Alright, this project log is probably about two weeks too late, but here we go: this is how the Blinky Tindie Badge went from an idea to 300 kitted badges in a mere ten days. Most of this log is taken from my (Benchoff)'s Hackaday Post, but this is a slightly more in-depth look at how the board was done.

Around the beginning of July, we had everything lined up for Tindie and Hackaday.io to make an appearance at Def Con. This meant we needed a custom hardware badge. Two ideas came to mind: an 'I Can Solder' badge like what Partfusion is selling on Tindie and a CSS PCB lapel pin I found a few days before. The obvious solution was to combine the two. The badge PCB would be shaped like a Tindie head, the eyes would blink, and everything would be powered by a 1220-sized battery (bigger ones are too big).

The lit review

This Tindie badge is designed to look like the head of our robotic dog, and there are a few examples of really, really great PCB art using only copper, soldermask, and silk. Here's a Benchoff nickel, and here's some amazing art. These are great applications of using different PCB layers as colors, but there's a problem: they're using OSH Park purple, and the Tindie dog is blue. Not a problem: every Chinese board house can do blue:

An initial render of what I imagined it would look like, side by side with a standard blue soldermask PCB:

Not bad, and everything turned out great. we ordered 300 boards and kitted them up before the con. They were a great success.

However...

I'm not quite happy with the badge in its current state. I neglected to use a bare copper/hasl layer. This will be fixed in the next revision. We already have the budget to make 1000 more of these, so I'll do a few experiments, see what works best, and that will be revision 2. Updates coming in a week or so.