What time do we have?
Not even 20.
This one?
So that people know why I got slipped.
Yes.
Alright.
Are you going up there to that microphone?
Yeah, it's this one right here.
Can you bend me the lighting?
I will stand behind the podium.
I don't want to wear this for an entire hour though.
As the hour goes, it just sheds.
I think it's hilarious.
I'm recording right now.
Alright, we are going to start here.
Excellent.
Welcome to CypherCon's badge panel.
For some reason I got selected to moderate it.
Can't imagine why.
Thank you very much for that by the way.
We have six wonderful badge making people up here.
We are going to kick off a conversation about making badges.
I got some questions off Twitter.
Let me unlock this bad boy.
We will start with some of the questions from Twitter.
First question.
Other than to save money, why don't badges have power switches?
I like this question.
Why don't they?
Who wants to start?
I will start.
That's not fair.
Yours does.
It does have a switch.
That was one of our biggest critiques last year.
He had to remove the battery.
Next year's will have a switch.
That's a very good question.
Speaking from experience on the first few that we did,
we know better now,
the power switch is kind of an afterthought.
Why would anyone want to turn off your badge?
It doesn't make sense.
That's a lesson we learned also
in our badges.
Logistically,
a lot of the badges have SMT switches.
And those actually can get knocked off
really easily.
Kind of like some of the IRDA modules
that you guys have had on our badge.
They just,
if somebody so much as
knocks it the wrong way,
then it lifts the pads
and then you no longer have a working badge.
I know some people don't include power switches
because of that.
Yeah, that's a pain.
I will say you can sometimes use capacitive touch
for switching, but we find that
that will still drain the battery over time.
I got one more bit for that one.
Go for it.
Actually on our badge,
those that have had the badge
or seen the badge, there's two buttons.
On and then off and throw.
On is actually a hardware on switch
and off and throw is a software switch.
So to get our
standby current down to 6 microamps
so that the battery didn't go dead
in transportation to the con,
the regulator gets bootstrapped
when you push the on button
to actually power it up and bring up the 3.3,
at which point the micro takes over
and keeps the badge on until you push off.
That's cool as hell.
Alright.
There's another fun one
also from Tim V.
What do you think of the idea
of including sound as a post-con option
on a badge since having it live at the event
would probably be disruptive?
And by probably we mean definitely.
Isn't that the point?
Well that's why these are this bright.
So ours do have a sound option.
There are two
solder points that you can
solder a piezo or a speaker to
and if you get your badge into the Morse code
mode or to the DTMF
payphone
then you can actually make DTMF
tones that you can use to phone freak
or have the Morse code
make sounds.
So we're going to be releasing those
instructions once we get some sleep.
I know that feel.
All right.
This one should take a little bit longer
for you guys. Describe your approach
to choosing components.
Randomly poking at digikey
not being a good one.
So if you were in my talk
in the last hour
one thing is
mostly cost, right?
And then supply. So how easily
can we get our hands on it? How easily can we
prototype with it? And then
who are the
vendors that actually sell it?
For the ones
that we've done, one thing
is the more you do this
the more you build up a library of stuff
you've done before, stuff you know how to do
and you always keep track of
what was the best part for that.
So there's
also a lot of reuse.
If you can't find
ones significantly cheaper
or some other good
reason to change
use a lot of the parts you've
used before.
And I would second that.
For us a lot of it is
need
then cost
and it really depends on your budget
for the badge. If you have a nice
budget then you can afford to
have more protection on your circuit.
If you have him designing it
then a lot of it is over.
Just kidding.
No such thing.
I don't believe you. I'll second that.
No more on choosing
components?
How about what happens when you've picked it
you've prototyped it, you go to do manufacturing
and it's not available anymore.
We didn't have that problem.
We started out with
a particular brand of IRDA module
got four months
into it and then realized
that the initial
modules we had worked great.
We got another batch of them
and they were sensitive to electrical noise.
We were getting electrical interference
on our IRDA modules
which caused the whole networking stack
just to completely stop.
So thankfully we
found it before we ordered all the parts for $400.
But it still
caused a rock hard spin
because the pinout was different on the new module.
The new module was slightly more expensive
but there was no choice.
It was either abandon that function
or pick a different part.
Actually we have an interesting story
on this year's badge related to that.
If you watch the Kickstarter video
we mentioned the APA-102 LEDs.
It's actually what's on this
vendor badge here, but they look a lot
nicer, they're a lot easier to program.
What we learned was
they don't support a very high temperature
and they crack when they're being
when they're being put to a reflow
oven. And so the manufacturer
we had putting this together, they were using
lead-free solder
and that was cracking all the LEDs.
And so we're having to go back and use hot air
and remove almost every LED
and then hand solder them.
So we've switched to the same LED we used last year.
It's a little bit more resilient.
And we're going to solder 6,000 of these
by hand this year.
So they don't go through the oven.
I know those feels. When I was making those USB blinkies
earlier today, I overheated one of them while soldering it on
and it did not work anymore.
And I guess another thing to add onto that
is just size constraints.
So for the badges for
this conference, they were all hand
placed by
me, among others.
But me.
And so I had to decide
are my eyes
good enough to see what I'm putting?
So for resistors
and capacitors, we went no smaller than
0603s.
And we tried not to do any
QFNs and stuck with QFPs,
SOICs, that type
of thing. Pins that I could see.
I agree with that.
I give Charles a dirty look if he puts any 0402s
on there.
Fly poop.
I haven't done that in a long time.
Come on. Live dangerously.
010.05s.
That's a thing?
That is a thing.
You don't have to deal with.
I wouldn't even want to breathe near that.
No, you sneeze. They're gone.
All right. Let's start a flame war.
Which protocol of LEDs
do you prefer?
So I
definitely prefer the AP102s.
And that's because you can use
SPI hardware to talk to them, which means
the core of your microcontroller
doesn't have to babysit them. They can go off and do other
things. In fact, another chip that
I like and have been using a lot is
the X-Mega series from
Atmel, which is really cool
because they have both hardware SPI
and DMA. So
you can set up your memory buffer
and just point the
SPI hardware at the memory buffer, say,
dump all this out to the LEDs, tell me when you're
done.
Very convenient.
We use just straight-up
LEDs, so
fortunately, the micro
that we're using has the eight different
cores. So I put together
bitbangs, you know,
live-driving all the
charlieplexed matrix stuff.
I think
it would be really nice to be able to just map things
like that. I like that.
To continue, the
the top
end
of that X-Mega series
has eight
hardware SPI
and I think
eight DMA channels. I'm not sure
on that. I'd have to check the datasheet.
So you could control eight
different strips
completely with hardware.
So
it all depends whether you
you're doing a job that you want done
and you want it done easy or
if you're going for credit.
If you're going for credit, it's the
WS
2012.
So I have
a project that's been cooking for
oh man, it's probably three years now
where someone gave me a whole
bunch of those LEDs
stuck them to a board to make a
scrolling text display
and I have a
20 megahertz
8-bit microcontroller
that reads out of an SD card
and spits it out to those strings.
Which, if anyone's worked with that
knows how tight that timing is
and getting that all fitted into a
20
megahertz 8-bit part
was a real challenge.
I'll second
the APA 102. Having that
clock line is really nice. We went back
to the WS2812s this year
and we are actually using SPI
to do it.
We are using Nordic on our
MCU and one of the challenges
with Nordic is you can only send 255
bytes at a time over DMA
so the driver
it works, but it will only work up to 20 LEDs.
So
somehow able to make it work through bit banging
SPI with DMA.
So with
that 8-bit PIC
I was able to do past that, but same thing.
You get to a point
in the flash or into the SD card
and you get a page boundary.
When you hit that, you have to readdress the card.
So you have this big dead time before you
get your next block of data.
So to get around that, I ended up having to implement
a circular buffer. So I would read
ahead in the SD card.
So every time the interrupt came around to go service
the LEDs to keep their timing happy,
there was always data there for it to do it.
Otherwise, you get a delay
all the LEDs would latch whatever data they had
right now, even if it wasn't
the correct data.
Another reason I like the
APA-102s is
they can work at, you can
send data up to, I think,
32 MHz. I'm not really sure because it's not
really been relevant to me yet.
But you can send
data to them a lot faster. Another project
I've been working on recently
is we're putting LED strips
on a car.
So it lights up and does all sorts of cool things
and there are strips that are
200 LEDs long
and of course I wanted a reasonable refresh rate
so that
translates to having to
send the data
out very quickly.
Side question.
How masochistic do you have to be
to get into badge design?
You just need a
pair of people that are like, hey,
can you give us a hand with this? It'll be
fun. That was a year
ago.
I remember getting
that.
So
for this badge,
for this conference,
I started soldering in the
beginning of February and it was
about 6 hours every day
and 16 hours on the weekend.
No breaks.
So
if you're cool with that and you don't have a life
otherwise, you're
welcome to do that.
Yeah,
and these two have been programming
this badge for
about a year?
Maybe? 8 months?
6 months? Yeah, probably 6 months.
6 months in earnest.
We had all the circuit design before that.
Yeah.
So
it really depends on your design.
So last year's CypherCon badge was
mostly solder work because there was
no programming. So that was me.
And I didn't have a stencil
then, so I hand-pasted
all of the
pins.
That took a long
time, but I personally find it kind of
zen.
But
yeah.
Yeah.
So very masochistic.
So this year when we started
she's like, I'll just hand-paste them. I'm like,
no, get a stencil. I'll just hand-paste
and get the stencil. She got the
stencil, we set her up, and she's like,
this is amazing!
Well, and the brain board
of this badge has like
80 parts or something like that?
And so I was like, yeah.
I don't think I can
hand-paste that. And thankfully, my hand
started cramping actually with the tweezer action.
So I'd have to kind of
shake it out every now and then
and make sure I wasn't having a heart attack or something.
I feel you.
Anytime anyone asks
us if we have a pick and place, Charles
just smiles and looks at me.
Yep.
I think I'll add something to that.
If you're 14,
go to school and have a job. It's very
difficult. I'm just going to
say that right now.
It's a labor of love,
but I think, like, we've had
such great feedback from everybody
and part of it is
loving to see how people work with your badge.
Even if someone just
sits there and
tries to concentrate on it, even for a little bit,
for me, it's worth it.
So there
is that trade-off.
So for me, last year,
basically,
kids go to bed, I get on my
computer. Kids go to bed, I get
on my computer. Weekends, they're
napping, whatever, I'm on my computer coding,
designing, soldering, whatever.
Some of us within the community,
there's a hashtag we use called
Badgelife, because it is a lifestyle.
It's something you choose.
I didn't have
anybody saying, hey, this sounds like a good idea.
It was mostly me telling myself that, so
I can blame myself.
But that's, yeah, that's my
experience. Masochism.
Yes, and I love it.
Alright, so
one thing I've noticed, and this is based on
another question from Twitter,
is that
your first badge tends to be
somewhat static or animated, and your second
or third badge starts to become interactive.
So you guys want to tell stories about
transitioning from static
badges to interactive badges?
Oh, yeah.
So
last year's badge here,
it being the first
year of the conference, it needed to be
pretty light.
And
Michael had asked me if I
had any ideas that would work out
for making it cost
effective for a first year.
And I sort of explained an idea of using
just some 7400 logic chips
to implement an XOR stream cipher.
And he said
you're hired. And I said, that's not what I meant.
And we were closer
to when the con was supposed to happen,
when that conversation occurred.
So it did have to be really simple.
But we didn't want people to think
that's all we can do. So
this year we just sort of dropped
the bomb on the conference a little
bit with this badge.
Because we all come from software
design backgrounds, so
we can do all that high-level stuff.
But I think next year we might go back to something a little
more analog and whatnot.
I think it's good to be able to just shift
around and change, do different things every
year.
There is an urge
to show off, isn't there? I like the
three-dimensional part.
Thank you.
It came together at a sushi restaurant
on a paper napkin.
We were like, we need
to do something having to do with fringe science.
And cube the movie
while very sadistic
is pretty fringy.
But wait, can we
do a cube?
Wait, can we do a cube?
Do we want to multiply everything
by six times?
Next time I want to see a dodecahedron.
I think we were talking
about a buckyball or something.
That's basically it.
Yeah.
Nope.
So in our experience
in going from
static to
interactive, I just want to say
I am still convinced that capacitive touch
sensors are black magic.
They're awesome because they're cheap.
You basically just need
like a resistor and a
copper core.
I did
some on the badge that Ben is wearing.
The recharge badge.
And there's
two down in front that work
beautifully. And then I
tried to do like a d-pad thing
somewhere else on the badge.
And I can see
when stuff touches it, but
the capacitance like crosses
over all the buttons. There's no way to get
any reliable direction out
of it. And then I did
try to do the same thing
on this. I just kind of threw together at the last
minute and
when I
built it, put the code on it,
I started trying to use the touch pad
and just nothing happened.
In the car on the way up here.
So I'm convinced
they're black magic. If you get it to work
amazing,
please tell us how.
I think another thing
with the badge interactivity
thought is, so our first
one, there's different levels of interactivity.
There's one where
it's between
you and your badge
with another person and their badge
and helping each other figure out
like the
encryption method for last
year's badge. So there's
the collaboration portion of
people working together to try to figure out
puzzles that are dealt with
with the badge.
With our second badge
that we did for another conference,
we thought about not
only how people could collaborate, but also
just the
physicalness of actually getting
two badges together to interact
with each other. And if you've
come to our table, you'll see one of the
DNA strand badges.
And so we
wanted something that was simple enough to understand
so that people didn't have to
be geniuses to figure out how it works.
And from that,
when we come to this badge,
this actually also has different
levels, I feel,
where it can be
as simple as helping each other figure out how
not to suffocate, to
how you can
jump
from your badge to another person's badge,
and then to the point where
multiple people in one person's
badge can talk to each other.
So there were different levels
that we wanted to try to hit
for different reactions
so that when people
got to that reach goal,
they're like, dudes.
And that was motivation
for us to keep feature
creeping in some of these
different aspects
of the badge. So hopefully
you guys have gotten to relay with each other on the badge.
If you haven't, it is
possible.
So speaking of feature creep,
how do you decide what to
keep and when to cut off
new ideas and such like that?
And tell us stories
about when you came up with an idea
that was just too good to not
do and was worth staying
up all night for a few weeks to do.
It's Tuesday night. The con's on Thursday.
Charles can't answer this question.
He does not know.
I was going to say, Tuesday night?
That's your cut off?
This one it was.
I think
last year we had one that
they're delivering
the badges to the con in
12 hours.
Yes.
I remember that night.
So anyone who's
interacted with this one knows that
we didn't
stop at any point with our feature
creep. We just kept going and going
and going.
It has two processors in it,
which is reasons,
right? The PIC hardware
can do the IRDA stack
and USB stack better
than the PROP could have.
But the PROP can do all sorts of neat things
that the PIC wouldn't be very good at.
So we just used both.
The problem with the PROP
is it only has 8k longs
of programming space.
And I needed to implement a
timesharing operating system,
an LED driver, and
a text adventure, etc.
So I kept running out of longs.
Every two days,
there would be like 40 longs left.
And I would have to go back over the whole codebase
and figure out ways
to make it smaller and smaller and smaller
so I could just have enough room to be able to
implement the next feature that these guys
were asking for without
overflowing my stacks and
the processor crashing and puking
things all over the screen, etc.
And then we found
an idea that just let us go
absolutely crazy.
We took all of the strings
in my source code and
put them on the EEPROM in the PIC chip.
Now I can just send
a long to the PIC chip
and the PIC chip loads up the string
and sends it on to the user. So now I have
8k longs of all code
space.
So we were able to do things like implement the payphone
and implement frequency generation on the fly
for all the
blue box and red box tone
freaking, you know, all that stuff.
So we basically just never
said no. We just kept going and
going and figured out how to fit it in.
That seems to be a theme. How about you guys
with the vendor badge?
So the way we picked
features, we had maybe
40 different ideas in our spreadsheet
that the team contributed to.
If you saw my talk, I mentioned
FPGA. There was really no
reason why other than to have an FPGA.
So what we tried
to do was just map,
we have this cool hardware,
what will it actually do?
What's the person going to use it for?
And then try to find commonality
between those ideas.
So one of the things we removed from this
year's or this upcoming badge
is accelerometer.
We couldn't find anything to do with it
other than to tilt the badge.
So it was a huge waste of money
just to put this QFN part on there.
I've got to think of another one.
As far as
coding and feature creep,
that is how it goes for us.
The same thing as the toy makers.
Our issue tracker this year
already is up to 300 issues
or 330 issues.
That's well beyond anything we did last year.
We're up to
170k of flash used.
We only used 108 last year.
So we're
just above everything
we did.
And I don't think we're going to stop
until right before the con
where we have to flash these things.
The issue is really stability.
So every time I introduce a new feature
into the code, what am I breaking?
I have to go back and regression test
everything that's already in there.
And where I may have added a timer
over here to drive an LED,
I just affected the display driver
over here on some animation or some game.
So it's really difficult to ferret
all those bugs out.
Especially when you have so many things going on at once.
And so I'm
an expert at the
game inside
the Texas Adventure game because I'm the
alpha tester for them.
So I just have to know, I have to
first be able to test all the deaths,
to make sure I can get through the system,
that all the actions and the looks
are correct.
So that's probably why I think
it's so easy.
Yeah, so this year,
I'll throw it out, so Hyren
is one of our new team members.
He's been furiously testing the badge.
Every time I push something to get, he's flashing onto his,
he's doing some sort of test, and he's dumping
about ten different issues into the
tracker. So I close one thing, he opens
ten. And it's usually some sort of frustrating
chat log between us going,
what just happened and why did this happen?
So, yeah, I don't really have the same
experience, but Hyren does.
Again,
masochism.
Alright, let's start another
Flame War. Language
to write your code in.
So, one of our
friends that we hang out
in IRC with is a microchip rep.
And these guys originally said
we want to do USB
serial and IRDA.
So we need two different chips to do this.
He's like, oh, you can just
do that in a PIC.
And that's where I got involved, because I've done
a lot of PIC code.
Unfortunately, with the time frame we had
and the chip they picked, they forced
me to use C.
So I have a ton of experience
in assembly, because my
previous jobs, I had to do
some really tight optimization
for work.
And that just, you know, I learned
in assembly, they wanted it done
in assembly, because that's the only way we could optimize
for certain cases.
And then these guys come along like, hey, can you do this?
There's this whole code thing over here, you just paste
it in. So
it was a real experience.
You know, I knew C.
I just didn't use it for
programming microcontrollers until this last
go-around.
So, my preference is
assembly. I'm a hardware guy.
If I do it in assembly, I know exactly
what the hardware is going to do.
The downside is, I have to optimize everything.
So it's totally a trade-off.
If you trust your
compiler,
and you know it's going to do
a good job, go with a compiled
language. If you're
doing something a little odd, or
really odd in my case, then
assembly might be the better way to go.
I spend most of my time
in C,
although it should be pointed out
that you can embed assembly in C,
and I've had to do that on a few occasions
when the compiler just couldn't figure
out exactly what I was trying to do.
The compiler
also can usually do all kinds of
amazing things that you would never think of.
And I also find it very
useful. The compiler, or
one of the object
manipulation things
in the toolchain, will
spit out an assembly listing
of the code that is compiled.
And if you really need to optimize something,
you really need to figure out
why you just lost
2K of program space
when you added something that seemed really
simple, you can go back to that
listing and see what the compiler actually did
and figure out where it might
be doing something stupid.
So
first of all, Arduino sucks.
I did
the Bender badge last year in Arduino.
If you look at our code
on GitHub, we had about 30
different files. I had to name the file
and give them the shortest name possible
so it would fit on those tabs across the top.
This year we're
C, using Nordic.
I actually kind of like the Nordic SDK.
It's pretty nice to work with.
As long as you don't use their high-level
libraries too much, you're pretty much okay.
So
contrary to basically
every Hackaday comment ever
about the Parallax Propeller, you can
use C on it.
I don't,
because I've been using Spin for a long time
and I'm pretty good with it, and I
treat it more like you'd approach
assembly.
I'm mostly shifting things in and out of
registers all the time.
To me, it's more about
how I'm using memory than it is about
what language I'm using.
All this stuff is super low-level.
But again, this is a weird
one because not only was I
having to choose a programming language
to work in, that made sense for my
platform.
There's also a programming language
interpreter built into this.
So I had to design a programming language
for it.
So, I don't know.
Alrighty.
Here's the last fun one
we got from Twitter.
And I will add a couple of details to it
because it's kind of short.
Would you rather hand solder
1,000 duck-sized horse badges
or one horse-sized
duck badge?
Asking for a friend.
And I'm going to say same component count
for both scenarios.
How many components?
The same.
I see what you mean.
How big are they?
Well, there are
1,000 duck-sized horse badges
and one horse-sized duck badge.
Yeah, but the components can be
kind of small on them, or they could be like
you know, whatever.
Your choice.
Does it weigh the same as a duck?
Does it quack like a duck?
Yes.
1,000.
1,000 ducks.
Wait, horse-sized ducks?
Duck-sized horses.
I don't know.
Whatever.
The 1,000 options, because you have reach goals.
So like, when you're soldering,
you know that
if you get this 10 done,
like this group of 10 done,
you're 10 closer to the end.
And you can look at your little stack
of done piles and you're like, look what I did.
That's so nice.
But with the horse-sized duck,
then you're just waiting forever.
You know, and you're still
pasting, pasting, pasting.
And, yeah.
So I think I'd do the 1,000.
I mean, I did 2,400, so...
whatever.
I'll agree with the 1,000
because it becomes repetitive, right?
That was kind of our pick and place last year.
It's really easy to line up
four badges and then drop the same component
on all four and then put those into the oven.
If we did the
horse-sized duck, I'd just make
Jorge do that one because he's really good at soldering
a bunch of different components.
Now the other thing is
if you have like a quilting club, you know,
you just set everybody around
a lazy Susan or something
and then they can take care of a part
of the horse. So I guess there's that, but
if you can't rely on, you know,
everybody soldering like
a masochist, then, yeah,
1,000. I'll echo the
1,000 for the assembly.
You know, you can, you know,
do assembly line style. You can
get into the right rhythm.
Can we make
the large duck out of the smaller
horses? Why not?
Because then
it's basically the same thing.
I would just send mine to
Macrofab for assembly.
I'd send it to my picking place.
That would be me.
All right, I'm out of Twitter questions,
so it's time for audience questions. Who's got a question?
All right, you get first.
So what feature of your badge
do you hope
and pray somebody finds?
An Easter egg or
some kind of hidden component?
I'm asking for myself.
The woods?
The woods?
For you?
Probably. For Peter,
it'd be the woods.
If you find the woods.
One person has found the
woods, and they're like this
close to getting in.
No one has come anywhere near
locating the panopticon
that is in the center of the missile silo.
So, you know,
get busy, guys.
So next year's badge will be
trawlable like last year's.
I had a little device last year that was
sending out the rickroll packet
every second, and we were rickrolling
everyone we walked by.
So of course we're going to do that next year.
And if you're really good at Bluetooth,
you may be able to figure out how to rickroll
or Hypnotoad or
whatever you want, all other
vendor badges. And you won't need a badge to
do it. You can do it with your phone.
I remember I was like
two drinks in, and all of a sudden I looked down
and I'm getting rickrolled. And I'm like, where are they?
So
a story that I can tell
is back
when I was a noob at going to
cons and nobody knew or cared who I was
I'd put puzzles
on my shirt or something
and nobody
cared and nobody would
try to solve it.
So
for...
and I want to echo what was
said earlier about basically if you
find anything that we've put
into these badges
that's just amazing for us.
That someone actually took the time to find it
and mess around with it.
And I think actually that goes like
last year's badge with encryption
we had a single encryption
sentence, I guess, on the back
of the badge. And
of 225 people
I think, or 250 people who came to the
conference, one team
solved it. And it was students.
So we love students.
Because they roll over
to our table. Okay, does
it work like this?
Oh no! And then they roll
back and they work on it. So the
working on it is really like
what drives us and what
we're going to be talking about on the
trip home, to be honest.
Yes, those students that cracked it
last year, you may see them in the hallway.
They've taken over an alcove. They've found
an outlet. They have disassembled the
badge, hooked logic analyzers
up to it, broken
basically everything. They're
going through it every step.
And that is
worth more than whatever Getsman paid us.
That feels really good.
You know,
continue to
play with the badge. Just because the
con's over, you can still play with it.
And if you do find stuff,
tweet it out at us. I mean, it's
cool to see that, hey, two
years from now someone tweets you and is like, hey,
on the CypherCon 2.0 badge
I found this. Just
know that it's still interesting
to someone. They just didn't all get thrown out at
the end of the con.
And for me personally, there are two
things that I want to see done.
So one, I've already seen
kind of because people wanted points, like the
QR code points, which was relay
people chatting with each other.
That blew my mind when
Whisker implemented it. They're like, hey,
sit down. And I'm like,
okay, whatever. They're like, relay me.
And I'm like, okay, blah. And then he starts
talking to me, and I'm like,
what is this?
Right? I was amazed. And I love
that, like, chat with each other on
a badge.
The other thing
is when I was testing,
I never managed to get
more than seven hops
through the badges. Seven
to eight, maybe, hops
before it got way too slow
for me to talk or to
telnet to the next badge. So I want to see
how far somebody
can telnet, which may require
getting a bunch of people together in a circle
and keeping track of
where you are in the chain to make sure
you're not doubling back on yourself.
So, yeah.
So one thing that we did at the
last minute is I put
these coins together that we've been
handing out a few of them here and there.
There's a couple of things on
here that you can try to figure out.
If you
go to a lot of these cons, like
DefCon, DerbyCon,
we're going to try to hook that
into something that we bring to those.
So, yeah.
I would be really
happy if someone actually makes that connection
and does that. Especially since I don't
know what exactly
it's going to do yet because I haven't written it.
Okay.
How much
time is spent on research and
development compared to production
of the badges?
So, a lot of that
come... oh, sorry.
Can I go first?
Go ahead.
A lot of that comes down to
what you're doing and have you done it before.
So, this year
with the USB stack and the
IRDA stack, that was a lot
of... I mean,
it wasn't so much research and development, but it was
just a lot of learning.
I knew this part existed here, I knew that part
existed there, but I never put them together.
So, what do you say?
40-60 split?
Yeah.
For
the hardware portion, it
also depends on your parts. So,
we sourced through a broker in China
and
there are ups and downs to
that. One of the downs
was that the part that I
asked him to get
was completely opposite from the part
that we got. So, we had
like 2100
LEDs that
were completely backwards.
And so, what that meant was I had to
re-spin all the boards, like
all the sides,
and make sure that those prototypes worked
with the new LED
that we actually got sourced.
And then the other thing is partially
feature creep.
So, if you look at your badges,
there are, on the sides
and the top, there are absolutely
no vias.
So, there's nothing...
Yeah, okay, I'm really proud of that.
There are no vias
on these boards. And so, if you look
at the rose pattern
inside for these
16 LEDs, and you've
done trace work before, like
that's... I'd like to think
that's impressive.
So, the amount of time that was spent
doing that trace work
was a little more than
your normal board.
But,
yeah, so
at least for me, that part
depended on the parts and
whether it worked or not.
So, for us, it's
about 30-40%
of the time is spent just researching,
buying sample parts,
prototyping, writing drivers,
and just kind of figuring out all
those ideas that we have, which ones will
actually work.
The production part is...
it's a furious activity. At least last year
it was. It's about 6 weeks long.
Not counting sourcing any of the parts.
One thing I've learned, especially dealing with China,
is buy the parts early,
get them on hand, and then finalize
the design based upon that.
So, our displays last year, I think
I had those on hand in March, and we didn't finalize
until May.
And that was just because I wasn't sure what pins
I would actually end up with.
Any more questions from the audience?
Don't be shy.
Can we
make up more questions?
Any
duck-sized dogs or horse-sized
elephants?
Is there any
way you can control
things like TVs with the
badges?
The
IRDA stack
relies on a hardware IRDA
engine in the PicMicro.
And the way that IRDA
works is whenever you...
We're using SIR, which is
simple IR. IRDA
mode. So basically, it acts
like a glorified UARP.
The way it does it, though, is it takes
for any time you send a zero,
it takes the bit time,
divides it by 8, and sends
one high pulse for that
bit time. And then on the other end,
it uses that to sync things back up
because they're going to be totally out of sequence
and also due to reflections
and other things, if it sees two
pulses in that same window because
of reflections, it
ignores the second one. So it helps it
recover the signal.
So in theory, no.
But as soon as I say that, someone's going to be like,
hey, I just turned off my TV. So
if you get the right baud rate
coming out of IRDA and the bits
just happen to line up in the right spots,
it might be possible.
So
the
TVVigon is a really neat little
mischief making device.
And it's completely open source
so you can get the plans off of
wherever.
Adafruit has one version of it.
It runs with an
ATTiny85, a couple of transistors,
and infrared LEDs.
And, well, crystal
power filtering capacitors, all that.
Boilerplate.
And that
has been and will be rolled into
badges.
So
the first IRDA part
that I picked had
a RR remote mode
built into it. But unfortunately,
when that part just turned out to be
junk,
the new part didn't
have that, so that feature got dropped.
But it would have
been a good feature for you.
Yeah, I mean, we were totally planning
with the original part to support
there's a
Linux open source project
for controlling remote TVs
and whatnot, where they have a standard
format of libraries for IR codes.
We were planning on supporting that format
so you could just type it in and your badge
would do it. But unfortunately, switching
to the other IRDA module
sort of killed that feature.
I will say
that Charles and I have been
told not to provide batteries
for certain things.
You can do that at certain conventions
by the hotel staff.
Pro tip, some of our TV
BeGons and some of our other soldering kits
take the same kind of battery.
So
that was actually one of the ideas
we dumped. We had a TV BeGon idea.
We wanted to do IR and do some interesting
badge-to-badge comms with it.
We didn't continue with that idea.
But if you have the Defcon 20 or
Defcon 22 badge, those are easy
to hack to do
any Sony IR remote control code
you want to do. We did it and
we're actually able to basically DOS
any IR signal around us
with the Defcon 20 badge.
So if you have that on hand, go look at it.
So what
dream feature would you guys like
to add to a badge if you had
the budget and the time
and all of the stars aligned?
Defray!
Defray or deathray?
Let's go ahead and
add a deathray.
We might have a winner there.
Fully fledged relay computer?
Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.
Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.
Oh!
Yeah, flip dots or something.
Flip dots.
Flip dots.
Alright, so the first thing
I'm going to do with mine when I get it home
is
tap into the UART
that's on the bottom and
hook it up to my acoustic
coupler because we have a PBX
in our house because we're
those kind of people.
And our own ISP on it
because I want to go
in IR to the badge
and then out
to the acoustic coupler
and dial through to our ISP
to get online that way.
But I don't think that's really
the sort of thing you would do
for an actual conference day of
rollout thing unless it was just for a demo
or something, but it would be a cool feature.
Because reasons
is perfectly valid for me.
Wait, so it's possible?
Yes.
So actually we probably could still
talk to you guys
through the internets
with the badge.
But very, very slowly.
So I'm not
going to talk about our dream features because that's
what I'm actually working on back in the hotel
room. I know.
I'm sure you won't.
It's been obscured on the badge.
Sorry, you'll have to wait.
Any more
questions from the audience? I kind of want that
LED matrix up there to have a capacitive
touch matrix under it.
If budget
were not an issue, I think I would have put
corner... in time. I think I
would have put corner LEDs in everybody's badge.
And that was the initial
intention, because the corner
LEDs are pretty epic.
I think I will provide
the part number, though, for you guys. If you
choose at your own risk to take
your badge apart and to
put the corner LEDs in.
Because when you play
the game, the corner LEDs
act as a map for the game.
So,
I think that would have been
my
dream feature.
I definitely want to do that.
Any more questions from the audience?
Bueller?
Bueller?
Nobody? Let me see here.
Oh, there we go.
I know you guys integrated
a game or a story into
your badge, and I was just
wondering, how common is
that, or is this
a really unique approach?
Yeah.
These guys have games in theirs.
Do you mean like the story
or the game, or both?
Okay. I think...
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, I've played with theirs a little bit,
and they've got some pretty cool games in there.
Is there anything that's really like story-driven
on those?
No. Nothing.
Next year? We'll see.
I'm trying to get him to tell us stuff.
We did Flappy Bird and
SkiFree Asteroids.
That's only because I had some
back problems, and so I couldn't move,
so I just sat there coding.
I know you got Snake on there.
On last year's, there's Snake.
And then on next year's,
we've implemented a Chip8 emulator,
and so there's 64
emulated games in there that we've
put on.
But nothing story-based. The only other badge
I know that even attempted that,
the Whiskey Pirates tried one last year,
but they had some issues with their hardware.
I will say that the SkyDogCon badge
that I'm wearing was designed by Red,
and it had an interactive
game of tank that all of the participants
in the con could play versus each other.
They had that running off a server
over the wireless without
completely killing the wireless,
which was pretty
amazing in of itself, and
that was pretty impressive.
Yeah. And speaking of badge
life, if I can tell a story,
Charles and I arrived
at SkyDogCon going, yay, a con!
We won't be up all night soldering badges
before, and we'll actually get sleep.
And then we met Red, and he was
still putting together the last
finishing touches on these, and
we were talking badge stuff
and soldering, and
one way or another the challenge
was issued, and so Charles and I
stayed up until I think one or two in the morning
soldering our own badges
because masochism.
Is that time?
Yeah, that's about
it. So, thank you all very much
for coming, and for the
panelists for talking to us all, and
thank you very much for inviting us out.
applause