[Music]
okay
oh
hi guys yay welcome to the batch panel
all right
so uh why don't we start there is a very
impressive
i mean i'm a little biased but there's a
very impressive group of individuals up
here on the stage and so i'm going to
have them introduce themselves and what
badges they're known for
and then we can get to some rapid fire
questions
okay um
let's start with
my team
i'm wire i help out the toy makers i
don't do much
that's where he lies um hi everyone i'm
whisker
i'm zap i do the bender badges or antics
or is the group i'm from
i'm maddie also one of the toy makers
and we do the cyprecon badges um we have
done dc26
and we do
now the disk badges
michael or copykit mike
mk factor is our badge thing and so we
did defcon last year and we'll do it
this year and
uh we do saintcon for the last five
years
oh wow you guys do this too
we did it one year amazing
amazing
i'm mike's wife or katie from mk factor
i'm twinkle twinkie i mostly am known
for shitty add-ons and really annoying
things that make
baby noises
it took me a week to make
all right well let's go ahead and start
so um apparently we have questions maybe
coming from discord
okay so we've got maybe questions coming
from a discord we'd love to take
questions from you guys and then we also
had questions that we had from twitter
so
let's start with twitter
and
uh
we'll try to keep these shortish answers
how about that um first one how long
does the initial concept or design phase
last not just the physical structure of
the badge but the overall functionality
of it um
it never ends
we're designing up until the end
okay
for another it's about a 15-month
process and there's usually about three
months of overlap with the production of
the previous year's badge that we're
doing
yeah we're different because we do
several a year uh i think the most we
usually get is maybe
our parts ordered and what not about
five months out at the very least
you know unless they shut down the whole
planet
and i would say for toy makers like the
if you're talking about just the initial
concept and design
i would say it's a night
where we sit
and
feature creep until we realize we should
stop
and then we go from there or fall asleep
yeah yeah and then there's always the
badges that you design in 15 minutes
that you shelve and you keep coming back
to every year and then you shelve it
again
and and now you have a pink fluffy
flamingo
it's been percolating for a while
all right um
why don't we take a picture from discord
or a picture of a question
through a con
hardest badge to build
not only maintain
sorry not
maintain build but maintain through a
con i should just give you the link
which one do we have to fix the most
phone badge
i think for the toy makers the phone
badge was probably the one
because we came to the con with like 130
complete
and we had to solder through the night
and fix through the night to
accommodate 400
the hilton badges very nice they will
let you stay in their bar until 6 a.m
and not even really bother you yeah
yeah for us it was the cowboy badge with
the sd cards
we were constantly replacing those
things and troubleshooting with people
even after defcon
not so much anymore thankfully
probably our saintcon 2019 badge
the boards showed up to my house the day
before the conference and we assembled
1200 of them with a
group of volunteers and it was
nuts and we had to reprogram them
multiple times throughout the conference
it was horrible 1200
and my husband has a thing about
sandwich boards so we had to screw
all the sandwich boards together that
day as well
and put 26 buttons on each of them
it was a great time
i haven't really had any trouble with
the
only handful i've made my time was
coming uh but the first badge i helped
someone build was a triple badge and it
was made out of synthetic fur with a
bunch of um adafruit up to shelf parts
soldered together and so we spend more
time fixing our bath solder joints
all right
mk factor guys day before
dude our our thing doesn't even
that doesn't even match up
on last year what surprises you that's
true that's true
all right so let's take a question from
one of you guys
anybody does anyone have a question yes
uh let's can we get a mic too
mine actually builds off that question i
was wondering about the n and not xr
badge with the light pipes how many
light pipes did you replace after that
actually not many uh we carried these
little ziploc bags that look like
some sort of narcotic and
if anyone was missing we just hand them
out we intentionally bought
maybe 30 40 more than we needed but it
wasn't an issue i remember really having
to deal with too much
all right next question
uh how do you deal with con operators
so we are very fortunate with cypher
khan getzman is an amazing operator
he um i think he left you can be honest
no
no truly like there are many different
con operators and
some are responsive some are
non-responsive some are
um
like to get into the weeds
but if you let the toy makers run
with it then we feature creep to our
hearts content
and usually that just is ridiculous so
gutzman is like perfect you know um and
it was his question
so
what's it like uh dealing with the board
houses doing really really weird things
like do they get angry with you or do
they love you or do they hate you or
whatever
we don't care
uh frankly we uh generally how it goes
is we send them a design
and they will say i don't know if this
will work and we say please do it anyway
your best
will you ask for a refund probably not
okay
it works out ninety percent of the time
and it doesn't it sometimes it's our
fault sometimes it's their fault
but
the the neat thing about it is
unless you're doing the the really cool
extreme stuff it's stuff that's
generally done after we get some boards
from them
um
a lot of the really cool net uh
techniques and stuff it doesn't matter
if they're making
a piece of round
board or if it's making an art board
it's the exact same process it's someone
watching the machine making sure that it
keeps on running they don't really pay
attention
it's only when it's actually more of a
frustration in my experience comes from
when you give them a design
and then
someone whose job is to make slight
corrections to make it easier for them
to make
completely up your boards
um
i don't know about you guys but that's
been in my
health so like they'll be like you sure
you want it this way yes please make it
this way exactly like this do not change
it but every now and then
they'll change it and it's kind of
frustrating but they're usually pretty
good to work with and we'll produce
another set
in my experience the u.s fabs are a lot
easier to deal with on that and mostly
because the
the language is not really as much of a
barrier there's not as much time delay
and it's easier to communicate this is
my intent i want to make art i don't
necessarily care about your
manufacturing process
they'll charge you for it but
yeah and i think for us um
the only complaint we've ever had is so
we design our art in 1200 dpi
and sometimes that causes our file sizes
to be extremely large
so i think one time the fab was just
like
we can't handle this
size so you need to like
decrease the size i think we had to go
from 12 megabytes down to two i think it
was
yeah that was fun but
we managed to do it without you know
sacrificing any um quality that was
actually for this one the the drago's
badge so
all right
so
quick oh
oh what's the pin out for these badges
there's a tweet out there
all right
there is a tweet out there on that one
so just
hopefully guessman echoed it out on the
cyphercon but we tweeted it at cyphercon
there should be a screenshot
his twitter handle is wire engineer
all right a question from discord sure
okay um what's your favorite scope creep
feature that you were able to add and
what's a feature that you really wanted
to fit in but could not
for me the saintcon 2019 badge
we had a big led matrix big enough that
normal driver chips wouldn't do it and
so i got to put an fpga on it and
do all that design work which was a lot
of fun
probably the second screen on our
2020 badge
getting to run those simultaneously with
one microcontroller was was a lot of
feature creep and a big challenge
uh on that same badge we intended to put
ir
and just could not fit in the time to
add that to the firmware
so i regretted having to remove it but
it would have been a great feature
kobe wouldn't have allowed it anyways
does anyone here uh
know the wisconsin badge the cheese
badge
so you'll see a lot yellow ones shave
the state there's like 50
of the largest cities in wisconsin are
all leds on it and they have little
metal
touch sensitive pads around them
but to
do it and have the traces all fit on the
processor has to flip modes it's using
the same traces to light up the leds as
to do the touch sensitive pads
and i was working on it
in the car on the way to defcon
bouncing ir off the ceiling in in the
car talking between badges and i was
trying and trying and trying to get that
processor to flip over fast enough but
stay long enough to do the
cap sense of the touch sensitivity while
still being having the uh the leds
bright enough so that it was nice and
sparkly and i just couldn't get there
i'm still sad about that one
i think for mine the cube badge which is
still my favorite batch to date
so when you fix the computer in the game
you can go into the computer and you can
do stuff in the computer
but the feature creep that i
particularly liked was that you could go
from
the computer in your badge to the
computer in another badge to the
computer in another badge and you could
actually like have a group chat if you
if everybody was logged into the same
badge
um that was way overkill but i thought
it was really fun
[Music]
don't touch the hypercube that's right
all right a question from twitter where
can we pre-order you know so we can have
all the things
twitter
it's always twitter
and then with us it's a pre-buy
cyphercon digital badge before they run
out
um yeah
all right any more questions from the
audience
if not we can go to discord
have you found anyone in america and
obviously who are they um that are have
started to compete with china on cost
and turn around for pcbs specifically
the type of prototype and short runs
that we
use for badges
[Music]
yeah i haven't found a lot of us
board fats that come even close to toss
but if you need them quick
that's definitely
better
it's
it's kind of hard to
look go on jlc pcb and look at a
two-layer board that's 10 centimeters by
10 centimeters and that's 20 bucks
shipped and then go to osh park and that
same board is 40
but
our part quality is not good enough
it's great
it's equivalent to a production like a
real
this isn't a product board so
whether you scale it up and do a lot of
work with them or only do a couple it is
that quality period the words you get
out of china
they're they're good enough they're fine
and that that's all you're looking for
you get what you pay for and that's kind
of the bottom line on
that agree for so osh park um
you pay
per three pcbs so they're really good
for
prototypes smaller prototypes and ones
that are shipped
technically free within the u.s
um those are really nice now for the
flamingo badge again
when i mentioned in the opening
ceremonies that
you know the chinese fabs were closed
so we actually contacted
five different fads in america
to see who we could afford honestly
and we had ranges from
eighty dollars aboard
to
like fifteen dollars award
and there's no way that a budget you
know would be able to accommodate eighty
dollars a board
not assembled
just straight up board
um but the particular
um so the pink boards that you guys have
we actually were able to go to the fab
they're called trc circuits
and they were very reasonably priced um
i met the guy who mixed the paints
for the solder mask he was like
i've never made pink solder mask but i
hope this color's okay
and like the boards were already made so
we were kind of like
yes they're great
um but uh yeah so in in the us i would
say
i've asked a lot of different ones but
trc circuits i
would recommend them they were nice to
work with we got to visit their fab and
they're in minneapolis
all right next question
what license do you release your code
with
if you release your code
i believe we do mit
we didn't have any last year so my
memory's a little bit flaky on that but
i think it's mit and we'll at least
under public domain if people want we
just don't want to support it anymore
going back to the maintenance question
yeah we just throw it up on github is
someone else's problems then
yeah when we do release it it's mit
license if we can
and usually that is the case it's just a
good license for anything related to
hardware really there's no strings
attached after the fact so it's it's a
really easy one to use
any questions from discord
what is your favorite badge built by
somebody else
26 the toy makers because it was the
badge that made everybody know who i was
it was a really really fun year
um
this is going to be dumb
some
guy at defcon he made
a wood-burned
uh
villain ted
one i can't remember his name in the
moment
but it's my favorite out of all the
badges i've gotten that one was my
favorite find
um for me it's got to be the the paper
tape badge that you guys did it was
so much fun and i actually got to buy
one today so i'm super excited to play
with it
uh for me it was probably the same con
i don't even know what year was but it
was the one where you guys
had the villages do like different
little mini badges
bloody brilliant i was like
amazing off off sourcing offshoring the
like extra little bits to other villages
clever
yeah
uh as far as badges i don't have the
ninja networks def con 18
badge is probably my favorite that's
where i caught the bug
badges i do have the square con squid
badge is absolutely gorgeous and that
you're doing things ahead of stuff we're
doing now so
those are the two
yeah i was definitely going to say queer
con and basically anything they've done
so far it's all been amazing
nothing in you know particular from them
either it's just any of the queer gun
badges are great
yeah i'd have to go with the squid
well that squid was that year they
actually
uh the queer con team is
uh amazing the whole term badge light
was theirs george you know put that and
bad life if you are a consumer of the
badges is an appreciation of the work
the people who make it is an expression
of the misery
because it is it is very very very
difficult um
a lot of sleepless nights uh a lot of
money
a very big risk and it's all for fun
most of us won't even do it for a career
in any way
um but that year
uh was the first badge that had an
add-on and it was not the current shitty
add-on it was the predecessor to the
shitty add-on
so the blooper badge is
one of my favorite badges
period it was incredible
all right uh next question oh
yes
uh
how do you decide between uh a lipo or
something rechargeable versus disposable
batteries on a badge
lipo batteries were really popular in
the earlier days
um but then we all realized that people
keep metal sharp objects in their bags
that poke them
oh yeah
so
different teams use different things but
i refuse to not use anything that's on a
double a or triple a or smaller just not
a lipo
so i think for us uh
depends on functionality
um
usually if you use a lipo then we have
to do a sandwich board
and i have a slight little bit of ptsd
from those
so uh
so it depends on functionality if you
want to have to keep replacing them
because it's training them or you want
them to be able to just plug them in and
keep them going
yeah so availability is definitely an
issue with that you should with
double a's and aaa's you know if you've
got a thousand or ten thousand defcon
attendees who need new batteries that's
a problem
um
but again with the lipos yeah protection
for them if you can't provide that
protection that's bad
the other thing with lipos is long-term
storage right lots of people like to
keep these in a drawer or in a box or
whatever the batteries swell over time
can be a problem
yeah i think for us
power is always an issue because we
always want things to be
blinky right
and oh i gotta read them
light i'm getting diet not five yeah
but like so actually up here we do have
one with lipos
and for lipos
two of them yeah two of them and so you
can tell that they're encased right um
because again pointy things and so we
didn't want to have fire happening
but the thing about lipos is that we
individ we charge all of these by hand
so
or we have friends and now with you know
not being able to have friends over we
would have to individually charge these
and just monitor for when the light
turns off so we can put the next
take you know that lipo off and put the
next one on
so we've really gone from
that to double a's
because cr2032s while they're very nice
and light also don't give you the bling
you know that you want
essentially
yeah the same thing is the rest of the
group fire is an issue in
uh psa remove the batteries from your
badge if you're gonna hang them on the
wall
even alkaline batteries they will
they will off gas and all sorts of crazy
stuff
uh so i think recognizing the fact that
people should be taking those hours and
it probably just can be on display for
the long term
yeah and if you're picking a particular
battery technology
um
make sure you triple quadruple check to
make sure digikey's gonna send
the number that you thought you ordered
and not exactly half what you thought
you ordered cause that sucks
and don't ever put four in a single
badge you will be crucified
um
yeah no more than two
no more
the other thing about lipo batteries as
a whole is an alkaline battery like i
said you got to charge them and things
like that but you need to give people a
means to charge the lipo battery and not
discharge it because that's not fun
either that actually adds a significant
cost to the for battery safety um in
general it adds cost to it
so
there's a little bit
a lot of math going on to it as well
also
shipping
yeah yeah shipping with batteries is not
they don't like it
they're supposed to go my ground
which sucks
all right
clearly a smart topic
[Music]
what badge chips are your favorite or
that you currently use
the nordic 52 series
by far my favorite very low power
very capable chips uh and the new ones
now are just getting better so we've
done that i think in two or three
designs
some prototypes you've thrown away but
that's our that's our favorite
uh whenever i'm doing the code on it
there's always a propeller on there
because that's what i use most often but
it's a power hungry little chip so you
know for doing that there's going to be
a lipo on there and as we all just heard
that complicates everything
and i think we all know what peter uses
yep i'm stuck in the pick world i just
go to digi kingdom that's cheap oh that
works
um so
i have a new favorite chip but it's
classified we're still we haven't
released that badge yet
um but i will say anything that has
the ability to be
reflashed over usb without code already
on it is
well worth just do that don't ever do
anything else
i do whatever he tells me to
same thing but peter peter does all my
code and everything so people are like
oh what's that that's a it's got to pick
why because that's what peter does why
does peter do that because that's what
he knows and he programs an assembly
because he's crazy
no that's that's true and everything's
in the simplicity
yes and just screaming
what's the badge component or feature
that you will never ever ever do again
aside from lipos
sd cards
touch sends
other than having four double a
batteries that's you know
i don't think we'd do that one again but
as far as like badge features hmm
i don't know i mean we'll flock a badge
if it's funny enough
i don't know if you'd call it a feature
but a kit
like a bad kit
it takes longer to miss put the damn kit
together that doesn't build the damn bag
when you magnify that by a hundred that
sucks
okay
uh printing keycaps
key switches keycaps don't do it we
won't do it again we've learned
so i got a question for you what was
your yield on the keycap
um
you're over yeah
it was it was pretty good
like how many
percentage percentage percentage of
successes it was probably less than five
percent were bad oh yeah mine was a 50.
i made 250 to use 125. no
no
your mileage may vary
you know i think actually in that same
grain um
our our disc badge
which is i think is beautiful
but
i got calluses and blisters putting the
mechanism together
i'm
i told them after this was done that we
would never do another mechanical badge
again
but then they came up with an idea and i
was like maybe we'll do that
but with significantly fewer parts
because there are like 40 3d printed
parts on that that had to be sanded and
calibrated
and
adjusted to
create and i
it's a beautiful product but
i i don't think i could do it again
learned our lessons yes we have learned
our lessons
hopefully except for that one badge
all right
uh
do you see many after con code changes
to your badges by you or by third
parties
no not really i think we released one
soft one fix a couple years later on one
of our badges but nothing really
yeah eddie was supposed to test one
badge and she missed
a slight little detail thing but we
managed to
sort of
spin the problem uh the people who found
the bug were like okay we're gonna give
you the patch
and uh you can go out in the community
and disseminate it to uh everyone that
you feel is doing a really good job and
they actually went out and they did that
and then of course we put it online too
so you know sometimes things happen and
just turn it into something good
no
um it's pretty rare that i released more
code after the conference occasionally
there's a little bug that i'll fix
um last year's defcon badge i was really
hoping someone would you know do a pull
request and fix some of the macro pad
code no one ever did so it's still
horrible
yeah normally we're once we're done we
move on to the next batch there's
there's no time to turn rack and be like
uh we should uh
maybe when we're like really old
yeah it's it's really
in my stuff we just kind of release it
you know the completed firmware
um
to be honest i've only had one person
ask for the code and i told them like
i'll be honest with you this badge does
nothing but blink
figure out how to do it on an arduino
it'll actually be better than what this
thing can do we ran that take to the
ground
obviously surface mountain leds were
enabling technologies for batches what
future component or current component
that you would like to see cheaper would
you love to include in a future batch
micro projectors maybe so
our competition is basically sitting up
here and
i don't think you know we're yeah we're
all playing the same games i don't think
we can answer this with each other in
the room ask me later
mechatronics
storage
like like more storage to do because a
lot of stuff that's really neat with
like audio and things like that not
generation of audio but like playing you
know rick ashley and that kind of good
stuff
or slayer um i mean a slayer bag would
be really annoying for people around you
it's awesome for you though
um but that kind of stuff gets kind of
limited by space um and the overall
power there's a lot of things that it's
really
like you can go by
okay let me give you the simplest thing
go
to any gift shop and they've got those
fans that are foam
and it's got a little led strip on it
and you turn it on and it's plays i
don't know captain america or batman or
some thing the amount of work that goes
into that animation
is immense and they make millions of
them and they sell them for a buck
um
i
i i can't even begin like i've sat and
looked at that product and taken it
apart and you're like how could i
replicate this
and everything i've come up with it'd be
50 dollars
per
stupid fan for me to replicate that
because
there's just there's just some things
that the individual parts are that price
because they're expected to be purchased
in the quantities of a million
and
we weren't getting like well a lot of
our tips now are mostly from the
mid 2000's for the most part
uh they're just trickling down far
enough to where they're actually
affordable for us um yeah definitely
mechanical stuff is a problem
there's also a lot of things that you
can get
that have to be soldered to the board
excuse me so like displays a lot of them
come with a connector that you can't
shove it in an actual connector you have
to solder it to the board and there are
machines that do that and they're really
stupidly expensive and so it's not
really an option to use that kind of
stuff
with a 3d printed jig and
just you know
crying
a little bit
there's a lot of brute force
and bad thinking yeah uh and volunteers
depending on the group
we're stronger than
it's like an amish barn raising is what
we put it as you know when we get
together to do a badge because our our
hackerspace before you know everything
happened
would come and help us be you know pick
and place machines and
essential labor
um
[Music]
yeah
what's the thing that joe used in his
badge
the is it the near field
oh
magnetic near field magnetic something
but it was unobtainium
and but it was very interesting
technology and i like it didn't require
people clicking buttons you know it was
just near field
yeah
yes i think so yeah and
yeah yeah
yeah and i just i thought that was
really interesting tech that
i would easily incorporate into our bed
well i would easily ask him to
incorporate into our badges
you know um if it were cheaper
for accessible okay
all right
oh yep
to kind of expand on that what's your
most and least favorite batch to badge
communication options
[Music]
fast
favorite
i'm scared of the fcc so just infrared
yeah honestly that's why we use it so
much is because it's you know not
regulated um and uh it's not interfering
with everyone's cell phone in their
pocket or other devices that they're
playing with for wireless capture the
flag or any of that sort of stuff
whenever you get 400 500 people in a
building all playing with rf it gets
nasty in the spectrum so i like light
for that but i think it would be really
fun to do ultrasonics
for badge to badge that'd be pretty cool
bluetooth is really great uh especially
on those nordic chips i mentioned
least favorite um probably anything sub
gigahertz i really struggled with that
favorite ir because we can solder it
easily
uh when the they're not like minuscule
parts least favorite
i think the one that
yes yeah
[Music]
you mean like the connects that we stole
from queer con those
uh
connections i think there were other
kind so we had this dna badge which it
was like one by four pin headers
and
there was two of them that these
individuals had to connect to each other
um and that was just
it just took too it took too long for
people to connect and so they felt like
more and more awkward as they did it
and so that just didn't work out and
to wired point of fear of the fcc which
is valid
um
there was actually an incident at one of
the defcons that was not bad related
but they came the hotel blame badges uh
the nd badges because
one of the badge makers used a chip that
you could
you really wanted to do diop packets
with
that was not what it was for it did not
do it
but
that that one little tweet caused a hell
of a lot of trouble for us for
a day
uh so fear of the van is pretty healthy
sometimes
the vegas people are way scarier than
the man
well i don't know but the queer gone on
the squid yeah that was the coolest i've
ever seen and i'm always like let's do
that and he's like that's not in our
budget and so i don't even know how it
does but it's beautiful
apparently
i'd say least favorite are weird
connectors that you can't get or replace
i am guilty of this i've used them
because of budget and other constraints
but
using connectors that are made for
people to plug and unplug thousands of
times like usb
that's where it's at
yeah i think the ones that we use that
we stole from queer con
or when yeah and
used on the defcon 26 badges i think
technically they were rated for like 36
connects
wow there were way more than 36 connects
and so understandably like there were a
lot that broke off and you know some
that just
you know coached out afterwards um but
yeah
all right so
uh
maybe one last question
well i'll ask this question yeah so
what brought you into badges and what
will take you out
go down the line
uh what brought me into badges
originally
was lost badges
before i started attending defcon i just
thought it was really cool to see
art in an unconventional medium which is
exactly why i do what i do in fact when
i got into it what really surprised me
was the other badge makers approaching
me asking how i did what i did when i
thought they were hiding all the secrets
it turned out it was kind of more of a
coincidence than anything in some cases
um what will take me out of it um
if
my daughter says she misses me and i'm
not seeing her enough
oh my family is more important than that
it's not really insanity it's a
challenge
because it looks really difficult to do
and it's a lot of work i mean i'm not
understanding how much work it is
but when you have your finished product
in hand
for the first time and it works
the first time it works
that's a really cool feeling
uh and
the thing about it's
everyone's their own worst critic every
time you look at something you make you
know every mistake you made on it you
know everything wrong with it you know
every
thing every feature you cut every
feature that didn't turn out the way
you'd hoped it did even though it's
there you you know the whole story but
the people who acquire it don't know
that whole story you don't need to know
that whole story to them it's just
really goddamn cool
uh and the they do things with it they
sometimes they modify it sometimes they
hang out on the wall one of the coolest
things about doing this is when someone
two years later posts a picture of like
this is my badge collection and you get
to look at it and see which ones are
yours
and and it's that's a really cool
feeling
uh it's it is
it's
it's really really nice
that said
uh i'm sure we all kind of experienced
it to a level in 2020 i actually was
supposed to do the deathcon china two
batch
um
i got recruited to do that in the middle
of january to replace another maker uh
who couldn't do it for uh reasons and um
we were going full bore on that
a full scene ahead for a thing that
needed to be delivered by april uh in
china and we had to have it
everything had to be made in china
everything had to be delivered in china
and i don't speak chinese
um so we were
going going going going going hey what's
going on with the scope and then going
going and trying to shut down
and i hit a wall like literally 100
miles an hour hit a wall uh and that
that broke me for
the
net tilt now
i came here to recharge it was it was
hard so it's when you are going full
steam you have to stop for something you
never get so i've seen the start and
finish and i've seen the start and had
to stop and you can never go back to it
that is hurts way more than the finished
product does now you might get burnout
and decide not to go back to it
but
there's always more to burn out than
just
the the product
[Applause]
okay
[Music]
you