2024 SAO Contest: The Jolly Tagger Is A Golden Way To Share Info

A golden Jolly Wrencher SAO that works as an NFC tag for sharing contact info.

For this contest, we’re asking you to come up with the best SAO you can think of that does something cool. What could be cooler than sharing your contact information all over Supercon and beyond with a tap of a Jolly Wrencher? It’s way better than just some sticker, and with the extra solder pad on the back, you can turn it into a pin once the con is over. Contact data can be uploaded over I²C.

An antenna coil PCB trace as generated by a KiCad plugin.
The KiCad-generated coil.

Here, [Phil Weasel] seeks to answer the question of whether one can make a working NFC tag with the M24LR04E IC, using a PCB trace as a coil. If there is an issue, it’s probably going to be that copper plane inside the antenna.

Designing the antenna itself proved fairly easy after checking the datasheet for the internal tuning capacitance (~27.5 pF), verifying the frequency of NFC (~13.56 MHz), and doing the math to find the inductance needed. After confirming everything in LTSpice, [Phil] used a PCB coil calculator and let the KiCad coil generator draw it out.

Did we mention the Jolly Wrencher is backlit by four side-mounted LEDs? Because what’s an SAO without a few blinkenlights?

17 thoughts on “2024 SAO Contest: The Jolly Tagger Is A Golden Way To Share Info

      1. It was short for “Shitty Add-on”, which some people turned into “Simple Add-on”. Now I’ve seen “Supercon Add-on” as well, it basically is an agreed on “standard” to connect a small badge to a big conference badge.

        1. [TwinkleTwinkie]’s Simple Add-On version is very good: https://hackaday.io/project/175182-simple-add-ons-sao And it has PCB footprints!

          The [Badge Team] added a data protocol to their Standardized Add-On, which hasn’t gotten much uptake, but probably should, IMO.
          https://badge.team/docs/standards/sao/

          [Brian Benchoff]’s still remains the canonical resource, even though we’ve all moved on from the potty humor: https://hackaday.io/project/52950-shitty-add-ons

          And this year, because Supercon, SAO means “Supercon Add-Ons”.

          What SAO stands for is a meme at this point. If my name were Steve, I know what I’d be calling mine.

          Good news is that they’re all compatible with each other, so despite the minor differences, they’re all SAOs.

    1. I saw the acronym in use several times without definition. Finally I heard the full words used on a recent Hackaday podcast.

      Prior to hearing that podcast, I had drafted and abandoned a comment on another article asking the question. Not being the first time realizing that I wasn’t an insider, I adopted the Groucho Marx position on club membership and moved on. :-)

  1. Jeez, I’ve been here since the green text, and I never saw that acronym before.

    I’ve remember Benchoff well though. Funny and knowledgeable, but fundamentally toxic. It’s good for HaD he moved on.

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