Hackaday Supercon 2016 · United States · 2016

Hackaday Supercon 2016 LED Matrix Badge

PIC18 LED-matrix badge with IR and accelerometer

The 2016 Hackaday Superconference badge, also documented as the Supercon II badge, was a Voja Antonic-designed open hardware badge with a red 8x16 LED matrix, PIC18LF25K50/PIC18F25K50-class MCU, integral LIS3 accelerometer, infrared communication, USB bootloader, five tactile controls, and expansion pads.

Hackaday Supercon United States PIC18 LED Matrix Infrared Accelerometer USB Bootloader Voja Antonic Badge Hacking North America

EventHackaday Supercon 2016

SeriesHackaday Superconference

LocationSupplyframe DesignLab and Los Angeles College of Music, Pasadena, California

CountryUnited States

People

Authors & Credits

USB bootloader contributor

Microchip

Hackaday.io and Hackaday coverage credit Microchip with creating or adapting the mass-storage bootloader used for the badge.

Source

badge designer and project author

Voja Antonic

Hackaday.io names Voja Antonic as Supercon II badge project owner, and Hackaday coverage identifies him as the designer and drilldown author.

Source

event and badge coverage author

Mike Szczys

Author of the Hackaday reveal, event overview, hack-results, and retrospective sources used for hardware, event, and post-event context.

Source

event and badge publisher

Hackaday

Hackaday published the event overview, badge reveal, design drilldown, puzzle article, post-event hack coverage, project pages, and source repository.

Source

project team member

Dusan Petrovic

The Hackaday.io Supercon II badge project lists Dusan Petrovic on the project team.

Source

puzzle and challenge coverage author

Brian Benchoff

Author of the Hackaday source documenting the badge's puzzle layers and hacking award categories.

Source

Why It Mattered

It turned the second Pasadena Supercon into a serious firmware and hardware badge-hacking event while preserving a visible design lineage from Hackaday Belgrade to the North American Superconference.

Hardware

Hackaday coverage, the Hackaday.io project, and the manual document 128 discrete LEDs, an 8x16 display matrix, PIC18LF25K50-family controller, LIS3 accelerometer, TSOP6240 IR receiver, 940 nm IR LED transmitter, two AAA batteries, five tactile buttons plus reset, USB, 74HC138 row selection, and a 5-bit I/O expansion port.

Software & Apps

The badge shipped with a Microchip-adapted USB mass-storage bootloader named HackABadge, protected kernel services for display scanning and button debounce, assembly kernel sources, challenge HEX files, and a public MPLAB X/XC8 C framework exposing display, button, timing, accelerometer, and memory-map functions.

Lore

The badge carried hidden challenge layers behind accelerometer gravity simulation, moving messages, Tetris, and infrared behavior. Post-event coverage documented badge-hacking awards for blinky, deadbug, over-the-top, and crypto-challenge work, and later retrospectives framed Voja's design as a model for exposed-PCB conference badge craft.

Lifecycle

Add-ons & Upgrades

badge app historical

Accelerometer gravity simulation

The firmware used the integral accelerometer for gravity-style simulations and input mechanics that sat behind the public puzzle and demo behavior.