Over the last several years, there’s been a trend towards designing ever more complex and powerful electronic event badges. Color displays, sensors, WiFi, USB, Bluetooth — you name it, and there’s probably a con badge out there that has packed it in. Even our own 2019 Supercon broke new ground with the inclusion of a Lattice LFE5U-45F FPGA running a RISC-V core. Admittedly, observing this unofficial arms race has been fascinating. But as we all know, a hacker isn’t defined by the tools at their disposal, but rather the skill and imagination with which they wield them.
So this year, we’ve taken a slightly different approach. Rather than try and cram the badge with even more state of the art hardware than we did in 2019, we’ve decided to go back to the well. The 2022 Supercon badge is a lesson in what it means to truly control a piece of hardware, to know what each bit of memory is doing, and why. Make no mistake, it’s going to be a challenge. In fact, we’d wager most of the people who get their hands on the badge come November 4th will have never worked on anything quite like it before. Folks are going to get pulled out of their comfort zones, but of course, that’s the whole idea.
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