On the face of it, making an event badge should be an easy process. After all, most of us can hand-assemble a microcontroller, some buttons, a battery, and a screen. But anyone who has been involved in producing one will tell you, the difference between producing one or two, and making sure hundreds or even thousands appear on day one of the event fully working is enormous. [Nicholas Ficara] produced 1750 of his first badge for Canada’s Hack The North hackathon, and he’s shared the full story.
We’ve been involved with the gestation of more than one badge here at Hackaday, so we recognise some of his learning moments only too well. He approached it with a well-planned series of prototype and release candidate steps to catch the problems, which came in handy as there certainly were a few. Wrong footprints, misplaced components, power supply issues, and rotated parts were fixed, and eventually they were delivered in time. It’s good to see that they were well received and well used at the event.
If you’re thinking of doing a badge we can certainly recommend that you give this a read. A few years ago we wrote up the story of another badge whose creators put in some hard work to save it from a more serious part error.
Great write-up. It once again proves assumptions are the mother of all f*ck-ups.
Exactly. I would also add – ALWAYS perform design reviews before submitting something for (even prototype) manufacturing, and then double-check that the outlined issues were actually addressed by the fixes.
It’s much cheaper for your embedded SW guy to spend lets say 2-3h to review the schematic, verify all schematic assumptions against the MCU’s datasheet and email the feedback to the HW design guy, than just to cross fingers and wait for the boards just to see if “it worked just by itself” or we have to fix, re-spin and wait… another 4 weeks.
Which is to say – you’re free to invent any design/documentation process that fits your needs (even if you’re a startup or a one-person-army). Even a tiny process can be infinitely better than a non-existing one.
“We are too many Hackaday readers, and we have launched a DDoS attack.
We like learning from mistakes too much, the server is down and not loading.
I attended Hack The North and the badge was one of the coolest and least buggy conference badges I’ve ever encountered. He did a great job.