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!

Apple 1 Emulator Is A Perfect Fit For Supercon Badge

November 13, 2018 by Roger Cheng 9 Comments

Supercon badge hackers had to be ready to present their show-and-tell by 6 pm Sunday evening. This ruthless unmoving deadline meant every badge hack on stage represents an accomplishment in time management, and some luck, in addition to their own technical merits. But that deadline also meant a few fantastic projects lost their race against the clock. We were rooting for [Jac Goudsmit] to build an Apple I emulator as his badge expansion, but he wasn’t quite done when our badge hack ceremony began. After Supercon he went home, finished the project, and documented everything in a detailed writeup.

Our 2018 Supercon badge is built on a retro-computing theme, and the default firmware came with a BASIC interpreter as well as a Z80 emulator running CP/M. So an Apple 1 emulator should feel right home with its contemporaries. Mechanically speaking, all the parts were a tight fit on the badge expansion board given out to every attendee at Supercon. So tightly that [Jac] had to file down the two main chips in order to fit them side by side. The breadboard-like pattern of connected holes on the expansion board, intended to help ease in beginners for their badge hack soldering, proved to be an inconvenience in tightly packed arrangements such as this.

With all the work [Jac] had invested, it was heartbreaking to know he was only five minutes of soldering and 30 minutes of coding away when time ran out. Time pressure was part of the challenge faced by every Supercon badge hacker, and while we’re sad [Jac] missed the deadline for stage time we’re happy to see him finish and write it all up. We hope every badge hacker would write up their stories of frantic weekend projects. Those who do so on hackaday.io are encouraged to tag their project with “Supercon” and get them added to our list of badge hacks for everyone to admire.

Make A Badge When There Is No Badge Yet

August 19, 2017 by Jenny List 10 Comments

What do you do when your keenly anticipated hacker camp releases details of its upcoming badge and you really want to have a go at coding for it, but there are no badges for you to try yet? If you are [Artdanion], this is not a problem, you simply build your own.

He found his requirement to interface with genuine hardware exceeded the abilities of the emulator that the SHACamp 2017 badge team had thoughtfully provided, so he reached for breakout boards for the ESP32, the MPR121 touch sensor, and the e-ink display, and assembled his own clone on a piece of stripboard. Not only did it provide him with enough to develop his own apps, he found when he brought it to the event that the public release of the official firmware ran on it with only a few configuration tweaks. He had an official event badge, that wasn’t the event badge. Is this the first time this has been done? We think it might be.

The home-made badge is an impressive piece of work, but it ties into an observation we made at the end of our review of the official version of the SHA2017 badge. The use of an ESP32 with well-designed peripherals and a solid firmware means that this is a design that is likely to form the bedrock upon which some future badges are built. [Artdanion] has proved how straightforward it is to clone, we’d like to be so bold as to make the prediction that we’ll see more developments of this platform at future events. Meanwhile this home-made badge is a neat achievement, and we can only imagine the surprise of the SHA2017 badge team on being presented with a clone of their work for reflashing.

The Best Badges Of The SuperCon

December 9, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

A few weeks ago, we took a look at the best badge hacks at the Hackaday Supercon. These were the best badge hacks anyone has ever seen – including what comes out of DEF CON and the SDR badge from the latest CCC. I’m ascribing this entirely to the free-form nature of the badge; give people a blank canvas and you’re sure to get a diverse field of builds. Now it’s time to take a look at the cream of the crop, hear what the jolly wrencher sounds like, and how to put 1000 Volts in a badge.

There were three categories for the badge hacking competition at the SuperCon – best deadbug, best blinky, and most over the top. A surprising number of people managed to solder, glue, and tape some components to a the piece of FR4 we used as a conference badge, but in the end, only three would win.

Continue reading “The Best Badges Of The SuperCon” →

Defcon 17: Badge Hacking

August 4, 2009 by Nick Caiello 17 Comments

Following up on their post about the new Defcon 17 badges, Wired recently posted some of the best badge hacks of the con. Among the hacks featured were an LED frequency meter hack, a sound seeking dirigible powered by three badges, and a wireless geiger counter random number generator that sent random numbers back to a laptop equipped with a zigbee card. Probably one of the most impressive hacks mentioned, the hack that won the badge hacking contest, was the LED equipped baseball cap modeled above by [Joe Grand], Defcon’s defacto badge designer.

The hacked badge is connected to the cap by an ethernet cable, where the LEDs pulse on and off in order to defeat facial recognition systems. The cap’s designer told Wired that he initially designed the cap in order to sneak into [Grand]’s room to steal the über badges under his protection. Needless to say, the winner doesn’t have to worry about stealing the badges anymore as he was awarded his own über badge at the award ceremony. While we’re not completely sure who pulled off this awesome hack, we congratulate you and all of the participants of the badge hacking contest on your fantastic hacks.

Update: We’ve confirmed that the badge contest winner was in fact [Zoz Brooks], [Grand]’s co-star on the popular Discovery channel show Prototype This. From all indications, his hack seems to be legitimate and not a clever idea, however we are still looking to confirm this. Also, even though Wired’s article stated that the dirigible was sound seeking, we have confirmed that it is sound avoiding. Thank’s to everyone in the comments for pointing these things out.