We just got the shipment of hot Hackaday Superconference badges in our hands yesterday, and they’re frankly awesome. Due to great manufacturing partners and a fantastic design by [Mike Harrison], we ended up with too few manufacturing defects and too many badges. How’s that for a nice problem to have?
But our gain is your gain! We have enough badges for everyone who’s coming to the con, and we’re selling the rest on Tindie.
In case you missed it, the badge is a digital video camera, or at least that’s how it’s going to start out its life. It’s got a camera sensor, enough processing power on-board to handle the image data, a screen, and SD card storage. It’s also got a good assortment of buttons, and more importantly, prototyping space and an abundance of pins broken out for you to play with. For the nitty-gritty, see the badge’s Hackaday.io project page. We’ve coded up the obvious applications, added in some challenging puzzles, and now we’re handing them off to you.
Hackaday Badge History
What will you do with them? That remains to be seen. The first time we put on a Supercon, we made the best badge you’ve ever seen — a blank protoboard, and a big pile of parts. Add in an enthusiastic and creative crowd, and out pops magic. Last year, [Voja] produced a badge with finesse and more resources, adding blinkies, IR, and an accelerometer, and we saw hacks making use of each of the features. This year, we’ve pushed it even further. Now it’s your turn.
The Superconference is this weekend, and a few hundred Hackaday hackers will get their hands on this lump of open hardware. Something fantastic is certainly going to happen. If you couldn’t make it but still want to play along, now’s your chance!
Conference badges are a fantastic playground for hardware hackers: they’re a small enough project to get done, but large enough to do something interesting. Some badges, like [Brian Benchoff]’s badge for Tindie, are minimalistic. Others, like this unofficial badge for DEFCON, are quadcopters. In between, there’s room for artistry and aesthetics and just plain cleverness. And don’t forget utility. The 2017 Layer One conference badge (here on Hackaday.io) is easily converted into an OBD II CAN bus sniffer or a video game machine — your pick.
Hackaday loves custom hardware and badges like this are more than just a PCB full of components. They’re a piece of the culture from the event where they made their debut. We’re happy we can share that with some of the hackers who couldn’t make it to Supercon this year.
The whole thing is amazing, but I am particularly taken by the system for mounting the camera in the PCB.
Keeps things nice and low profile.
What is the thing with badges? I just don’t get it. They strike me as just another bad idea spreading fast.
HaD are trying to make something out of very slim picking….. “badge life” urgh.
Why do you think they are a bad idea? I’ve only been to a few events that had them, and not all the bades were great, but some have been and still are a lot of fun.
Lighten up fella, they’re not the Keurig of hacker hobbyism, that’s the 3D printer.
Well I dunno about “fast” – our Chicago con did our first electronic blinkie badges in the 1990s.
What is with the insane shipping costs here?
$99.00 (£75.37 GBP)
Shipping to United Kingdom starts at $40.00 (£30.45 GBP)
Yeah, that’s what stopped me clicking the buy button.
I guess I’m too conditioned to getting cheap shit and free P&P from China.
Oh well.
They should offer shipping by china post as an option :-) I also hate it, when shipping is a significant percentage of the product value. But this is better than ordering some transistors from digi key (value: <1$, shipping 20$)
Tindie shipping is always prohibitively high. It’s completely useless outside of the US.
I was more surprised at the price… and still $10 shipping in the US. I’ll probably save those $109 and put them towards something else, like some raspberry pi or a jetson.
I was more surprised at the price… and still $10 shipping in the US. I’ll probably save those $109 and put them towards something else, like some raspberry pi or a jetson.
Why is there no video of the badge? I’d like to see the camera work on that display