Supercon 2024 SAO Petal KiCad Redrawing Project

November 19, 2024 by Chris Lott 4 Comments

Last week I completed the SAO flower badge redrawing task, making a complete KiCad project. Most of the SAO petals are already released as KiCad projects, except for the Petal Matrix. The design features 56 LEDs arranged in eight spiral arms radiating from the center. What it does not feature are straight lines, right angles, nor parts placed on a regular grid.

Importing into KiCad

Circuit Notes for LEDs, Thanks to [spereinabox]

I followed the same procedures as the main flower badge with no major hiccups. This design didn’t have any released schematics, but backing out the circuits was straightforward. It also helped that user [sphereinabox] over on the Hackaday Discord server had rung out the LED matrix connections and gave me his notes.

Grep Those Positons

I first wanted to only read the data from the LEDs for analysis, and I didn’t need the full Kicad + Python scripting for that. Using grep on the PCB file, you get a text file that can be easily parsed to get the numbers. I confirmed that the LED placements were truly as irregular as they looked.

My biggest worry was how obtain and re-apply the positions and angles of the LEDs, given the irregular layout of the spiral arms. Just like the random angles of six SAO connector on the badge board, [Voja] doesn’t disappoint on this board, either. I fired up Python and used Matplotlib to get a visual perspective of the randomness of the placements, as one does. Due to the overall shape of the arms, there is a general trend to the numbers. But no obvious equation is discernable.

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The Badge Hacks Of Supercon

November 9, 2024 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

We just got home from Supercon and well, it was super. It was great to see everyone, and meet a whole bunch of new folks to boot! The talks were great, and you can see a good half of them already on the Hackaday YouTube channel, so for that you didn’t even have to be there.

The badge hacks were, as with most years, out of this world. I’ll admit that my cheeks were sore from laughing so much after emceeing it this year, due in no small part to two hilarious AI projects, both of which were also righteous hacks in addition to full-on comedy routines. A group of six programmers got all of their hacks working together, and the I2C-to-MQTT bridge had badges blinking in sync even in the audience. You want blinkies? We had blinkies.

But the hack that warmed everyones’ hearts was “I figured it out” by [Connie]. Before this weekend, she had never coded MicroPython and didn’t know anything about I2C. But yet by Sunday afternoon, she made a sweet spiral animation on the LED wheel, and blinked the RGBs in the touchwheel.

What I love about the Hackaday audience is that, when the chips are down, someone doing something new for the first time is valued as much as some of the more showy work done by more experienced programmers. Hacking is also about learning and pushing out boundaries after all. The shouts for “I figured it out” were louder than any others in the graphics hacks category, it took home a prize, and I was smiling from ear to ear.

Hackaday can learn from this too. [Connie]’s hack definitely shows the need for another badge-hack category, first timers, because we absolutely should recognize first tries. There was also a strong petition / protest from people who had worked new hacks onto previous year’s badges – like [Andy] and [koppanyh]’s addition of bit-banged I2C to the Voja 4 badge from two years ago, and [Instant Arcade]’s Polar Pacman, which he named “Ineligible for this Competition” in protest. Touche.

We’re stoked to learn new things, see new hacks, and basically just catch up with everything folks did over the weekend. We can’t wait to see what you’re up to next year!

Supercon 2024: Badge Add-On Winners

November 4, 2024 by Tom Nardi 5 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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Supercon 2024: Streaming Live

November 2, 2024 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

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.

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Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing In KiCad

October 31, 2024 by Chris Lott 12 Comments

Out of curiosity, I redrew the Supercon Vectorscope badge schematics in KiCad last year. As you might suspect, going from PCB to schematic is opposite to the normal design flow of KiCad and most other PCB design tools. As a result, the schematics and PCB of the Vectorscope project were not really linked. I decided to try it again this year, but with the added goal of making a complete KiCad project. As usual, [Voja] provided a well drawn schematic diagram in PDF and CorelDRAW formats, and a PCB design using Altium’s Circuit Maker format (CSPcbDoc file). And for reference, this year I’m using KiCad v8 versus v7 last year.

Importing into KiCad

This went smoothly. KiCad imports Altium files, as I discovered last year. Converting the graphic lines to traces was easier than before, since the graphical lines are deleted in the conversion process. There was a file organizational quirk, however. I made a new, empty project and imported the Circuit Maker PCB file. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the importing action didn’t make use the new project I had just made. Instead, it created a completely new project in the directory holding the imported Circuit Maker file. This caused a lot of head scratching when I was editing the symbol and footprint library table files, and couldn’t figure out why my edits weren’t being seen by KiCad. I’m not sure what the logic of this is, was an easy fix once you know what’s going on. I simply copied everything from the imported project and pasted it in my new, empty project. Continue reading “Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing In KiCad” →

2024 Supercon: Last Minute Announcements

October 29, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

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.

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The 2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Badge Reveal

October 22, 2024 by Elliot Williams 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!

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