Building The Spectacular Fibonacci128 Simple Add-On

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, mos…

FREE-WILi Turns DC32 Badge Into Hardware Dev Tool

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 w…

A CO2 Traffic Light On An SAO

[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 spa…

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Badge Reveal

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, bu…

An SAO For Hams

Generally speaking, the Hackaday Supercon badge will always have a place for SAO (rebranded as “Supercon add-ons”), and that makes sense. We did originate them, after all. This year, th…

Breaking News: 2024 Supercon SAO Contest Deadline Extended

More than a couple folks have written us saying that their entries into the Supercon Add-On Contest got caught up in the Chinese fall holidays. Add to that our tendency to wait until the last minut…

2024 SAO Contest: Speak, SAO

For some of us, the Speak ‘n Spell evokes pleasant memories of childhood as our first computer, along with one of those Merlin things. For others, it’s the ultimate circuit bending vict…

2024 SAO Contest: The Jolly Tagger Is A Golden Way To Share Info

For this contest, we’re asking you to come up with the best SAO you can think of that does something cool. What could be cooler than sharing your contact information all over Supercon and bey…

A Nibble Of Core Memory, In An SAO

Core memory, magnetized memory using tiny magnetic rings suspended on a grid of wires, is now more than five decades obsolete, yet it exerts a fascination for hardware hackers still. Not least [And…

Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-Ons Win

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 t…

Chip Shortage Engineering: Misusing DIP Packages

After years of seeing people showing off and trading their badge Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) at Supercon, this year I finally decided to make one myself. Now for a first attempt, it would have been enoug…

Jolly Wrencher SAO, And How KiCad 6 Made It Easy

If you plan to attend Supercon or some other hacker conference, know that you’re going to get a badge with a SAO (Simple Add-On) connector, a 4-pin or 6-pin connector that you can plug an add…

Jazzfest Berlin 2021: Schmissig-elegantes Zeug

Das Jazzfest Berlin war auch in diesem Jahr international-vielfältig. Im Fokus standen Künst­le­r:in­nen aus Johannesburg, São Paulo und Kairo.