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Badge hacking

A project log for Thotcon 0x8 Badge

Details on the badge for Thotcon 0x8 (2017)

gigawattsGigawatts 05/08/2017 at 01:520 Comments

The badge can be easily reprogrammed using the Arduino IDE as an "Arduino Leonardo" target. In my case, I accidentally erased the flash of the atmega32u4 while trying to dump the stock firmware, so I used a buspirate as an ISP to burn the arduino bootloader back on to the badge via the broken out ICSP header. After a few rounds of guessing at pin numbers, I mapped all the pot and LED pins out as follows:

Arduino PinConnected to
A2Left potentiometer
A1Cener potentiometer
A0Right potentiometer
11Neopixels

I wrote a quick demo sketch where each potentiometer controls the brightness of Red, Green, and Blue respectively. The first 3 LEDs show each individual color brightness and the 4th LED displays all 3 color channels at once, mixing to different colors depending on the brightness of each color channel. The result is showed in the first image in my project gallery. I have shared the code to this sketch on github, also linked from the main project page.

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