Collaborate Disseminate
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 …read more Continue reading 2024 SAO Contest: The Jolly Tagger Is a Golden Way to Share Info
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. …read more Continue reading A Nibble Of Core Memory, In An SAO
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 …read more Continue reading Supercon 2024: May the Best Badge Add-Ons Win
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, …read more Continue reading Chip Shortage Engineering: Misusing DIP Packages
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 …read more Continue reading Jolly Wrencher SAO, And How KiCad 6 Made It Easy
Our friends in the Whiskey Pirates crew sent me the unofficial DEF CON badge they built this year. The Internet of Batteries QUANTUM provides power and connectivity to the all-important add-on badges of DC28. The front of the badge is absolutely gorgeous to the point I don’t really want to …read more
Over the year or two since the SAO connector specification was published, otherwise known as the Shitty Addon, we’ve seen a huge variety of these daughter boards for our favourite electronic badges. Many of them are works of art, but there’s another subset that’s far less about show and …read more
Through the weekend Twitter has been a-titter with news coming out of Saintcon, the annual security conference in Provo, Utah. Now that the weekend is over we can finally get our hands on full hardware and software sources for the curvy, LED-covered badge we’ve been salivating over and a write …read more
By now most of us should be used to backlit LEDs, in which a bare board with no copper or soldermask as an LED mounted on its reverse side to shine through as if with a diffuser. [Wim Van Gool] has created such an LED display with a twist, instead …read more
Continue reading Stack Those Boards For An Extra-Special Backlit LED Effect
Ah, crap. We lost a good one, people. [Samm Sheperd] passed away last month. We’ve seen his stuff before, from a plane with a squirrel cage fan, to completely owning a bunch of engineering students by auditing a class. The obit is available as a Google Doc, and there’s a Samm Sheperd Memorial Fund for the Big Lake Youth Camp in Gladstone, Oregon.
FranLab is closing down! Fran is one of the hardware greats, and she’s being evicted. If you’ve got 2000sqft of workshop space in Philly you’d like to spare, you know who to talk to. There will, probably, …read more