Making For Others

October 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

One of the nicest things about the Hackaday community, and the open-source hardware community at large, is the incredible generosity of one hacker to another. But it’s not purely altruism – it’s also just a great feeling to be able to share your work with other folks who understand what it represents and how to use it.

I’m looking at my workbench right now. Because I’ve been testing out the Supercon badge prototype, there is a small pile of SAOs to the right. SAOs are the perfect size for giving out to fellow hackers, because they can be small, inexpensive, and yet still embody a ton of your creativity. [Tom]’s marvelous Ode to the SAO, even opens with this as one of the main benefits, alongside teaching you “full-stack” PCB production at small scale; they are cheap enough that you can give them away. Of course, you end up getting as many or more than you give, so it’s not just the pure joy of giving at work in the SAO scene.

On my left, I have a couple dev boards made by fellow hackers. One is a clone of the Raspberry Pi Pico that’s made by the high-school students of Hack Club, and the other is [CNLohr]’s ch32v003fun board and esp32s2-funprog programmer. I needed to test out a quick microcontroller application, and having a few dev boards on hand is always useful. Because I know the people who made these boards, I tend to reach for these over their commercial alternatives. Romantic? Maybe. But they were given to me by friends.

And of course the badge prototype is sitting in the middle of all this, and that’s how I really know about the joy of giving away your designs to fellow hackers. We at Hackaday are in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to dream up a new and fun badge every year, and give it out to hundreds of fellow hackers. Heck, this year, we’re making 1,000. I say “fortunate” because we don’t have to pay for them ourselves, but rather our Supercon sponsors help pick up the bill, and that means we can make stuff that’s far cooler than our budgets would otherwise allow.

So to everyone in the SAO scene, may you give away your designs to people who really appreciate them. For the folks who have built tools for other hackers to use, you should know that the recipients probably reach for your boards over their bland commercial alternatives. And for all of you coming to Supercon in two weeks, we hope you dig the badge. It has maybe become a bit of a cliché these days, but you should know that it’s made with love.

Chase Light SAO Shouldn’t Have Used A 555, And Didn’t

March 27, 2025 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Around these parts, projects needlessly using a microcontroller where a simpler design would do are often derided with the catch-all “Should have used a 555,” even if the venerable timer chip wouldn’t have been the ideal solution. But the sentiment stands that a solution more complicated than it needs to be is probably one that needs rethinking, as this completely mechanical chaser light badge Simple Add-On (SAO) aptly demonstrates.

Rather than choosing any number of circuits to turn a strip of discrete lights on and off, [Johannes] took inspiration for his chaser lights from factory automation mechanisms that move parts between levels on steps that move out of phase with each other, similar to the marble-raising mechanism used in [Wintergatan]’s Marble Machine X.

Two thin plates with notches around the edge are sandwiched together inside the 3D printed case of the SAO, between the face and the light source. A small motor and a series of gears rotate the two masks 180° out of phase with each other, which creates the illusion that the light is moving.

It’s pretty convincing; when we first saw the video below, we were sure it was a row of tiny LEDs around the edge of the badge.

Hats off to [Johannes] for coming up with such a clever mechanism and getting it working just in time for Hackaday Europe. If you need to catch up on the talks, we’ve got a playlist ready for you.

Continue reading “Chase Light SAO Shouldn’t Have Used A 555, And Didn’t” →

Clever PCBs Straighten Out The Supercon SAO Badge

January 13, 2025 by Tom Nardi No comments

When we decided that Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) would be the focus of Supercon 2024, it was clear the badge would need to feature more than just one or two of the requisite connectors. We finally settled on six ports, but figuring out the geometry of getting all those ports on the badge in such a way that the SAOs wouldn’t hit each other was a bit tricky. In early concept drawings the badge was just a big rectangle with the ports along the top, but it was too ugly.

In the end we went with a somewhat organic design — an electronic “flower” with the radially arranged SAOs forming the petals, but this meant that that none of the SAOs were in the traditional vertical orientation. Luckily, [Adrian Studer] designed a couple of PCBs that not only resolve this issue, but add a seventh SAO port for good measure.

In the project repository you’ll find two PCB designs. The first, “SAO Up” is essentially a little arm that turns the SAO port 90 degrees. This doesn’t exactly get them vertical, in fact, whether or not the new orientation is actually an improvement for the top two SAOs is perhaps debatable. But it definitely helps on the lower SAOs, which are essentially upside down in their original configuration.

The real star of the show is “SAO Bridge”, a wavy board that connects across the two midline SAO ports on the Supercon badge and turns it into a set of three (nearly) horizontal connectors across the front. The center port is particularly helpful in that it gives you a place to put unusually wide SAOs.

As a reminder the Supercon SAO badge, and the winners of the 2024 SAO Contest, will be making the trip across the pond for Hackaday Europe in just a few months. That means you’ve still got plenty of time to have a few of these CERN-OHL-P licensed boards made up.

2024: As The Hardware World Turns

January 2, 2025 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

With 2024 now officially in the history books, it’s time to take our traditional look back and reflect on some of the top trends and stories from the past twelve months as viewed from the unique perspective Hackaday affords us. Thanks to the constant stream of tips and updates we receive from the community, we’ve got a better than average view of what’s on the mind of hardware hackers, engineers, and hobbyists.

This symbiotic relationship is something we take great pride in, which is why we also use this time of year to remind the readers just how much we appreciate them. We know it sounds line a line, but we really couldn’t do it without you. So whether you’ve just started reading in 2024 or been with us for years, everyone here at Hackaday thanks you for being part of something special. We’re keenly aware of how fortunate we are to still be running a successful blog in the era of YouTube and TikTok, and that’s all because people like you keep coming back. If you keep reading it, we’ll keep writing it.

So let’s take a trip down memory lane and go over just a handful of the stories that kept us talking in 2024. Did we miss your favorite? Feel free to share with the class in the comments.

Continue reading “2024: As The Hardware World Turns” →

Building The Spectacular Fibonacci128 Simple Add-On

December 16, 2024 by Tom Nardi No comments

This year, we not only challenged Supercon attendees to come up with their own Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) for the badge, but to push the envelope on how the modular bits of flair work. Historically, most SAOs were little more than artistically arranged LEDs, but we wanted to see what folks could do if they embraced the largely unused I2C capability of the spec.

[Squidgeefish] clearly understood the assignment. This first-time attendee arrived in Pasadena with an SAO that was hard to miss…literally. Looking directly at the shockingly bright 128 RGB LED array packed onto the one-inch diameter PCB was an experience that would stay with you for quite some time (ask us how we know). With the “artistically arranged LEDs” aspect of the nominal SAO handled nicely, the extra work was put into the design so that the CPU could control the LED array via simple I2C commands.

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FREE-WILi Turns DC32 Badge Into Hardware Dev Tool

November 21, 2024 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

With few exceptions, electronic event badges are often all but forgotten as soon as the attendee gets back home. They’re a fun novelty for the two or three days they’re expected to be worn, but after that, they end up getting tossed in a drawer (or worse.) As you might imagine, this can be a somewhat depressing thought thought for the folks who design and build these badges.

But thanks to a new firmware released by the FREE-WILi project, at least one badge is going to get a shot at having a second life. When loaded onto the RP2350-powered DEF CON 32 badge, the device is turned into a handy hardware hacking multi-tool. By navigating through a graphical interface, users will be able to control the badge’s GPIO pins, communicate over I2C, receive and transmit via infrared, and more. We’re particularly interested in the project’s claims that the combination of their firmware and the DC32 badge create an ideal platform for testing and debugging Simple Add-Ons (SAOs).

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A CO2 Traffic Light On An SAO

November 6, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 12 Comments

[David Bryant] clearly has an awareness of the impact of an excess concentration of CO₂ in the local environment and has designed an SAO board to add a CO₂ traffic light indicator to one of the spare slots on the official Hackaday Supercon 2024 badge.

The part used is the Sensirion SCD40 ‘true’ CO2 sensor, sitting atop an Adafruit rider board. [David] got a leg up on development by creating a simple SAO breakout board, which could have either the male and female connectors fitted, as required. Next, he successfully guessed that the badge would be based around the RP2040 running MicroPython and hooked up an Adafruit Feather RP2040 board to get started on some software to drive the thing. This made hooking up to the official badge an easy job. Since the SAO has only two GPIOs, [David] needed to decode these to drive the three LEDs. There are a few ways to avoid this, but he wanted to relive his earlier EE college years and do it the direct way using a pair of 74HC00 quad NAND gate chips.

We’ve seen a few CO₂ monitors over the years. This sleek little unit is based around the Seeeduino XIAO module and uses an LED ring as an indicator. Proper CO₂ monitors can be a little pricey, and there are fakes out there. Finally, CO₂ is not the only household pollutant; check out this project.