The 2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Badge Reveal

October 22, 2024 by 25 Comments

We’ve been hinting at it for a few months now, running a series of articles on SAOs, then a Supercon Add-On Challenge. We even let on that the badge would have space for multiple SAOs this year, but would you believe six?

Way back in 2017ish, Hackaday’s own [Brian Benchoff] and the [AND!XOR] crew thought it would be funny and useful to create a “standard” for adding small custom PCB art-badges onto bigger conference badges. The idea was to keep it quick and dirty, uncomplicated and hacky, and the “Shitty” Add On was born. The badge community took to this like wildfire. While the community has moved on from the fecal humor, whether you call these little badgelets “SAOs”, “Simple Add-Ons”, or even “Supercon-8 Add Ons”, there’s something here for everyone. So if you’ve already got some SAOs in a drawer, bring them to this year’s Supercon and show them off!

Continue reading “The 2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Badge Reveal” →

HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along

October 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

I’m sitting at a table writing this in the centre of a long and cavernous industrial building, the former print works of a local newspaper, I’m surrounded by hardware and software hackers working at their laptops, around me is a bustling crowd admiring a series of large projects on tables along the walls, and the ambient sound is one of the demoscene, chiptunes, 3D-printed guitars, and improbably hurdy-gurdy music. Laser light is playing on the walls, and even though it’s quite a journey from England to get here, I’m home. This is Hackfest Enschede, a two-day event in the Eastern Dutch city which by my estimation has managed the near-impossible feat of combining the flavour of both a hacker event and a maker faire all in one, causing the two distinct crowds to come together.

The Best Of Both Worlds, In One Place

To give an idea of what’s here it’s time for a virtual trip round the hall. I’ll start with the music, aside from the demosceners there’s Printstruments with a range of 3D-printedmusical instruments, and Nerdy Gurdy, as you may have guessed, that hacker hurdy-gurdy I mentioned. This is perhaps one of few places I could have seen a spontaneous jam session featuring a 3D-printed bass and a laser-cut hurdy-gurdy. Alongside them were the Eurorack synthesisers of Sound Force, providing analogue electronic sounds aplenty. Continue reading “HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along” →

Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-Ons Win

August 27, 2024 by 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…

The SAO Wall at Supercon 2023

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.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-Ons Win” →

Hands-On With The Electromagnetic Field 2024 Badge

June 1, 2024 by 11 Comments

With every large event in our circles comes a badge, and Electromagnetic Field 2024 is no exception. We’ve told you about the Tildagon when it was announced, it’s a hexagonal badge designed with provision for user-created “Hexpansions”, which can be picked up at future camps. The idea of this badge is to make something with a lifetime beyond the one camp, and we’re interested to have received our badge. It’s unusual for a hacker camp badge in that it costs a little extra rather than just coming with the ticket. Continue reading “Hands-On With The Electromagnetic Field 2024 Badge” →

Adafruit Badges Turned Electronic Invitations

May 28, 2024 by 8 Comments

Despite what you might have heard, even the most devout Hackaday readers may eventually find themselves getting married. Should you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to send out invitations for your big day, or any other major celebration for that matter, you could do worse than follow the example [Mokas] and their partner set with these memorable electronic wedding invitations.

Inspired by the electronic badges distributed at hacker cons, [Mokas] decided to use Adafruit’ EdgeBadge and PyBadge devices to create a similar interactive keepsake that would be a bit more exciting than a piece of paper. While it would have been enough to have the wedding information pop up on the screen when they were turned on, the final invites actually boot into a retro-style game where you walk around talking to characters to uncover information about the event and the venue.

The game was created in Microsoft MakeCode Arcade, with a sprinkling of original and commissioned sprites. Early versions of the game ended up being a bit much for the Adafruit badge’s to handle, but after doing a bit of research on creating games for computationally-constrained platforms, [Mokas] was able to optimize the performance. For those that didn’t get a physical invite (no doubt ours was simply lost in the mail), you can play the whole thing right in your browser.

It’s a very clever idea, and while using custom hardware would have allowed for a more bespoke package, we can’t blame [Mokas] for wanting to keep this one simple. Getting everything ready for your wedding is already enough stress — it’s hardly the time to spin up a new board.

For a similar reasons, another Adafruit offering was selected to power the couple’s e-ink baby development display.

A Telegraph Interface For The Hacker Hotel 2024 Badge

March 30, 2024 by 5 Comments

Hacker Hotel is a small Dutch hacker event that takes place, as its name suggests, in a hotel. It’s a welcome high point in the damp of a north-west-European winter, and attendees come to its setting in the wooded Veluwe region in the centre of the country from far and wide. As is the custom with such events it has an electronic badge, and this year’s one had a rather unusual interface. Instead of a keyboard for text input, it replicates a 19th century Crook and Wheatstone telegraph, replacing the five needles of the original with a diamond-shaped grid of LEDs.

At its heart is an Espressif ESP32-C6 microcontroller which provides both a processor powerhouse and the usual array of wireless connectivity. Paired with that is a much more modest CH32V003 microcontroller to handle I/O tasks, and an e-paper screen using displays salvaged from surplus German supermarket shelf labels. That interface is handled by an array of five-way switches, and in a stroke of genius there’s a small relay on board which does nothing but provide a satisfying tactile “click”. Expansion is seen to by an SAO connector, Qwiic, and a USB-C socket. The software meanwhile is a combination of a non-volatile nametag, a complex set of puzzles used in the on-site competition, and a messaging system using the C6’s 802.15.4 mesh networking. A particularly neat feature of this was a Battleships game that could be played with another badge.

While this isn’t the first Hacker Hotel badge with an e-paper display, we like this one for its novel interface, for the mesh connectivity, and for that clicky relay. We’ll definitely be using ours as a name badge for some time to come.

The Electromagnetic Field 2024 Badge Is A Little Different

March 23, 2024 by 4 Comments

It’s a problem that faces every designer of an event badge: how to make something that won’t simply become a piece of e-waste once the last attendee has gone home. Various events have had badges with extra sensors, ones designed to be dev boards, and ones that try to do useful software tasks, but this year’s Electromagnetic Field in the UK has a different take. Its badge is designed to be used across multiple events, with the badge itself being a hub for event-specific add-ons.

To achieve this feat, the Tildagon badge is a hexagonal hub with an expansion port on every side. Each of these sports an edge connector, and the corresponding part of the add-on is simply part of the PCB. The ‘hexpansions’ as the add-ons are called, don’t even have to have electronics, at their simplest they can even be cut from a piece of card. The brain of the outfit is an ESP32-C3 sporting a round LCD. Of course, and it has the usual buttons and LEDs.

We applaud the sentiment behind making a badge live beyond the event, and we expect that this won’t be the only take on a reusable badge we’ll see over the coming events. We’re guessing those edge connectors will add to the BoM cost though, which is why this probably will be the first EMF badge for which there will be a modest charge. We look forward to seeing it for real, meanwhile, they also published some technical info alongside the announcement linked above.