Defcon Badges

defcon badge

Defcon is off to an incredibly slow start; It’s already 2 hours behind because of safety inspections (not surprising). I wouldn’t be too annoyed, but the first talk of the day is Joe Grand explaining the LED badges. They apparently made 6,055 of these LED badges. There is a PIC10F202 on the back and a switch to change between different flash modes. He even included solder pads to reprogram it. They’re encouraging people to hack the badges and come up with something new. More pictures after the break.

Joe Grand’s operates Grand Idea Studios and has quite a few projects on his site. He also talked at Maker Faire about his Simon game.

badge front
badge back
badge detail

77 thoughts on “Defcon Badges

  1. LED’s are 1337. I think these badges are 100% hackable.

    BTW, can someone get me steve’s IP so I can hack his machine (probably some Windoze p.o.s.) and stop him from ever showing up on hackaday anymore?

  2. “Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed.”

    I think Eliot should just remove Steve’s posts. All he does is derail thread after thread. If this was my site, I would probably ban his IP as well.

  3. HaX80r, I wish you didn’t say the second part of #49. You have no idea how much of a wanna be you look like. No offence. And finally if you could hack him, you would not need someone to tell you his IP directly.

    PS steve please don’t derail these hacks, you may not consider them hacks but others do.

    For post #1 what do you consider cool, why are LEDs so uncool? (it is not the LEDs that we care about but the controller circuit/chip)

    Finally steve what kind of a father are you, if at all? How long were you at the doctors office with you daughter treating her burn wounds from the soldering iron?

    I apologize for my grammer, english is not my native language.

  4. first of all my daughter is of utmost importance to me have u ever heard of cold solder secondly jason ur not clever enough to hack my system but r welcome to try and who made u the boss correct me if iam wrong but i think eliot is the boss and i am not a wanabe i am in my own right more advanced than u will ever no led ciurcit r ok its the fuss thats made aboute the diode its not a high teck peac of kitt is it lets be honest
    led

  5. steve

    with every comment you post. we get more facts of why ,your not more advanced than the 12 year old you seem to be.

    we do not believe you have a kid or could even get laid. so please never post again. your creditability is very much in question.

    as for the badge nice trinket.

  6. I like the tv-b-gone idea. But, its a badge, i think its a waste of time to hack it. BUT, it IS a hack nonetheless and should be respected as the thoughts and opinions of someone else. Therefore, steve should keep his adolescent opinions to himself and this site should continue getting hack entries of all shapes and sizes.

  7. LOL

    LEDs suk need to ues valves instead olol my daughter made her first radeo teliscope at 5 with no leds and fully valves and lightbulbts leds are usless and this hak suks cos it uses leds

  8. #27 gave me a great idea; hook the LEDs up to a Penile plethysmograph, AKA a tumescence monitor. Measures male sexual arousal and displays the results in a visual form for the world to see! Perfect for bars and nightclubs.

  9. I kinda agree with steve (in a small way) that hacking something this simple is kinda pointless, though, on the other hand, i do respect all the cool ideas you have come up with on hacking it.

    AM transmitter… hmm… morse code… !!! DeCsS code transmitter! (or something equally ‘illegal’ (or ‘illegal’ in the eyes of the gov, which if they had their ways, would be everything.)

  10. @12: The PIC uses Harvard architecture, you cannot write to the Program memory, only registers, RAM (24 Bytes in 10F202), and EEPROM (0 bytes in the 10F202).

    @25: That appears that it may be In Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) header. The square pin would be pin 1 of the header.
    See ICSP Guide: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/30277d.pdf

    I just noticed that this flash device is cheaper than the One-Time-Programmable chips (e.g. 16C602A) in quanity, cool.

  11. Come on, I am DefCon and part of the conference was not even looking to see if you ad a badge and the other part was being guarded by some old men who don’t even know how to program a VCR, let alone tell iff a badge is legit or not. I never saw anyone challenged about their badge. In a matter of minutes I could mill out an off-white piece of plastic, punch two large blue LED through and connect with a little battery in the back. Who cares if it flashes or not. Just to show how well the security is, I hacked DefCon by going up to the Skybox area, down the back stairs and a DUMB security guard let me in the back door. I wandered the area 1 hour before everyone else was let in.

  12. Haha, Steve’s trollish counterpart is hilarious.

    But besides that, poor grammar isnt a good way to troll; just so oldschool. Nowadays we think something witty up and with proper spelling and all you degrade someone else’s character. Example:

    Steve, you shouldnt take the effort to uncram your hands from your asshole the next time you want to spout something that retarded onto my internet.

    These tubes belong to me.

  13. @63 steve probably has a dynamic Ip so it would be a little bit tough to hack his system. and anyways steve probably thinks that his crappy firwall and Nortan will protect him. :D

  14. I have an idea, why not use a photoresistor and an led, coupled with a similar setup on a pc, to transfer data to a storage device on the badge. Of course, the transmiter and reviever would need to be very close and shielded from stray light to prevent interference. An optical link like that could operate pretty fast.

    Steve, please stop trying to derail every hack.

  15. I like the idea…. Maybe an “all in 1” badge incorpoating ideas from #6 and #8 that would be nice to have the infrared LEDS in there and you could tell at a glace who in the crowd has one using an infrared camera….maybe use that for registration control in the future?

  16. So i just finished my defcon badge hack. I replaced the blue LEDs with UV ones and expoxied the thing in a pour-able plastic cup, It now purifies about 4 oz of water per hour. I removed the chip, put in a voltage regulator and put two series 9v.

    steve, you retarded little freak twink, don’t your parents love you? certainly your grammar teacher didn’t (doesn’t).

    two show my gratitude to you steve, I invite you to perform your socket ninja abilities on my server.

    12.110.110.204

    Have at it, you pathetic little 12 year-old twirp.

    Also, you can try my ultra-secure firewall, it is locked down like a brick…

    nmap away:

    127.0.0.1:31337

  17. After reading post number 1 and a few others about people complaining about the badges i then saw “Post Number 12 by morcheeba”…

    THATS THE TRUE HACKER SPIRIT!!!! no matter how simple “my five year old daught can make one of these”, its not about that, hacking is just about making something, or changing somehting, and enjoying what you doing…Nice one Morcheeba ;)

  18. Steve.

    I’ve been visiting Hack-a-day fro about 2 years now, and to honest I’m a bit sick of you attitude.

    2 Points regarding your (apprent) fathering skills (or lack of).

    1. If your child made a radio telescope at age 5, they why arent you posting a blog/website, to show the world the brilliance of your daughter?

    2. Why the hell are you letting you daughter near anything like a soldering iron or electronics? I have a 7 year old daughter, and she knows she’s not allowed to touch any of my electronic equipment. Hell I’m not even going to show her how to use a soldering iron till she’s much older.

    If you want a forum or website to troll, I suggest you create one to show of your ‘daughters’ obvious superior intelligence (must have got her IQ from her mother btw), and troll that, so nobody has to hear about your “I’m Leet, phear me’ attitude.

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