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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 03/16/2017 at 18:340 Comments

The last week has been pretty amazing, and while I haven't been updating here, I have been updating a few other places.

Rev2 boards came back. one works 100%, the other works

There appears to be an audio issue on all boards. I am not sure how this happened by I had a cap from the audio amplifier, C42, on the far left of the board over by the RF circuit. That cap should not have been there. When we transmit, we get a digital click in our speaker. Now, you're never going to hear this at DEFCON but it is damn annoying.

I've moved C42 back to the right side of the board and tore up a pile of vias and traces that were along that path in the hopes that it fixes this issue.

On the second board, we had a few bad/melted WS2812B's. One was so dead it couldn't pass any signal through DOUT. The other, well, it was just dead. Using the hot air station to rework those parts restored function on the second board.

However, the second board's pin 49 (DIO) which we use as an RF Interrupt wasn't connected at all, making it impossible to receive packets. I had an excellent phone call with Macrofab earlier today to discuss why the KW01 isn't mounting to the board correctly, and their engineers are going to take a look at the footprint today.

I cannot recommend Macrofab enough. They have been giving me stellar customer service!

In funding news...

I spent quite a few hours making a video and created a Kickstarter with it. That's online now, and KS has approved our page so you can actually preorder the badge on kickstarter now!

Funding has been incredible. 50% of our funding goal in under three hours.

Now, obviously, $6,000 is not enough to make this project happen. But, I expect that the badge will sell out and we made the goal purposely low. That's just what you have to do to make Kickstarter go. Low expectations, High rewards.

This project is actually around $18,000 - $20,000 to make at quantity 225. We'll get there. I know it.

Thank you all for your support.

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