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.

Best Overall: SAO Multimeter

For the “Best Overall” category, we only intended to compare it with the other entries in the contest. But in the end, we think there’s a strong case to be made that [Thomas Flummer] has created the greatest SAO of all time. So far, anyway.

This add-on is a fully functional digital multimeter, with functions for measuring voltage, resistance, and continuity. The design is a pure work of art, with its structure combining stacked PCBs and 3D printed parts. There’s even tiny banana plugs to connect up properly scaled probes. Incredible.

In the documentation [Thomas] mentions there are additional functions he didn’t have time to include in the firmware, such as modes to analyze the I2C and GPIO signals being received. Now that it’s been selected for production, we’re hoping he’ll have the time to get the code finished up before its European debut.

Fun: Etch sAo Sketch

This SAO recreates the iconic art toy in a (hopefully) non-trademarked way, with a 1.5″ inch 128 x 128 grayscale OLED display and a pair of trimpots capped with 3D printed knobs. Drawing is fun enough, but the nostalgia really kicks in when you give it a good shake — the onboard LIS3DH 3-axis accelerometer picks up the motion and wipes the display just like the real thing.

Created by [Andy Geppert], this SAO isn’t just a pretty face. Flipping it over shows an exceptionally clever technique for connecting the display board to the main PCB. Tiny metal balls (or “alignment spheres” if you want to get fancy) mate up with the mounting holes on the OLED board and center it, and a touch of solder locks it all in place.

Fine Art: Bendy SAO

While this wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing SAO might look like the sort of thing that would be outside of a used car dealership, but creator [debraansell] managed to shrink it down so the point that it’s reasonable to plug into your badge. More or less.

There are several fascinating tricks at work here, from lighting the PCB from the back using side-firing LEDs to the integrated slip rings. If this one didn’t look so good, it would have been a strong contender for the “Least Manufacturable” Honorable Mention.

Functional: Vectrex SAO

Creating a replica of the Vectrex at SAO scale would have been an impressive enough accomplishment, but [Brett Walach] took this one all the way and made it playable.

The display is a 7 x 10 Charlieplexed LED matrix, while the “joystick” is implemented with a 1-button capacitive touch sensor. A PIC16F886 microcontroller runs the simplified version of Scramble, and there’s even a speaker for era-appropriate audio.

But that’s not all! This SAO was also designed to be hacked — so not only is all the hardware and software open source, but there’re various jumpers to fiddle with various settings and an I2C control protocol that lets you command the action from the badge.

Honorable Mentions

As usual, this contest had several Honorable Mentions categories — while we would have loved to put all of these SAOs into production, there’s only so much we can do before now and Spring.

[Jeremy Geppert]’s SAO LoRa Walkie Talkie was a judge favorite, for its simple good looks and the extra functionality that it brings to the table. [Scorch Works]’s SAO Infinity Mirror was absolutely beautiful to see in person, and makes a fantastic display when many of them get together. And [MakeItHackin]’s Skull of Fate SAO not only looked super when its eyes scan the room, but it could read your future as well!

Best Communication:

Using I2C to get SAOs to talk to the badge (or each other) was a big part of this contest, but we were also on the lookout for entries which helped facilitate badge-to-badge communications.

The Badge Tag NFC SAO from [Thomas Flummer] is a perfect example of both — it uses the NXP NTAG I2C Plus to provide 2K of read-write storage that can be accessed either internally through the I2C bus by the badge, or externally by an NFC device such as a smartphone. Modeled after a traditional conference name tag, this SAO was designed to make it easier for sharing your contact info with others during a busy con.

Infrared Communication SAO by [Alec Probst] brings infrared communications to the party, while looking like a classic TV remote. Though the original idea was to get this working in conjunction with the badge to act as a sort of TV-B-Gone, it ended up being used as part of a laser tag game during Supercon.

The GAT Nametag SC8 from [true] tackles communication on a more human level by providing a digital name tag for your badge. This compact board’s secret trick is the ability to make sure your name is legible no matter what its orientation thanks to a LIS2DW12 accelerometer that can detect the SAO’s orientation relative to the ground. RGB LEDs catch the viewer’s eye, but it’s the incredible firmware with seemingly endless options for text styling and tweaks that really set this build apart.

Light Show:

There’s little question that Featuring You! from [Nanik Adnani] is a perfect entry for this category. Nominally, it’s a little arrow you can write your name on and use a name tag. But power it up and you can dazzle anyone standing too close with its array of marching white LEDs. In a particularly nice touch, the circuit is implemented with only discreet components — no microcontroller.

The reDOT_RGB from [Alex] is a tiny 5×7 RGB LED matrix with a minuscule ATtiny816 MCU around the back to control the show. At just 8 x 11 mm, it’s hard to overstate just how tiny this SAO is.

While on the subject of tiny boards, the
Persistence of Vision POV Display is another entry not much larger than the SAO connector itself. Using a row of five tiny white LEDs and a ADXL345 accelerometer, [Michael Yim] is able to write text in mid-air thanks to the gullibility of the human eye.

Least Manufacturable:

Simple Add-Ons are essentially an art form, so it’s not surprising to find that they don’t often lend themselves to mass production. Several of the entries this yeah would be a real challenge to make in large numbers, but the one that really keeps us up at night is the ultra tiny smart SAO from [Alex].

This board is designed to fit inside the space between four header pins. Thanks, but no thanks.

Raising the Bar

Our hope this year was to elevate the Simple Add-On from a decorative piece of flair to something functional, and potentially, even useful. The results were incredible, and while we can only pick four winners this time around, every entry helped push the state-of-the-art forward in its own way. It’s hard to imagine how the SAO envelope can be pushed any further, but we can’t wait to find out.

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.

NOTE: Stream will resume Sunday morning.

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.

New Events Added!

For those who’ve attended a Supercon before, you know we like to cram as much content as we can into the weekend. But there’s always room for more, and this year we’ve managed to squeeze in a couple extra activities that we’re very excited about.

Halloween Hacker Happy Hour

It just so happens that Halloween is the night before Supercon officially kicks off, and that seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up. So we’ll be throwing a pre-event party at the nearby KingsRow Gastropub where costumes and all manner of blinking LEDs are very much encouraged. Officially we’ll be hanging out from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself still talking to Hackaday folks at last call.

You don’t need tickets for this event, but we’d like to have a rough head count, so if you could RSVP through Eventbrite we’d appreciate it.

Tina’s Junk Challenge

We’ve always wanted to introduce some kind of swap meet aspect to Supercon, but the logistics have always been a challenge. This year though, we’re finally going to get the chance to test out the idea. Former DesignLab Resident Tina Belmont is in the process of moving out of the country and needs to find a new home for her electronic bric-a-brac.

Everything is free, so attendees are encouraged to take anything they think they can make use of. Naturally, an influx of interesting hardware could provide for some very unique badge hacking possibilities. If we can get enough people to graft these second-hand components onto their badges, we just might be able to turn it into a proper category come Sunday night.

A table where folks can offload their electronic bits and bobs has worked well at other hacker cons, so we’re eager to see how it goes at Supercon. If this is something you’d like to see more of, or would potentially like to participate in next year, let us know.

Krux’s Side Quests

Let’s be honest, most of us are already taking our marching orders from the computer in one way or another. So why not turn it into a fun interactive game?

The idea is simple: use the mysterious retrocomputer oracle, and it gives you a quest. Maybe you’ll have to find a hidden item, or solve a riddle. Krux has a run a variation of this game at Toor Con in the past, but the challenges spit out by the computer this time will be tailored to Supercon.

Windows Through Wires Exhibition

You may recall that we asked the Hackaday community if they had any unusual display technology they’d like to show off during Supercon as part of an exhibit.

Well, as you might have imagined, the response was incredible. From gorgeous vintage pieces to completely custom hardware, there’s going to be a wide array of fascinating hardware for attendees to study up-close.

While getting a chance to see various display technologies throughout the years would have our attention as it is, what’s really exciting is that many of the custom-built devices in the exhibit are either projects hosted on Hackaday.io or ones that we’ve covered at some point on the front page.

Considering how gorgeous some of them have looked in photographs, we’re eager to drool over them in the real world — and we bet you are to.

Workshop Technical Difficulties

Hopefully we’ve provided enough good news that we can slip in a bit of the bad. Unfortunately, we’ve had to cancel the “Hands on with an Electron Microscope” workshop that was to be hosted by Adam McCombs and Isabel Burgos. Everyone with tickets will of course be getting a refund, and you should be receiving an email to that effect shortly if you haven’t already.

While we’re just as disappointed by this news as you are, it’s one of those situations where there simply weren’t any good solutions. Long story short, the scanning electron microscope that was small enough to bring to Supercon is down, and there’s just not enough time to get it up and running at this point. An attempt was made to find another small-ish electron microscope on short notice but…well, that’s just as tricky to pull off as it sounds.

Send Us Your Lightning Talks!

To end this update on a high note, we want to remind everyone that this year we’ll once again be going Lighting Talks on Sunday morning. If you’ve never given a talk before, the shorter seven minute format is perfect for getting your feet wet. Or maybe you’ve got something you want to talk about that doesn’t take a whole hour to explain. Either way, the Lightning Talks are a great way to share what your passionate about with the Supercon audience.

If you’d like to give a Lightning Talk, simply fill out this form. You can upload slides if you’ve got them, but they aren’t strictly necessary.