Dave Darko's Mysterio SAO Puts a Spider-Man Villain on Your Favorite Badge
Shine-through four-layer PCB has Spider-Man's nemesis peering ghoulishly from behind his helmet.
Web developer and self-described "LED blinking sci-fi nerd" Dave Darko is looking to put a little villain on your badge, with a Simple Add-On (SAO) based on Spider-Man's Mysterio.
I had an idea for a Mysterio SAO," Darko explains. "Mysterio is an enemy of Spider-Man, big ominous glass orb sits on top of his head(?) — perfect for some LEDs to shine through the PCB material."
Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) are standardized accessories for electronic badges, hooking into a port to connect to power and data. In the case of this Mysterio-themed add-on, it needs only some power to run a series of surface-mount LEDs from an on-board microcontroller — the 32-bit RISC-V-based WCH Electronics CH32V003, in the most recent variant of the badge.
Like Mysterio's various redesigns and reinventions through the years, Darko's badge accessory is also undergoing an evolution. Having been underwhelmed with the results from the first prototype, in which the skull was hard to make out, Darko designed a new revision as a four-layer board — putting the cape, helmet, skull, and actual electronic traces on different layers using a thinner PCB substrate than the original prototype to increase light transmission and improve the clarity of the effect.
Darko's project write-up is available on Hackaday.io; full source code and design files had not been released at the time of writing.