This year’s Hackaday Supercon, the initial because 2019 many thanks to the pandemic, was a very identical affair to those of the earlier. Nearly every hardware-oriented hacker function has its have tailor made electronic badge, and Supercon was no diverse. This year’s badge is a simulation system for a hypothetical 4-little bit CPU established by our own [Voja Antonic], and offered a genuine challenge for some of the attendees who had hardly ever touched equipment code for the duration of their formative yrs. The problem established was to appear up with the most exciting hack for the badge, so collaborators [Ben Hencke] and [Zach Fredin] established about nailing the ‘expandr’ category of the competitors with their optical punched card reader bolt-on.

Peripheral connectivity is considerably confined. The concept was to construct a bolt-on board with its own community processing — using a PixelBlaze board [Ben] brought along — to