Building my first SAO: A beginner’s guide to building and distributing your own SAO - Matthew Moses

well appreciate you guys being here I don't know how I compete with cotton candy and um happy hours so um it's good stuff um like you said my name is Matthew Moses um and uh just real quick get this out of the way I do work uh for Walmart and they wanted me to say that my presentation comments and opinions are not provided and they're provided in my personal capacity and not as a representative of Walmart they do not reflect views of Walmart are not by Walmart so a little bit about me real quick um if I took three words I'd probably say husband father Runner like I mentioned I read team at Walmart uh in a previous role I did appdev uh for the inent response team that was a lot of fun none of that's super applicable to what I'm talking about today uh what I'm talking about today are seos right and to provide a little context here I uh volunteer with an organization down in Northwest Arkansas very similar probably to like set KC if you guys are members there we're just a group of like infos professionals and hackers and students that get together once a month and this last year we um had a booth at a conference and I worked with some of you might know Evan Wagner he was putting together like a conference badge you know electronic badge like this and uh he reached out and um Wanted to make a SEO for our group right so this is our logo I know it's really hard to see I'll have a picture of it later um but it's a really cool um thing for our group and so I kind of worked with him on that and that's kind of the uh the birth of this talk right I'm going to kind of provide a Playbook that if you want to do something similar for your your group or your organization your company or your team um I think these seos are really cool and they're like a great way to build like loyalty to your group or brand or or team or whatever it is so you've probably seen these floating around at different conferences um some have Electronics in them like LEDs and resistors and different types of things some don't um I like to call them simple add-ons but you all know that they're actually called shitty add-ons um so if you go look at the specific spe ification um the one I've been looking at is out on hackaday there's links there um and it's just a proposed specification on how to kind of make these interoperable so if you get one at this conference you could potentially go to another conference later this year and plug it on your badge and it just works right um so I'm not going to dive too much in those details but we'll we'll touch on those a little bit so if you're interested in making one this is kind of my bullet points for like how do you make one right so first you're going to have to start off with some kind of idea and I'm not much like a very like artsy person and so like uh if you're like me and you like computers right maybe you like use Dolly to like get some examples like generate me a image of this or that right or maybe you just take your company or your like in our case right you just take your organization's logo and that's kind of your basis uh but from that point then you're going to need to Pivot to design tool we'll talk about a few today there's a lot out there but something that will actually allow you to create your schematic if you're going to do electronics and then of course the actual uh design design of the board you'll also need someone to manufacture this unless you just happen to have you know all the special PCB equipment at your house which um probably none of us do but very few maybe the badge Pirates um but there's manufacturers over seeds that will allow you to uh ship off your file to them and they'll create it for you and ship it back right um so definitely not super expensive but it is like a project that will require some cash um especially like parts right if you're going to be buying LEDs and resistors or different things and like the pins to put them together and then of course you'll need like you know basic soldering skills uh so this is actually the one that I built from scratch for my talk it's uh kind of got its inspiration here from Kansas City with the the bad mittens um uh but Sao is really just a printed circuit board right so if you rip open your your computer at home right you look at your motherboard or you open up like any sort of electronics right that board inside there is a PCB right it's a printed circuit board U saos like I already alluded to may or may not have electronic components and really designing them just comes down to you know figuring out the shape and then figuring out what components you're going to put on there and then if you want to get like really fancy like some of these um of course figuring out your design and I'm not going to like talk about like the details of how you go about doing like really cool ones like this I've got a A Link at the end of this presentation um there's a great YouTube talk out there that kind of talks about how you can leverage the different layers of a PCB to achieve these effects and so you can see from this is like a screenshot of of the tools that I was using if you've used Photoshop before it's very similar there's a lot of different layers that make up an actual PCB right uh from your top layer your your solder mask and the silk screen and whatnot so you can use all that to your advantage to get those really cool shapes and colors and designs and so it's really really up to your imagination how you can achieve that this was the standard I talk about um if you've look on your badge I don't know if you guys have been to the soldering Village I highly encourage you to get there uh but in the top I guess will be the top right corner you're going to see a bunch of holes there and if you go visit them they'll give you um one of these pieces here right and that's what you can solder on and that's the piece that interfaces with these Sao boards right so on the back of this SEO board again that's probably really hard to see but there are are six little pins coming out of there and so when you plug it in um one of them is going to be your power right your 3.3 volts one's going to be your ground and then you've got a couple GPI pins a data line and then a clock line too and again for like a really simple Sao you don't need to use any of that you don't have to even accept the power right you could just have an Sao that just attaches to the badge right and that's that's pretty cool um in my example here just with like a really simple simple example this like a blinking LED all you need to do when you're building out your schematic is worry about the 3.3 volts in the ground so you you can keep these uh pretty simple a couple tools you can use use um there's one called easy Eda and it's free um I really recommend it I felt like it was very approachable for like a beginner um free account log on you can do everything you need to do uh right there from like your web browser you don't have to install anything in fact you can even I'll talk about this maybe later but you can actually integrates uh there's a company called jlcpcb they integrate with that and it makes it really easy to say I want to order this thing right so um that makes it really nice there's another one I kind of toyed around with it's maybe uh you might check it out it's called Kad Eda it is something you download and run may have a few more features I can't talk a lot about it but it's another option and of course you can Google and there's probably others as well so if you're going to put like Electronics inside your badge one of the first things you'll do when you get in one of these tools is kind of build your schematic and I would even say at this point take a step back and figure out what your schematic is going to look like right so if you've got wires at home and you got a breadboard you know pop an LED in there get a battery and just kind of figure it out um at that level but when you've kind of got it ready to go you can jump into the schematic and start kind of putting it together and again this one's really simple I followed an example online there's there's people who have already kind of done blog posts about hey what's a basic schematic with a 3.3 volt and an LED um and so when you're in Easy Ada you can actually import the um the thing on the top left there this little piece this is the SEO standard right that's the six pins you can import that and drop it right in there and then it's just a matter of grabbing the LED dropping it on there and I had a resistor in mine I think these seos perform fine on their own without a resistor so I um if I was going to redo this I I'd leave that out but um it's up to you guys so once you have your schematic right and that's just I'm definitely not an electrical engineer and I don't think you need to necessarily be an electrical engineer just need know some of the basics so once you got this schematic right which describes your your physical circuit you can then do what's called an import into your PCB or update your PCB and basically a easy Eda will give you um a really basic printed circuit board right um so there's a purple box around there not super exciting right but then you can like arrange your components right so you can see here's the sa saao um the six the 2x3 adapter there and your l light and of course the resistor in my example here but at that point you can start working with your shape that's kind of what I did is I took those got rid of those purple lines and started putting my own uh purple lines in there and so since I was going with this like bad Mitten style I took the tool and I you know sketched out um what that looks like so once you get your shape you kind of make sure you arrange your components so they still uh look correct there's a lot of other details that go into this um a lot of great tutorials online I had to use like easy Eda so I'd recommend them just kind of given a high level here but at some point once you've got the PCB built your modeling tool will actually do like a 3D rendering and I found this like super useful right because it allows you to kind of I mean again it's still not physical but allows you kind of take it twist it and turn around and kind of Reason about it to say hey do I have things on there correctly like um like for this one like I really wanted it to face down kind of like the bad Mitten over in the the field not far from here right um and so I had to kind of like reason about it and say okay when it's faced this way the pins are facing this way uh so the 3D view is really really helpful to kind of get a sense of what it's going to look like it won't be like exact but it gets you there and then again ordering is really easy um not recommending any of these companies necessarily but I've heard a lot of people use PCB way.com and the one that I used was jlc pcb.com they're really good about um allowing you to do like test batches right you can order five just for a few bucks and get them shipped to you uh with jlc PCB mine are actually manufactured overseas so you do need to account for that so if you're doing this for like a conference or for like a big team meeting or a group meeting I'd give yourself plenty of like lead time right like maybe like a month or two especially if it's your first time uh because on my experience was about two weeks two two and a half weeks I think to get the boards back um and first time I did not get it right I messed up and I I spent some time trying to figure it out I was like oh yep I think I got it I think I got it that's what I did wrong um and so I fixed it up made a couple other tweaks sent it over again got them back still not right um this was version two but unfortunately I was able to kind of do a little hacking on it and just like get it to work um but ideally you know if I was going to like do like a big batch I would probably do a version three right and fix fix my mistakes there one of the things you want to watch out for is like layers right so it's really hard to see here but you can on on pcbs if you look at your badge you can put like text and I goofed I put some of that text on the um the copper layer and so when it was actually printed even though it looked good on the screen it was making connections on my copper lines that I didn't want to be there uh and so basically my hack was to kind of scratch out some of it to get the circuit um behaving the way it should be uh but the other piece I wanted to talk about this right um talking about building like loyalty to your organization is like what can do with these things right of course you can sell them you can trade them you can just give them away but like what my group did is we used them to kind of build our community which I thought um was uh it was a lot of fun to do so like I said this was in connection with the conference earlier this year and our group's called arkans SEC and what we did is we directed people to our website we made a very like approachable CTF that you could anybody could really solve in a matter of you know 10 15 minutes and they could even do it like on their phone while they were at the conference so we pointed them to our website and we gave them like that first clue right so our CTF was called to chase around the web and it was really designed to get people familiar with our organization and so you kind of traversed from our website to some our social media sites until you found the final clue right and we had a booth um at the conference and so once you had that final clue you could come to us and we would get you an SEO so the first clue was right what did Pac-Man say when he saw our website Dom d d right so like super Elite hacking right as you hit that F12 button um um and you can see the uh um in the source source code here we dropped our first clue right uh nothing super fancy right just kind of tells them about us kind of takes them to our Facebook page and so one of the things that we did is we posted this message like early on in the week and then when we released the CTF we went back and edited it hopefully to kind of keep keep it like a low profile so you know part of the challenge was is I think the second clue was like I should have read the WR writing on the wall right on their wall and so they would Google Arc Facebook right and then then find this kind of same thing the Facebook one would take you to our Twitter page um where you'd get kind of like that final clue that you'd have to solve um yeah so you finally solve it you get that token um so yeah so this was their kind of reward for the CTF that's a big picture of it there we were able to put some of our branding on the back of it uh we had a lot of fun with it and again um Evan Wagner was are my friend who actually designed it and printed it and I was kind of there kind of learning from him and helping solder and put these together and kind of working on the CTF so that was a really awesome experience and got me really interested in this so here's kind of an action shot of the badge the conference badge with our sa on it and then you know putting it all together right uh so much like it here there was a soldering Village and so when we distributed these to people uh we gave them the option we said hey we you can have the one that's ready to go or we've just got the PCB the PCB board right and they could take it to the village and get it wired up and um yeah a lot of people really appreciated that right and they had a lot of fun and it was really good like takeaway for them they feel quite accomplished right um soldering irons are hot so um definitely pack first aid okay so just kind of summarizing here kind of the Playbook then um I went through right the PCB designs design phase right you want to follow that adage of measure measure twice cut once right you're probably going to be printing a few few different batches until you get more proficient at it um right and ordering them right give your time to get another batch uh likewise with parts you know make sure you plant ahead um you got plant parts on the ready some of the things you'll need are um the top right there that's the uh um piece that you'll actually put on the SEO which will connect to the uh uh the main conference badge right you may have ldds resistors uh whatever else you need there and of of course you know doing plenty of testing on it all right and then giving people you know the preassembled option or the do yourself option yeah so just kind of wrapping up um some helpful resources here that I found helpful as I was kind of exploring uh this process this last link here at the bottom was one I was talking about where they actually get into kind of more of the the thought process behind being able to design and do kind of cool art on these uh on these PC uh PCB boards but anyway um that's all I had just kind of a brief overview if anyone I don't know if you have any questions um but other than that I'll be hanging out and uh thanks for thanks for listening [Applause] in