Tom Nardi's SAO Plank Makes Badge Accessory Testing a Cinch — If You Have a Bus Pirate 5
If you want to power an SAO but don't have a badge to hand, the SAO Plank is exactly what you need.
Maker Tom Nardi has built a tool that aims to make it easier to try out Simple Add-On (SAO) badge accessories without having to actually dig out a badge — so long as you've got a Dangerous Prototypes Bus Pirate 5 or newer to hand.
"This simple PCB plugs into the Bus Pirate (5, 5XL, and 6) and allows you to power and communicate with up to three Simple Add-Ons (SAOs)," Nardi explains of the SAO Plank. "This board was designed out of a need to power Simple-Add Ons (SAOs) being tested and worked on, without having to pull out an old event badge or rig something up with a bench PSU."
The Simple Add-On standard, also known by a less family-friendly name, makes it easy to design accessories for connection to any badge adopting said standard. These accessories may be simple, lighting up an artistic PCB with a handful of LEDs, or run the gamut of complexity all the way up to clever creations like Ben Combee's add-on display.
For those at the simpler end of the spectrum, Nardi's SAO Plank delivers power without the need to pull out an actual badge — by linking them to the programmable power supply of the Dangerous Prototypes Bus Pirate 5 debugging tool or its Raspberry Pi RP2350-powered successors. "With the abilities of the modern Bus Pirate," Nardi notes, "you can even operate it at different voltages to simulate the batteries going flat." The I2C and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins are also wired, allowing SAOs to communicate with each other.
Production files for the board are available on Nardi's Hackaday.io project page, along with more details.