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A project log for The ides of DEFCON: An Unofficial Electronic Badge

A wearable hardware badge, featuring blinky lights, sound, a sub-1Ghz radio, games, and more. Based on the Freescale KW01.

john-adamsJohn Adams 09/25/2016 at 08:160 Comments

After leaving Defcon 24 last year we were so impressed with all the work that people had done on unofficial badges.

I've been going to defcon since, oh, Defcon 5 or so and as next year is Defcon 25, I figured, why not actually make a badge. The best badges we've seen so far are things like the AndXor! badge and the Ninja fighting badge (Defcon 18). My wish is to make something like those badges but more accessible.

After much debating we've decided to base our badge on the Freescale KW01, an ARM Cortex M0 platform with a sub-1ghz radio. We are going to build something that you can all have fun with that will involve battles from person to person and a number of things to make the game as social as we can possibly make it.

We're roping in Egan Hirvela, a legendary game designer from many AAA titles, Bill Paul, an amazing embedded HW engineer, and myself, who has written code for Twitter, Apple, and many others.

We currently have two KW01 development boards and have Chibios flashed to them. We've patched the code such that our radios work and can send messages from board to board (and to multiple boards).

Our development timeline looks something like:

1) Figure out game specs and hw specs

2) Build the game software, make it work.

3) Plot the hardware for manufacturing

4) Fund the project

5) Manufacture boards.

6) Flash many, many boards.

7) Test!

8) Redo the boards (this will happen, we will need some spinz.)

9) Produce final boards and art.

10) Defcon!

Right now we're around steps 2 and 3. More soon!

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