Introduction #

What is a Shitty Add-on? #

Okay, so there are these circuit boards for conference badges called Shitty Add-ons, or SBA for short!

There is even a simi-standard that can be found at these links:

• https://hackaday.com/2019/03/20/introducing-the-shitty-add-on-v1-69bis-standard/
• https://hackaday.io/project/52950-shitty-add-ons

As you can see in the image below. It standardized a header for a circuit board to supply power and data. However, most badges do not utilize any data pins.

At maker and hacker conferences there are often headers put onto the conference badges so that you can put one of these onto the conference badge.

A conference badge might look something like this:

And it has a little header here, that you can see:

Then you might put an SAO onto it that looks like this:

To make your badge different and more blinky overall. I love these things and there is a whole community of people that make these and even some sell them for about $20- $30 apiece. They are pretty cool! Check out this wall of them here:

How I ended up here #

So how did I end up learning about these badge add-ons? I went to my first conference which was called DEFCON. I have been wanting to go to this conference most of my life honestly. It's a pretty cool thing to be at.

And someone gave me a Shitty Add-on. Which was the Pikachu one but the badge at Def Con that year did not have a way to power it.

So I was not sure what to do. I had this cool badge but no way to see it working. It kind of stayed that way for me the rest of the conference. So I just took the badge home and thought about it a bit.

Creating a Solution #

So I was thinking there are probably people like me out there showing up to DEFCON, New to electronics and someone gives them one of these badges. Right? They would also not have a way to power it... What if I could learn circuit board design? Which would give me a way to create a circuit board to power one of these SAO badges! It Does not seem that bad...

Around the same time I joined MHub. Which is a coworking space for people to develop their ideas into physical products and devices.

When I joined MHub, I met this really cool and wise guy named Yuri Gallegos. Yuri is a great engineer! He helped me learn EasyEDA (an online circuit board design software) and guided me through designing the boards and having them manufactured.

So, Yuri and I created this circuit board:

It is a very simple design that consist of a button, a coin cell battery and SOA header for plugging in the SOA badges.

Results #

I did not receive the circuit boards until a few days before the next DEFCON was going to start. Which put me in a spot where I spend all day soldering and make sure I had them all finished before I got on my flight to Las Vegas.

I was able to finishes making all the soldering all the boards together and make it to my flight on time.

However, I am honestly not that good at sales! So when I got to DEFCON, I was not really sure how I was going to go about selling these things I made.... I tried talking to people about it but they did not seem to get it or want to buy it from me. Which kind of sucks but this is just practice for me. I have learn a lot in the process of making this physical product! I am going to keep making things and trying to improve.