One of our favorite parts of Hackaday Supercon is seeing all the incredible badge add-ons people put together. These extensions are even more impressive when you consider that they had to develop their hardware without physical access to the badge and with only a few weeks’ notice. Even under ideal conditions, that’s not a lot of time to make circuit boards, 3D print parts, or write code. If only there was a standard for badge extensions that could speed up the process…

But there is! The Simple Add-On (SAO) standard has been supported by the Supercon badges since 2019, and the 2×3 pin connector has also appeared on badges from various other hacker events such as HOPE and DEF CON. There’s just one problem – until now, most SAOs were simply decorative, consisting of little more than LEDs connected to the power connectors.

This year, with the Supercon Add-On Contest, we want to redefine what a SAO can be. Don’t worry, we’re not changing the existing standard – the pinout and connection remain the same. We just want to challenge hackers and makers to think bigger and bolder.

Thanks to the I2C interface in the SAO header, add-ons can communicate not only with the badge, but also with each other. We want you to take advantage of this ability by creating functional SAOs: sensors, displays, buttons, switches, encoders, radios – we want to see it all! Just make sure to send us your six-pin masterpiece by October 15th.

Read more “Supercon 2024: May the best badge add-ons win” →