The 2022 Supercon Badge Is a Fully-Functional Self-Contained Four-Bit Vintage Microcomputer
Designed by Voja Antonic, this clever badge uses LEDs and push-button switches to bring back memories of the Altair 8800.
The 2022 Hackaday Supercon is less than a month away, which means it's time for the big badge unveil — and this year the event's electronic badge will take attendees through a history of computing, offering a fully-functional — if simulated — vintage-style four-bit processor.
"Rather than try and cram the badge with even more state of the art hardware than we did in 2019, we've decided to go back to the well," explains Hackaday's Tom Nardi of the conference's latest badge design.
"The 2022 Supercon badge is a lesson in what it means to truly control a piece of hardware, to know what each bit of memory is doing, and why. Make no mistake, it's going to be a challenge. In fact, we'd wager most of the people who get their hands on the badge come November 4th will have never worked on anything quite like it before. Folks are going to get pulled out of their comfort zones, but of course, that's the whole idea."
Inspired by early personal microcomputers like the venerable Altair 8800, the Supercon 6 badge is festooned with an impressive 272 LEDs and physical buttons. They're not just for light-shows, though: the Voja Antonic-designed badge, originally scheduled for release in 2020, uses a Microchip PIC24 microcontroller to run a simulation of a custom 31-instruction four-bit processor.
As with the devices from which Antonic took inspiration, it's self-contained: programs are entered by physically toggling bits of memory using the switches, and the LEDs provide status information and a basic "display" for program output.
"To help you out," Nardi adds, "the 31 instructions accepted by the badge's 4-bit CPU are listed on the backside of the board. In addition, once you've entered in the binary opcode, a LED will illuminate next to the appropriate mnemonic on the front of the badge."
Elsewhere on the badge are battery holders for power, a four-pin Simple Add-On (SAO) header, which swaps out the traditional I2C bus for a UART serial connection, a 12-pin input/output header with In-Circuit Serial Programmer (ICSP) support, and an accessibility mode that allows for programs to be transmitted into memory from a USB-UART connection — bypassing the need to hack them into memory one bit at a time.
More information on the badge is available in Nardi's article, while documentation can be found on Antonic's project page. Supercon 6 itself, meanwhile, opens on Friday, November 4th and runs through to Sunday.