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!

But you don’t need to bring your own SAOs. We thought that as long as we were providing six SAO ports, we’d provide you with a small starter collection: four of them, in fact. A fantastic capacitive touch wheel designed by [Todbot], a beautiful spiral petal matrix of LEDs designed by [Voja Antonic], a completely blank-slate protoboard petal, and an I2C-enabled microcontroller proto-petal.

Bringing it all together, of course, is the main badge, which sports a Raspberry Pi Pico W on the back-side, for WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. This badge is intended to be a showcase of SAOs, and we thought that there have always been some under-explored corners of the spec. The most recent six-pin standard has power, ground, two GPIO pins, and an I2C pair. How often do we see SAOs that only use the power lines? This year, that changes!

Every GPIO pin on all six SAO slots is individually accessible, and the Pi Pico’s two hardware I2C peripheral busses are broken out on the left and right sides of the badge respectively. (Have an I2C enumeration conflict? Just move one of the offenders to the other side.) The idea here, combined with the wireless features and a trio of buttons on the front, is to give you a big sandbox to explore the possibilities of SAOs that go farther than just art.

Many Ways to Play

Straight out of the gate, the touch wheel and the LED petal matrix invite you to play with them, all the while fooling you into learning a little bit about interfacing I2C devices. You see, I2C devices have a unique address, and the rest of the functionality is handled by as if they were memory-mapped peripherals. What does this mean? If you want to ask the touch wheel where your finger is, you simply query its memory location 0. To set the LED colors, you write bytes to memory locations 15, 16, and 17 for red, green, and blue, respectively. Each spiral arm of the LED matrix petal is simply a byte in memory – write to it and the blinkies blink.

The take-home: I2C devices are fun and to play with. And when you start combining the functions of multiple SAOs, you can really start getting creative. But we’ve only scratched the surface. The I2C proto petal includes a CH32V003 chip, with its own dedicated I2C device hardware peripheral, so if you have essentially anything that you can solder to it, you can turn that into an I2C-enabled device to add to the party.

This is a multi-lingual party, though. The main badge, and all of the connection logic, runs on MicroPython. This makes it just a few lines of code to display your finger presses on the touchwheel over on the LED petal matrix, for instance, and we’ll have some demo code to ease you in. (And we’re frantically writing more!) But the I2C protoboard requires a little bit of C. If you’ve got a CH32V003 environment set up, by all means bring it – we love [CHLohr]’s CH32V003fun. We’re working on getting the badge board to program the CH32 in-situ, and we’re 99% sure we’ll have that ready by showtime. We’ll have demo code here to get you started as well. Will you program your first RISC-V chip at this year’s Supercon?

But say you don’t want anything to do with all this software? Just give me the solder! The blank-slate protoboard is for you. It breaks out the SAO lines, and gives you maximal room for creative hardware play. Heck, you could solder an LED, a resistor, and call it done. Or play around with the possibilities of the GPIOs. Low-code or no-code, the choice is yours.

Participate!

We know you’re all looking forward to getting your hands on the badge and the SAOs and getting creative. Here is the 2024 Supercon SAO Badge GitHub repository, for your perusal. All of the design files that we have are there in the hardware directory, but the code is not yet complete. If you want to design a 3D-printed case or add-on, you’ll find the vector files in PDF.

As usual [Voja] makes his circuit diagrams by hand, so you’ll find a beautifully annotated schematic that lets you know where each and every pin goes. If you’re not feeling the AA battery love, you’ll see that [Voja] has left you some pads to hook up an external power supply, for instance.

But the software is a work in progress, and in particular, we don’t know what I2C devices you’ll be bringing with you. We’re going to include as many MicroPython I2C device libraries as we can find, from OLED screens to magnetometers, and we’d like them to be on the default conference image. So if you’ve a device that you’d like us to support, either drop a link in the comments below or add the code in the libraries folder and submit a pull request! We’ll be flashing these at the absolute last minute, of course, but please get it in this weekend if you can.

Supercon!

Supercon 8’s badge is the unofficial world-record holder for the most SAO connectors on any official conference badge, but it also aspires to encourage you to play around with the functional aspects of our favorite mini-badge form factor. Heck, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about I2C along the way? Push some GPIOs around? Or maybe you’ll just have a fun weekend with a soldering iron, some stellar talks, and some great company. Whatever it’s going to be, we can’t wait to see you all, and to see what you come up with!

If you have any questions about the badge, fire away in the comments here.

You do have your tickets already, right? See you soon!

(C3P0 add-on by [kuro_dk] and Cyclops by [Simenzhor] not included.)

The third and final round of the 2024 Supercon talks announcements brings us to the end, and the full schedule is now up on Hackaday.io.

With Supercon just a couple weeks away, we hope you have your tickets already! Stay tuned tomorrow for a badge reveal.

(Go get your tickets already. And if you’ve got ’em, see you soon!)

Well, that was “fun”. Last week, we wrote a newsletter post about the state of Hackaday’s comments. We get good ones and bad ones, and almost all the time, we leave you all up to your own devices. But every once in a while, it’s good to remind people to be nice to our fellow hackers who get featured here, because after all they are the people doing the work that gives us something to read and write about. The whole point of the comment section is for you all to help them, or other Hackaday readers who want to follow in their footsteps.

Someone decided to let loose a comment-reporting attack. It works like this: you hit the “report comment” button on a given comment multiple times from multiple different IP addresses, and our system sends the comments back to moderation until a human editor can re-approve them. Given the context of an article about moderation, most everyone whose comment disappeared thought that we were behind it. When more than 300 comments were suddenly sitting in the moderation queue, our weekend editors figured something was up and started un-flagging comments as fast as they could. Order was eventually restored, but it was ugly for a while.

We’ve had these attacks before, but probably only a handful of times over the last ten years, and there’s basically nothing we can do to prevent them that won’t also prevent you all from flagging honestly abusive or spammy comments. (For which, thanks! It helps keep Hackaday’s comments clean.) Why doesn’t it happen all the time? Most of you all are just good people. Thanks for that, too!

But despite the interruption, we got a good discussion started about how to make a comment section thrive. A valid critique of our current system that was particularly evident during the hack is that the reported comment mechanism is entirely opaque. A “your comment is being moderated” placeholder would be a lot nicer than simply having the comment disappear. We’ll have to look into that.

You were basically divided down the middle about whether an upvote/downvote system like on Reddit or Slashdot would serve us well. Those tend to push more constructive comments up to the top, but they also create a popularity contest that can become its own mini-game, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing. Everyone seemed pretty convinced that our continuing to allow anonymous comments is the right choice, and we think it is simply because it removes a registration burden when someone new wants to write something insightful.

What else? If you could re-design the Hackaday comment section from scratch, what would you do? Or better yet, do you have any examples of similar (tech) communities that are particularly well run? How do they do it?

We spend our time either writing and searching for cool hacks, or moderating, and you can guess which we’d rather. At the end of the day, our comments are made up of Hackaday readers. So thanks to all of you who have, over the last week, thought twice and kept it nice.

In this tremendously educational video, [Linus Åkesson] takes us through how he develops a synthesizer and a sequencer and editor for it on the Commodore 64, all in BASIC. While this sounds easy, [Linus] is doing this in hard mode: all of the audio is generated by POKE, and it gets crazier from there. If you’re one of those people out there who think that BASIC is a limited language, you need to watch this video.

[Linus] can do anything with POKE. On a simple computer like the C64, the sound chip, the screen chips, and even the interrupts that control program flow are all accessible simply by writing to the right part of memory. So the main loop here simply runs through a lot of data, POKEing it into memory and turning the sound chip on and off. There’s also a counter running inside the C64 that he uses to point into a pitch lookup table in the code.

But the inception part comes when he designs the sequencer and editor. Because C64 BASIC already has an interactive code editor, he hijacks this for his music editor. The final sequencer interface exists inside the program itself, and he writes music in the code, in real time, using things like LIST and editing. (Code is data, and data is code.) Add in a noise drum hack, and you’ve got some classic chiptuney sounds by the end.

We love [Linus]’s minimal C64 exercises, and this one gets maximal effect out of a running C64 BASIC environment. But that’s so much code in comparison to his 256-byte “A Mind is Born” demo. But to get that done, he had to use assembly.

Thanks [zogzog] for the great tip!

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 minute, and there still more projects out there that we’d like to see. So we’re extending the deadline one more week, until October 22nd.

If you’re just tuning in now, well, you’ve got some catching up to do. Supercon Add-Ons are another step forward in the tradition of renaming the original SAO. One of our favorite resources on the subject comes from prolific SAO designer [Twinkle Twinkie], and you can even download PCB footprints over there on Hackaday.io.

Don’t know why you want to make an SAO?  Even if you’re not coming to Supercon this year? Well, our own [Tom Nardi] describes it as a low barrier to entry, full-stack hardware design and production tutorial. Plus, you’ll have something to trade with like-minded hardware nerds at the next con you attend.

We’ve already seen some killer artistic entries, but we want to see yours! We know the time’s tight, but you can still get in a last minute board run if you get started today. And those of you who are sitting at home waiting for boards to arrive, wipe that sweat from your brow. We’ll catch up with you next Tuesday!

[Editor’s Note: After we posted this, we got hit by a comment-report attack, and about 1,000 (!) comments across the whole site got sent back into the moderation queue on Saturday. We’ve since re-instated them all, but that took a lot of work.

About halfway down the comments in this article, the majority of comments are “hey, why did you delete this?”  We didn’t, and they should be all good now. We debated removing the “try deleting this!” comments, but since we didn’t delete them in the first place, we thought we should just leave them. It makes a royal mess of any discussion, and created a lot more heat than light, which is unfortunate.]

You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’s angular and futuristic designs, but it doesn’t have to be to your taste. Then someone else is like “you don’t even need a computer case.” Another commenter informed us that he doesn’t like to watch videos for the thirtieth time. (Yawn!)

What all of these comments have in common is that they’re negative, low value, non-constructive, and frankly have no place on Hackaday. The vast majority are just kind of Eeyorey complaining about how someone else is enjoying a chocolate ice cream, and the commenter prefers strawberry. But then some of them turn nasty. Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like. We publish a hack every three hours like a rubidium clockwork, with a couple of original content pieces scattered in-between on weekdays.

And don’t get us wrong: we love comments that help improve a project. There’s a not-so-fine line between “why didn’t you design it with trusses to better hold the load?” and “why did you paint it black, because blue is the superior color”. You know what we mean. Constructive criticism, good. Pointless criticism, bad.

It was to the point that we were discussing just shutting down the comments entirely. But then we got gems! [Maya Posch]’s fantastic explainer about the Lagrange points had an error: one of the satellites that Wikipedia said was at an earth-moon Lagrange point is actually in normal orbit around the moon. It only used the Lagrange point as a temporary transit orbit. Says who? One of the science instrument leads on the space vehicle in question. Now that is a high-value comment, both because it corrects a mistake and enlightens us all, but also because it shows who is reading Hackaday!

Or take [Al Williams]’s article on mold-making a cement “paper” airplane. It was a cool technique, but the commenters latched onto his assertion that you couldn’t fly a cement plane, and the discussions that ensued are awesome. Part of me wanted to remind folks about the nice mold-making technique on display, but it was such a joy to go down that odd rabbit hole, I forgive you all!

We have an official “be nice” policy about the comments, and that extends fairly broadly. We really don’t want to hear what you don’t like about someone’s project or the way they presented it, because it brings down the people out there who are doing the hard work of posting their hacks. And hackers have the highest priority on Hackaday.

DIY 3D printing in metal is a lot more complicated than we thought. And this video from [Metal Matters] shows two approaches, many many false starts, and finally, a glorious 78.9% success! (And it’s embedded below for your enjoyment.)

The first half of the video is dedicated to the work on a laser welding system that doesn’t pan out in the end at all. But the missteps are worth watching as well, and they hammer home the difficulties of melting metal reliably with nothing more than coherent light. Things like reflection, the difficulty of getting good process control cameras, and finally the whole thing slumping as multiple layers stack up on each other make this approach to 3D construction look nearly impossible.

Indeed, around halfway through the video, the focus shifts toward a metal-powder sintering machine, and this one is a success! Metal dust is deposited layer by layer, and fused with a totally different laser. The tricky bits here range from esoteric problems like making the laser fuse the metal dust without blasting it, to simple things like the geometry of the scraper that ensures even layer heights. And once you’ve got all that down, getting a good pattern down for 2D infill in metal is non-trivial.

A sweet half-scale metal Benchy emerges at the end, so why does [Metal Matters] call this a 78.9% success? Because that’s the density of the final print, and he is shooting for 100%. But we wouldn’t be so harsh. We’ve seen how far he’s come since the first machines, and this is a huge advance. We’re looking forward to the next video update in a year or two!

Thanks to [Jonas] for the tip!