanks to a recently released video by the state-funded CCTV Video News Agency, we now have an unprecedented look inside of humanity’s newest orbital laboratory. Shenzhou-18 crew members [Ye Guangfu], [Li Cong], and [Li Guangsu] provide viewers with a full-blown tour of the station, and there’s even baked-in English subtitles so you won’t miss a beat.

The few looks the public has gotten inside of Tiangong in the past have been low-resolution and generally of the “shaky cam” variety. In comparison, this flashy presentation was clearly made to impress an international audience. But let’s be fair, if you managed to build your own crewed station in low Earth orbit, wouldn’t you want to show it off a bit?

So what did we learn about Tiangong from this tour? Well, admittedly not more than we could have guessed. The layout of the three-module station isn’t entirely unlike the International Space Station or even its Soviet predecessor, Mir.

One module contains a common area where the crew meets and eats their meals, as well as the sleeping berths for crew members. (The small portholes in each berth are a nice touch.) Then there are the multi-purpose laboratory modules with their rows of rack mounted experiments, an exercise area, and finally an airlock that can be used to either bring cargo onboard or expose experiments to space.

Even though it’s much smaller than the ISS, one can’t help but notice that the inside of the Tiangong appears a bit less cramped. The modules of the Chinese station have a slightly sleeker internal look, and overall, everything seems less cluttered, or at least, better organized. Some online commenters have equated it to the comparison between the SpaceX Dragon and Russia’s Soyuz capsule, which given the relative ages of the two stations, isn’t wholly inaccurate.

China’s space program has been making great strides over the last several years, but from an outsider’s perspective, it’s been difficult to follow. It’s been doubly frustrating for us here at Hackaday. We’d love to provide the same sort of in-depth coverage we do for American and European missions, but often it’s a challenge to find the technical data that requires. Here’s hoping this video means China is looking to be more transparent about their off-world activities going forward.

With the 2024 Hackaday Supercon looming large on the horizon, Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this episode off by talking about this year’s badge and its focus on modular add-ons. From there they’ll go over the results of a particularly challenging installment of What’s that Sound?, discuss a promising DIY lathe that utilizes 3D printed parts filled with concrete, and ponder what the implosion of Redbox means for all of their disc-dispensing machines that are still out in the wild.

You’ll also hear about custom macropads, lifting SMD pins, and how one hacker is making music with vintage electronics  learning kits. Finally, they’ll reassure listeners that the shifting geopolitical landscape probably won’t mean the end of Hackaday.io anytime soon, and how some strategically placed pin headers can completely change how you approach designing your own PCBs.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3.

Episode 294 Show Notes:

News:

• The 2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Badge Reveal

What’s that Sound?

• Congrats to [I can see the sounds] for guessing the HAARP.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• A 3D Printed, Open Source Lathe?
  • Precision CNC With Epoxy Granite
  • Experiments In Creating The Best Epoxy Granite
• Redbox Is Dead, But The Machines Are Kind Of Hanging On
  • Redbox hack reveals customer info. from 2K rentals – Ars Technica
  • Foone: “the unit I’ve got an image for has records going …” – digipres.club
• Libre Space Foundation Aims To Improve Satellite Tech
  • Flying The First Open Source Satellite
  • 32C3: So You Want To Build A Satellite?
  • Open Source CubeSats Ease The Pain Of Building Your Own
  • How To Build A CubeSat
  • SatNOGS – Global Network of Ground Stations
• Keeping Tabs On An Undergraduate Projects Lab’s Door Status
• DIY Air Bearings, No Machining Required
  • Learn 40 Years Of Mech Prototyping At Lightspeed
  • High-Precision Air Bearing CNC Lathe And Grinder
• I2C The Hard Way

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • 3D Printed Tires, By The Numbers
  • Zero To Custom MacroPad In 37 Easy Steps
  • Make Your Own Remy The Rat This Halloween
• Tom’s Picks:
  • Give Your SMD Components A Lift
  • 75-In-One Music
  • Figuring Out The Most Efficient Way To Reuse Bags Of Desiccant

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Will .IO Domain Names Survive A Geopolitical Rearrangement?
• Hacker Tactic: Building Blocks
  • Power Supply PCB Redesign

Starting a hacker con is hardly what anyone would describe as easy — but arguably, the truly difficult part is keeping the momentum going into the second year and beyond. For the first year, you can get away with a few missed opportunities and glitches, but by the time you’ve got one event under your belt, you’ll have set the bar for what comes next. There’s pressure to grow, to make each year bigger and better than before. All the while, making sure you don’t go broke in the process. Putting on a single hacker con is an achievement in and of itself, but establishing a long-running hacker con is a feat that relatively few groups have managed to pull off.

With this in mind, the incredible success of the second annual JawnCon is all the more impressive. The Philadelphia-area event not only met the expectations of a sophomore effort, but exceeded them in pretty much every quantifiable way. From doubling attendance to providing a unique and immersive experience with their electronic badge, the team seized every opportunity to build upon the already strong foundation laid last year. If this was the make-or-break moment for the Northeast’s newest hacker con, the future looks very bright indeed.

But before setting our sights on next year, let’s take a look at some of the highlights from JawnCon 0x1. While you can watch all of this year’s talks on YouTube, the aspect of a hacker on that can’t easily be recorded is the quality time spent with like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, there’s no way to encompass everything that happened during a two-day con into a single article. Instead, this following will cover a few of the things that stood out to me personally.

If you’d like to experience the rest of JawnCon, you’ll just have to make the trip out to Philly for 2025.

Creating New Traditions

For returning attendees, certainly the most striking thing about this year’s event was simply how many people showed up. In the closing ceremonies, we learned that attendance had more than doubled since last year, and you could absolutely feel it. The rooms never felt cramped, but they certainly felt full. 

But the growth of this year’s event wasn’t limited to the ticket holders. The local chapter of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) was there, equipped with picks and transparent padlocks for anyone interested in an impromptu lesson in lockpicking. You could also try to get yourself out of a pair of handcuffs and other forms of restraints.

This year also featured a “Free Table” where attendees could leave interesting items for others. We’ve all got some piece of hardware that’s been gathering dust for just a bit too long. Maybe it was for some project that you’re no longer interested in, or you just don’t have the time to mess around with it. Instead of tossing it in the trash, a table like this is a great way to re-home some of those technical treasures.

The table was constantly being refreshed as more attendees showed up and added their contributions to the pile. There was only one rule: if your stuff was still there at the end of the con, you had to take it home. But as things started wrapping up on Saturday evening, there were just a few oddball antenna cables and a couple mystery PCBs left. It was especially gratifying to see how many reference books were picked up.

Another highlight this year was a informal competition inspired by the old IT adage that digital subscriber line (DSL)  broadband service could be run over a piece of wet string. With all the hardware necessary to establish a DSL connection on-site, attendees were invited to bring up various objects that would fill in for the telephone line. The medium that provided the fastest confirmed Internet connection would be crowned the winner.

Two pieces of spaghetti ended up taking the top spot, with a link speed of 10 Mbit. A section of carbon fiber tube — dubbed “hard-line coax” for the purposes of the competition — managed second place with around 6 Mbit. As you might expect, the failures in this competition were perhaps just as interesting as the successes. A line of “energy gel” was apparently not conductive enough, though some flickering of the indicator LEDs on the modem seemed to indicate it was close. While it came as no surprise that a line of hackers holding hands wasn’t a suitable link for the experiment, the audience did appreciate the irony that the hardware indicated it couldn’t progress past the handshaking stage of the connection.

Living History for Hackers

Attendees had already gotten a sneak peek at the JawnCon 0x1 badge a few weeks before the event, so the fact that they’d all be getting tiny modems to plug into their computers (and indeed, wear around their necks) wasn’t a complete surprise. But still, I don’t think anyone was fully prepared for what a unique experience it was really going to be.

For the younger players, there was an obvious learning curve. But the veterans in attendance were all too happy to explain the relevant AT commands and get them dialing away. Once you’d figured out how to connect up to the network and start exploring, it added a whole new dimension to the event.

Not only were there various puzzles and Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges that could be accessed through the modem, but it also acted as a gateway to games, chats, and other features that functioned within the con’s infrastructure.

For example, running a command within the modem’s onboard menu system would print the current talk taking place on the stage downstairs, and tell you who was up next.

It was actually a bit surreal. Walking around you’d come across a table of 20-somethings, all with look-alike Hayes modems plugged into their shiny new MacBooks or high-end gaming laptops. It’s hard to say how many of them came away from the event with a new respect for the old ways, but there’s no question they had learned a hell of a lot more about the early Internet than they would have from just watching a YouTube video about it.

While the badge was certainly the star of the show, there were also vintage serial terminals dotted around the chill-out area that you could interact with. By default they showed the talk schedule in a glorious shade of either amber or green, but hit a key and you’d be dumped into the terminal. Nominally, jumping on the terminals and executing various tasks was part of the CTF, but it was also a lot of fun to turn back the clock and sit down at a real serial terminal and interact with some *nix box hidden away elsewhere in the building.

Long Live the Jawn

Any event that manages to double its attendance from the previous year is clearly doing something right. But if you don’t know how to handle the growth, it can become a problem. Luckily, the JawnCon staff are on the case. It sounds like next year they may opt to use a larger space within the same building at Arcadia University. The University is a great fit for the event, so the fact that there’s room to grow is great news for everyone involved.

Of course, it takes more than simply securing a larger room every couple years to make sure an event like this stays on the right track. You also need intelligent and responsible folks at the wheel. Here again, JawnCon is well equipped for the future. The staff and volunteers that worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring this con to life are some of the most passionate and welcoming individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. They represent the very best qualities of hacker culture, and armed with a genuine desire to bring that sense of exploration and inclusion to the next generation, they’re the catalyst that will keep JawnCon growing and evolving over the coming years.

With the 2024 Hackaday Supercon just a couple weeks away, we’re pleased to announce that the official site for the three-day event is now live!

On the brand-new Supercon page, you can find a listing of all of our fantastic speakers, the hands-on workshops, and perhaps most importantly, the schedule of when everything is happening. As always, Supercon is jam-packed with incredible content, so you’ll want to consult with the schedule to navigate your way through it. Don’t worry if it ends up that two talks you want to see are scheduled for the same time — we’ll be recording all of the talks and releasing them on the Hackaday YouTube channel, so you won’t miss out.

If you’re still on the fence, we do have a few tickets left at the time of this writing. All of the workshops are full at this point, but you can still get on the waiting list for a few of them just in case a spot opens up.