2024 Hackaday Supercon

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon was not your average tech conference where everyone politely nods at slides, drinks coffee from tiny paper cups, and pretends the Wi-Fi is “good enough.” It was a full-contact celebration of hardware hacking, experimental electronics, strange badges, clever firmware, community-built projects, and the sacred art of making something blink for no practical reason other than joy.

Held November 1–3, 2024, in Pasadena, California, the 2024 Hackaday Superconference brought together makers, embedded engineers, reverse engineers, artists, PCB designers, firmware tinkerers, and the kind of people who can look at a six-pin connector and immediately ask, “But what if we made it weird?” The event centered around talks, demos, workshops, badge hacking, live streams, and the beloved hacker hallway energy that makes Supercon feel less like a polished trade show and more like a weekend-long lab bench with snacks.

For the Hackaday community, Supercon is more than a conference. It is a yearly checkpoint for the state of independent hardware culture. It asks a simple question: what happens when hundreds of curious people gather in one place, each carrying a laptop, a soldering iron, a bag of parts, and at least one project that is “almost working”? The answer, predictably, is magic with a small risk of smoke.

What Made the 2024 Hackaday Supercon Special?

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon stood out because it leaned hard into what Hackaday does best: practical creativity. The official event promised three days of talks, demos, badge hacking, workshops, and hardware shenanigans, and that description was not just marketing sparkle. It was the operating system of the weekend.

Friday acted as the warm-up: badge pickup, socializing, hacking, food, music, workshops, and the first wave of “wait, you built that?” moments. Saturday brought the main body of talks, soldering contests, hallway conversations, and demos. Sunday packed in more talks, lightning sessions, and the grand badge-hacking finale, where attendees showed off what they had managed to build, modify, break, repair, and occasionally resurrect during the weekend.

Unlike conferences built around product announcements, Supercon is built around participation. Attendees are not just audience members. They are co-conspirators. They bring add-ons, prototypes, display experiments, tiny PCBs, unusual wearables, custom firmware, and ideas that may not have a business model but absolutely have personality.

The 2024 Supercon Badge: A Playground for SAOs

No discussion of the 2024 Hackaday Supercon is complete without the badge. At many events, a badge is simply a piece of plastic that proves you paid to be there. At Hackaday Supercon, the badge is homework, toy, status symbol, conversation starter, development board, and gentle source of panic.

The 2024 badge focused on Simple Add-Ons, or SAOs. Traditionally, SAOs are small badge accessories that plug into a standard connector. Many are decorative: tiny blinking boards, funny shapes, miniature art pieces, or PCB jokes that only make sense if you know too much about silkscreen layers. In 2024, Hackaday pushed the idea further by designing the badge as a showcase for SAOs that could do more than merely look adorable.

Six SAO Ports and a Lot of Possibility

The badge included six SAO ports and used a Raspberry Pi Pico W on the back side, giving attendees Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability. It also ran MicroPython, which made experimentation more approachable. Instead of requiring a full embedded toolchain just to make something happen, attendees could plug in, open a serial terminal or development environment, and begin poking at the hardware in Python.

The SAO standard exposes power, ground, GPIO pins, and I2C. That sounds simple, but simple is where mischief begins. The 2024 badge made individual GPIO access available across the SAO slots and broke out I2C capabilities in a way that encouraged people to combine add-ons, write small programs, and think of SAOs as functional modules instead of decorative ornaments.

The Starter Add-Ons

Hackaday provided a starter collection of add-ons, including a capacitive touch wheel, an LED matrix petal, a protoboard-style petal, and an I2C-enabled microcontroller proto-petal. That mix was smart. It gave beginners something immediately rewarding, while giving experienced hackers enough room to do something gloriously unnecessary.

The touch wheel and LED matrix made it easy to experiment with input and output. The protoboard provided a blank canvas for low-level hardware play. The I2C proto-petal, using a CH32V003 RISC-V microcontroller, invited deeper embedded development. In plain English: the badge gave attendees several doors into the same party, whether they preferred Python, C, solder, sensors, LEDs, or pure chaos.

The Supercon Add-On Contest Raised the Bar

The 2024 Supercon Add-On Contest challenged makers to build functional SAOs. That was an important twist. Instead of rewarding only the prettiest PCB art or the flashiest blinky thing, the contest encouraged useful, interactive, or technically interesting badge add-ons.

The contest ran before the event and gave participants a defined target: design something that could plug into the Supercon ecosystem and show what an SAO could become. The results showed how much creativity can fit into a tiny board. Winners included projects such as a digital multimeter SAO, an Etch sAo Sketch, a bendy SAO, and a Vectrex-inspired SAO. That lineup says everything about the Supercon spirit: measurement tool, toy, flexible art object, and retro display tribute all sharing the same stage.

What made the contest valuable was not only the winning projects. It was the signal it sent to the community. Small hardware does not have to be trivial. A badge add-on can be playful and useful. A tiny PCB can teach interface design, firmware, power management, manufacturability, and user experience. It can also, if we are being honest, make everyone nearby ask where you got it.

Talks, Workshops, and the Joy of Practical Knowledge

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon included talks and workshops covering the kind of subjects that live at the intersection of engineering skill and curiosity. Topics included repurposing ESP32-based commercial products, prototyping on limited budgets, tracking radio transmissions, using oscilloscopes to detect weak signals, and hacking consumer 3D printer firmware.

These are not abstract topics. They are practical, hands-on, and occasionally delightfully stubborn. Supercon talks tend to come from people who have wrestled with real systems, discovered the ugly corners, and returned with stories, tools, and hard-earned lessons. That is why the event is so useful for makers. It does not merely say, “Here is what worked.” It often says, “Here is what failed first, what caught fire metaphorically, and how we eventually convinced the thing to behave.”

ESP32 Repurposing and the Black Box Problem

One standout topic from the 2024 Supercon program focused on repurposing commercial products built around ESP32 microcontrollers. That is a very Hackaday-friendly subject because modern consumer electronics often hide familiar chips behind unfriendly firmware, cloud services, or locked-down ecosystems. When hackers discover that a product contains a capable microcontroller, the question becomes: can we make this device serve the user instead of the other way around?

This matters because many connected devices become useless when a service shuts down, an app disappears, or a manufacturer loses interest. Repurposing hardware can extend product life, reduce waste, improve security, and restore ownership. It is also fun, which is a perfectly valid engineering reason as long as nobody asks procurement.

Firmware Freedom and the Bambu X1 Carbon

Another major thread involved custom firmware for the Bambu X1 Carbon 3D printer. The broader maker community has been paying close attention to consumer 3D printer firmware, device ownership, and whether users should be free to modify machines they bought. Supercon gave that debate a technical stage, showing how firmware work can become both a hacking challenge and a conversation about control.

That kind of talk is valuable because it connects low-level reverse engineering to big questions. Who owns the hardware after purchase? What happens when cloud-connected devices change behavior after firmware updates? How much access should users have to their tools? Supercon does not treat these as dry policy questions. It treats them as practical realities that show up on workbenches.

Projects Spotted at Supercon: Where Ideas Get Physical

One of the best parts of Hackaday Supercon is that the hallway can be as interesting as the stage. In 2024, post-event coverage highlighted projects that captured the event’s experimental personality.

The Circuit Graver, for example, attracted attention as an unconventional PCB milling machine. Built with many 3D-printed parts and a bed-slinger-style Cartesian layout, it represented the kind of project that makes Supercon feel like a living catalog of clever hardware experiments. PCB prototyping is a constant obsession in the maker world, and any machine that promises a different approach to turning ideas into copper traces will naturally draw a crowd.

Another memorable project was a glowtape wearable display: a luminous timepiece using glow-in-the-dark material and LEDs. It was strange, charming, and technically interesting in exactly the right proportions. The design showed how display technology does not always need to follow the normal screen playbook. Sometimes the better question is: what happens if the display fades, scrolls, glows, and looks like it escaped from a retro-futurist laboratory?

Display Technology, Alley Energy, and Community Culture

The 2024 event also included a focus on display technology, with the Supplyframe DesignLab hosting a special exhibit that invited the community to contribute unusual displays. That theme fit beautifully with the badge and SAO culture. Displays are often where hardware becomes emotional. A sensor board can be brilliant, but add a tiny screen, LED matrix, split-flap module, phosphorescent strip, or vintage display tube, and suddenly people gather around it like it is telling secrets.

Supercon’s community culture is hard to fake. The event works because it attracts people who are generous with knowledge. Someone might explain a board layout mistake, share a firmware trick, lend a cable, swap a component, or point at your project and say, “I did something similar, but mine failed in a completely different way.” That is not just networking. That is peer review with better stickers.

The alley and hallway moments matter because they collapse the distance between presenter and audience. A person who gave a talk in the morning may be debugging a badge in the evening. A first-time attendee may show a prototype to a veteran engineer and get practical advice. A silly SAO may trigger a serious discussion about I2C addresses, power budgets, enclosure design, or why hot glue remains undefeated in emergency fabrication.

Why the 2024 Hackaday Supercon Matters

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon matters because independent hardware culture needs places where experiments can be messy, public, and celebrated. In a world where many devices are sealed, cloud-dependent, subscription-adjacent, and hostile to repair, Supercon pushes in the opposite direction. It celebrates openness, reverse engineering, user control, documentation, modification, and creative misuse.

It also shows that hardware hacking is not only about nostalgia or hobbyist tinkering. It is connected to real issues: sustainability, right to repair, embedded security, accessible prototyping, open tools, education, and the future of personal manufacturing. A tiny badge add-on can teach the same mindset needed to understand a medical device, a smart home product, a radio system, or an industrial controller.

Most importantly, Supercon makes technical learning feel social. That is rare. Many engineering skills are learned alone, late at night, while searching error messages and questioning one’s life choices. At Supercon, those same skills become communal. People compare failures, share fixes, and cheer for projects that are barely holding together because everyone understands how much effort “barely holding together” actually took.

Who Should Care About Hackaday Supercon?

The obvious audience includes hardware hackers, electrical engineers, embedded developers, PCB designers, radio enthusiasts, firmware researchers, retrocomputing fans, and makers. But the event is also relevant for educators, product designers, startup founders, repair advocates, artists, and anyone interested in how technology behaves when users are allowed to open the box.

For beginners, Supercon can be inspiring because it reveals that experts are not magical beings. They are people who have made more mistakes, documented more failures, and learned how to recover faster. For experienced engineers, it is refreshing because it removes the corporate polish from technology and returns to the bench-level joy of making something work.

For companies watching from the sidelines, Supercon offers a useful lesson: communities form around tools that invite participation. Products that are hackable, documented, repairable, and extensible earn loyalty that marketing departments cannot buy. When users can modify something, they often become its best advocates.

Conclusion: A Conference That Still Believes in the Workbench

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon was a reminder that the future of technology is not only built in spotless labs or corporate campuses. Sometimes it is built in conference alleys, on folding tables, beside half-finished badges, with a borrowed USB cable and someone saying, “Try resetting it again.”

Its badge design pushed SAOs from decoration toward function. Its talks explored practical hacking, firmware, radio, measurement, prototyping, and device ownership. Its contest rewarded creative tiny hardware. Its hallway projects proved that the maker community still has plenty of wonderfully odd ideas left in the parts bin.

In short, the 2024 Hackaday Supercon was not just an event about hardware. It was an event about agency. It celebrated the idea that technology should be opened, questioned, improved, repurposed, and occasionally covered in LEDs. For anyone who believes the best gadgets are the ones you can learn from, modify, and make slightly ridiculous, Supercon 2024 was very much the place to be.

Experience Notes: What the 2024 Hackaday Supercon Felt Like

Experiencing the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, even through its talks, recaps, livestreams, project writeups, and community energy, feels like stepping into a room where every table has a side quest. One person is debugging MicroPython on the badge. Another is explaining why two I2C devices are arguing over the same address. Someone else is holding a tiny PCB that looks decorative until it starts behaving like a real instrument. Then there is always that one person with a wearable display, a custom enclosure, or a mysterious board that makes people stop mid-sentence and drift toward it like moths to a logic analyzer.

The strongest impression is that Supercon rewards curiosity more than polish. A finished project is great, of course, but an unfinished project with an interesting failure mode can be just as valuable. That changes the atmosphere. Instead of hiding rough edges, people talk about them. They explain what they tried, what went wrong, what they would redesign, and what they learned when the first revision behaved like a tiny electronic raccoon.

The 2024 badge experience seems especially important because it gave attendees a shared technical object. A good conference badge creates instant community. You do not need an awkward icebreaker when both people are staring at the same board wondering why one petal works and another refuses to acknowledge reality. The SAO theme made that even better because it encouraged swapping, comparing, modifying, and showing off. The badge was not a souvenir waiting for a drawer. It was a platform.

Another defining experience was the sense of layered learning. A beginner could start by running MicroPython examples and watching LEDs respond. A more experienced attendee could dig into I2C behavior, write libraries, experiment with the CH32V003 proto-petal, or design a custom add-on. That range matters. Events become more inclusive when the same object offers multiple difficulty levels. Nobody has to pretend they already know everything. There is always another layer to peel back.

The talks added a second kind of energy. Topics like repurposing ESP32 products, tracking radio transmissions, and custom 3D printer firmware are not merely cool tricks. They reflect a mindset: commercial hardware is not sacred, signals can be investigated, firmware can be understood, and tools can be made more personal. That mindset is contagious. After enough Supercon content, you start looking at everyday devices differently. A smart plug stops being a sealed consumer object and becomes a possible ESP32 board in disguise. A printer becomes a Linux system with motors. A display becomes a material experiment waiting to happen.

What makes the 2024 Hackaday Supercon memorable is the blend of seriousness and play. The engineering is real. The skills are real. The late-night debugging is painfully real. But the event never forgets that hardware hacking is fun. It allows room for jokes, strange art, blinking badges, tiny multimeters, glow-in-the-dark watches, and projects whose usefulness is secondary to the fact that somebody cared enough to build them. That is the magic: Supercon makes learning feel like play and play feel like invention.