The twin challenges of the pandemic and now the semiconductor shortage have been particularly hard on the designers of event badges, as events have been cancelled and uncertain supply issues render their task impossible. When an event goes virtual, how do you even start to produce a badge for it? Make the badge and rely on enough stalwarts buying one? Or maybe produce a badge that’s a fancy take on a prototyping board?
For Hackaday Remoticon 2021, [Thomas Flummer] has produced a novel take on the second option by distributing a badge as a set of KiCAD files that can either be ordered from a PCB fab as a prototyping board or used as the canvas for a PCB to use whatever components are to hand. To demonstrate this, he’s produced an example badge that’s a MicroMod carrier.
So if you’d like to chase the full Remoticon experience with a badge there should still be enough time to order a set of boards, but to design your own electronics you’ll need to get a move on. What you might build upon it is up to you, but if you have an ESP32 module lying around you might wish to consider cloning the SHA2017 badge or its successors with the badge.team platform.
We’ve seen Thomas’ work before more than once on these pages, most notably as the man behind the BornHack badges.
So, I can use the board with 0.1″ (2.54mm) hole spacing for SAO.bis connectors.
A 555 (or 558) should solder on easily enough too.
What?? No dedicated SAO?
(Seriously, though, beautiful designs.)
Arh… sorry… kind of forgot, but there is a Qwiic connector on the one with MicroMod, so maybe a special Qwiic module, with a SAO connector as the only thing ;-)
It’s a neat idea, allowing remote attendees order a board by providing exactly the files needed to do so. Then exactly as many as needed get made.
I also quite like the idea of making it with lots of prototyping space to accomodate whatever parts one might have. If you wanted to be extra fancy you might include some nice-to-have footprints and other amenities for thing one is liley to have on hand. And example might be common microcontrollers like an ESP-01 or ESP-16 or arduino headders, or perhaps common LCD footprints and some places to put buttons.
There’s always this tension between what the badge does out of the gate, and how much free room it leaves for hacking. Thomas is like “you get to choose”.
And while I’m not saying that Hackaday invented the protoboard, when you’ve got a really creative audience, you can get away with anything. (Or nothing.)
https://hackaday.com/2015/11/20/the-best-conference-badge-hacking-youve-ever-seen/
https://hackaday.com/2015/12/09/the-best-badges-of-the-supercon/
This is pretty neat.
I’m unsure if a week is enough to get boards made by any fab. But neat.
And the CC BY-SA license allows one to make derivates.
As a side note, the current Creative Commons landing page is useless for finding info about the licenses.
And I can’t seem to be able to find the differences between different versions, as the website just shows CC BY-SA 4.0 for “CC BY-SA” and I thus don’t know what’s the difference between this boards CC BY-SA (un-known version, but possibly 1.0) and the currently displayed 4.0 variant. Most annoying.
Any low cost fab that is.
I’m sure Brander would have them in my hand tomorrow if I ware ready to pay for that.