Now that our badge has it's own hackaday.io page, it's time to use this to publish our status. The three of us have been working on the badge quietly for several months. As early as October we started throwing ideas against the wall to see what would stick. We looked at accelerometers to FPGAs and settled on the design we have now which is based on the Maple Mini by Leaf Labs.

Why the Maple Mini?

For one, the design is mature enough for clones on Ebay and two, the BOM was straightforward and easy to implement. However, it did come with drawbacks: a unique IDE and drivers that don't work well on Windows 10.

This is where STM32Duino comes in. Roger Clark has done a fantastic job modernizing the toolchain, bootloader, and libraries for STM32-based designs like the Maple. In fact, the schematic we have right now is more of a generic STM32 device than a Maple.

So what do we have today?

After several fits and starts, we have a cheap Maple clone, a bare STM32F103CBT6 on a breadboard with major components, and a barebone breakout of the STM32 with supporting components (crystal, caps, LED, and buttons) to support further software development.

On the software side, we have about 1500 lines of code pushing animations across the WS2812B LEDS & OLED, basic UI supporting text and button input, several easter eggs, and a modified RFM69 driver from LowPowerLab.

More to come...