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A project log for Team Ides: DC27 / da Bomb!

A wearable, hackable, blinky badge for Defcon27 featuring RGB leds, sound, BLE, games, and more!

john-adamsJohn Adams 12/09/2018 at 00:040 Comments

It's been a couple of months, and I had to put the project on hold because I was overwhelmed with event production stuff. When I'm not working on electronics and computer things, I can be found at DNA Lounge making events go. This year has been pretty ridiculous, and only now do I have time to myself to get back to #badgelife. 

We're going through the schematic and layout this weekend in an attempt to get a prototype out the door to Macrofab. It's a lot of work, because there are still a few things we're unsure of. 

I'm hoping to get the UART sorted out today and then go back and fight with the autorouter for our board layout. I'm thinking that this year since 4-layer boards have come down, that we will do a 4-layer board. 

There's many, many advantages to this in the "Reducing signal noise" and "making layout easier" departments. Four layer boards are way easier to route, and when you can insert power and ground planes into your design, you turn the board into one gigantic capacitor, and this reduces overall noise greatly. 

I'm hoping that by Monday, we can get this thing out the door. We'll then start to work on our kickstarter (January) and the process of ordering parts. We've got 8 months until DC27. We can do this!

Sneak-peek at the schematic (at least, one page of it...)

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