Tom writes on Tea and Tech Time about badge hacking for Hackaday Supercon 2023:
Tayloe Mixer Frontend for the Supercon 2023 Vector Scope Badge
The Hackaday Supercon conference is an amazing convergence of electronics, makers, engineers, designers, educators, and anyone else interested in making cool projects. Each year we descend on the town of Old Pasadena to Hack on things over the weekend in early November. The amazing thing about the conference is that every year they build a complex electronics badge that every attendee gets and they do a presentation at the end where people can show off the cool things they made!
This year the badge emulates an old-school Vector Scope! It uses the Raspberry Pi Pico, an ADC and DAC chip, and a fancy circular screen to produce some mesmerizing green waveforms. Essentially it uses 2 DAC channels to generate arbitrary waveforms on the x and y axis, those outputs can then be looped back into the 2 ADC channels for x and y to plot on the screen! You can learn more on the Hackaday article below!
[..] I will be adding this design to my GitHub soon since I need to fix a few things before I release this design. So you may need to wait a while if you want to make your own. This project was done in a compressed timeline so it was more of a learning project and just something to do at Supercon that I hadn’t done before. It was amazing to get to talk to everyone there and the project helped me connect to others and became a fun icebreaker.
I am not an RF or hardware designer but this got me out of my shell and I am hoping to learn more in the future. If you have any suggestions or questions feel free to reach out especially if we met at supercon 2023 and want to chat more.
OSH Park 