Supercon 2024: Badge Add-On Winners

November 4, 2024 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

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.

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An Ode To The SAO

September 26, 2024 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

There are a lot of fantastic things about Hackaday Supercon, but for me personally, the highlight is always seeing the dizzying array of electronic bits and bobs that folks bring with them. If you’ve never had the chance to join us in Pasadena, it’s a bit like a hardware show-and-tell, where half the people you meet are eager to pull some homemade gadget out of their bag for an impromptu demonstration. But what’s really cool is that they’ve often made enough of said device that they can hand them out to anyone who’s interested. Put simply, it’s very easy to leave Supercon with a whole lot more stuff than when you came in with.

Most people would look at this as a benefit of attending, which of course it is. But in a way, the experience bummed me out for the first couple of years. Sure, I got to take home a literal sack of incredible hardware created by members of our community, and I’ve cherished each piece. But I never had anything to give them in return, and that didn’t quite sit right with me.

So last year I decided to be a bit more proactive and make my own Simple Add-On (SAO) in time for Supercon 2023. With a stack of these in my bag, I’d have a personalized piece of hardware to hand out that attendees could plug right into their badge and enjoy. From previous years I also knew there was something of an underground SAO market at Supercon, and that I’d find plenty of people who would be happy to swap one for their own add-ons for mine.

To say that designing, building, and distributing my first SAO was a rewarding experience would be something of an understatement. It made such an impression on me that it ended up helping to guide our brainstorming sessions for what would become the 2024 Supercon badge and the ongoing SAO Contest. Put simply, making an SAO and swapping it with other attendees adds an exciting new element to a hacker con, and you should absolutely do it.

So while you’ve still got time to get PCBs ordered, let’s take a look at some of the unique aspects of creating your own Simple Add-On.

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There’s Already A Nixie Addon For The 2024 Supercon Badge

September 12, 2024 by Lewin Day No comments

Nixie tubes are cool, and hackers like them. Perhaps for those reasons more than any other, [Kevin Santo Cappuccio] has developed a very particular Simple Add-On for the 2024 Hackaday Supercon badge.

The build began with a Burroughs 122P224 Nixie tube, and a HV8200 power supply. The latter component is key—it’s capable of turning voltages as low as 3 V into the 180V needed to power a Nixie. Then, an 18-position selector switch was pulled out of a resistance substitution box, and [Kevin] whipped up a basic DIY slip ring using some raw copper clad board.

Smoosh it all together, and what do you get? It’s a Nixie tube you can spin to change the number it displays. Useful? Hardly, unless you want to display varying glowing numbers to people at unreadable angles. Neat? Very. Just don’t touch any of the pins carrying 180 V, that’ll sting. Still, [Kevin] told us it’s pretty tucked away. “I’m totally comfortable touching it, but also would get sued into oblivion selling these on Amazon,” he says.

As [Kevin] notes in his post, the 2024 badge is all about the add-ons— and there’s actually a contest! We suspect [Kevin] will have a strong chance of taking out the Least Manufacturable title.

If you need more information about the Simple Add-On (SAO) interface, [Brian Benchoff] posted the V1.69bis standard on these very pages back in 2019. Apparently the S used to stand for something else. Video after the break.

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Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-Ons Win

August 27, 2024 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

One of our favorite parts of Hackaday Supercon is seeing all the incredible badge add-ons folks put together. These expansions are made all the more impressive by the fact that they had to design their hardware without any physical access to the badge, and with only a few weeks’ notice. Even under ideal conditions, that’s not a lot of time to get PCBs made, 3D print parts, or write code. If only there was some standard for badge expansions that could speed this process up…

But there is! The Simple Add-On (SAO) standard has been supported by the Supercon badges since 2019, and the 2×3 pin connector has also popped up on badges from various other hacker events such as HOPE and DEF CON. There’s only one problem — to date, the majority of SAOs have been simply decorative, consisting of little more than LEDs connected to the power pins.

This year, we’re looking to redefine what an SAO can be with the Supercon Add-On Contest. Don’t worry, we’re not changing anything about the existing standard — the pinout and connector remains the same. We simply want to challenge hackers and makers to think bigger and bolder.

Thanks to the I2C interface in the SAO header, add-ons can not only communicate with the badge, but with each other as well. We want you to put that capability to use by creating functional SAOs: sensors, displays, buttons, switches, rotary encoders, radios, we want to see it all! Just make sure you submit your six-pin masterpiece to us by the October 15th deadline.

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Hands-On: Internet Of Batteries Quantum Badge Brings Badgelife Add-Ons The Power And Internet They Crave

August 9, 2020 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Our friends in the Whiskey Pirates crew sent me the unofficial DEF CON badge they built this year. The Internet of Batteries QUANTUM provides power and connectivity to the all-important add-on badges of DC28. The front of the badge is absolutely gorgeous to the point I don’t really want to solder on my add-on headers and disrupt that aesthetic.

The gold-plated copper makes for a uniformed and reflective contrast to the red solder mask which occupies the majority of the front. Here we see the great attention to detail that [TrueControl] includes in his badges. The white stripe of silk screen separating the two colors is covered by some black detailing tape that looks much better than the white.

The antenna of the ESP32 module poking out the underside of the gold cover end of the badge gets its own rectangle of the holographic sticker material, the same as the sheet of stickers that was included in the box. Both decals are small details that make a huge difference to your eye.

The line of nine RGB LEDs have black bezels which goes along with the black stripe motif and underscores the typography of the badge name. These lights are hosted on a daughter board soldered to the underside of the badge with a slot for the LEDs to pass through. They are addressed in a 2×15 matrix that is scanned on the low side by the PSoC5 that drives the badge. This low-res image shows that daughter board before the lithium cell is placed.

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Hackaday Links: April 7, 2019

April 7, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

It’s April, which means all the people responsible for doubling the number of badges at DEF CON are hard at work getting their prototypes ready and trying to fund the entire thing. The first one out of the gate is Da Bomb, by [netik] and his crew. This is the same team that brought you the Ides of DEF CON badge, a blinky wearable multiplayer game that’s SPQR AF. Da Bomb is now a Kickstarter campaign to get the funding for the run of 500, and you’re getting a wearable badge filled with puzzles, Easter eggs, and a radio-based sea battle game that obviously can’t be called Battleship, because the navy doesn’t have battleships anymore.

Speaking of badges and various badge paraphernalia, there’s a new standard for add-ons this year. The Shitty Add-On V.1.69bis standard adds two pins and a very secure shrouded connector that solves all the problems of last year’s standard. [AND!XOR] just released a Shitty Brooch that powers all Shitty Add-Ons with a CR2032 battery. All the files are up on the Gits, so have fun.

You can 3D print anything if you don’t mind dealing with supports. But how to remove supports? For that [CCecil] has a great tip: use Chap stick. This is a print that used supports and it’s perfectly clean, right off the bed. By inserting a suspend (M600) command at the z-height of the top of the interface layer, then adding Chap stick on the top layer, everything comes off clean. Neat.

Speaking of 3D printing, here’s a project for anyone with the patience to do some serious modeling. It’s a pocket Soviet record player, although I think it’s more properly called a gramophone. It’s crank powered, so there’s a spring in there somewhere, and it’s entirely acoustic with zero electronics. Yes, you’re going to need a needle, but I’d be very interested in seeing somebody remake this using modern tools and construction materials.

Introducing The Shitty Add-On V1.69bis Standard

March 20, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

The last few years have seen a rise of artistic PCBs. Whether these are one-off projects with a little graphic on the silkscreen or the art of manufacturing and supply chains, these fancy PCBs are here to stay. Nowhere is this more apparent than the loose confederation of Badgelife enthusiasts, a hardware collective dedicated to making expressive and impressive electronic baubles for various hacker conferences. Here, hundreds of different hardware badges are created every year. It’s electronic art, supported by a community.

Some of these badges aren’t technically badges, but rather small, blinky add-ons meant to connect to a main badge, and these add-ons are all backed by a community-derived standard. The Shitty Add-On Standard is how you put smaller PCBs onto bigger PCBs. It is supported by tens of thousands of badges, and all of the people who are spending their free time designing electronic conference badges are using this standard.

It’s been more than a year since the Shitty Add-On standard was created, and in that time the people behind the work have seen the shortcomings of the first edition of the standard. Mechanically, it’s not really that strong, and it would be neat if there were a few more pins to drive RGB LEDs. This has led to the creation of the latest revision of the Shitty Add-On Standard, V.1.69bis. Now, for the first time, this standard is ready for the world to see.

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