Shelf Life Extended: Hacking E-Waste Tags Into Conference Badges

December 3, 2025 by Matt Varian 10 Comments

Ever wonder what happens to those digital price tags you see in stores once they run out of juice? In what is a prime example of e-waste, many of those digital price tags are made with non-replaceable batteries, so once their life is over they are discarded. Seeing an opportunity to breathe new life into these displays, [Tylercrumpton] went about converting them to be the official badge of the Phreaknic 26 conference.

Looking for a solution for a cheap display for the upcoming conference badge, [Tylercrumpton] recalled seeing the work [Aaron Christophel] did with reusing electronic shelf labels. Looking on eBay, he picked up a lot of 100 ZBD 55c-RB labels for just $0.70 a piece. When they arrived, he got to work liberating the displays from their plastic cases. The long-dead batteries in the devices ended up being easily removed, leaving behind just the display and the PCB that drives it.

Another hacker assisting with the badge project, [Mog], noticed that the spacing of the programming pads on the PCB was very close to the spacing of a DB9/DE9 cable. This gave way to a very clever hack for programming the badges: putting pogo pins into a female connector. The other end of the cable was connected to a TI CC Debugger which was used to program the firmware on the displays. But along the way, even this part of the project got an upgrade with moving to an ESP32 for flashing firmware, allowing for firmware updates without a host computer.

The next challenge was how to handle customizing 200 unique badges for the conference. For this, each badge had a unique QR code embedded in the back of the 3D printed case that pointed to an online customization tool. The tool allowed the user to change which of the images was used for the background, as well as input the name they wanted to be displayed on the badge. Once finished, the server would provide a patched firmware image suitable for flashing the badge. The original intent was to have stations where attendees could plug in their badge and it would update itself; however, due to some 11th hour hiccups, that didn’t pan out for this conference. Instead, [Tylercrumpton] ran the update script on his machine, and it gave him a great opportunity to interact with conference attendees as they stopped by to update their badges.

For the Phreaknic 27 badge, the plan is to once again use electronic shelf labels, but this time to utilize some of the advanced features of the tags such as the EEPROM and wireless communications. We’re eager to see what the team comes up with.

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Elli Furedy Brings Cyberpunk Games To Life

November 26, 2025 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

When you’re designing a bounty hunter game for a five-day cyberpunk live-action-role-play out in the middle of the Mojave desert, you’ve got to bring something extra cool. But [Elli]’s Hackaday Supercon talk isn’t just about the hardware; it’s as much about the design philosophy behind the game – how you bring something immersive and exciting to hundreds of players.

Sandbox Systems

The game itself is fairly simple: bounty hunters try to find the bounty, and when they do, they have a quick-draw to see who wins. Everyone is issued a color-coded Portable Data Node device, and when a hunter jacks into a bounty’s Node, a countdown begins, and the first to press the button after the display say “Go” wins.

But the simplicity of the game is by design, and [Elli] talks about the philosophy that she and her team followed to make it a success. If you’re designing a conference badge or an immersive game for a large group of people, take note.

The first principle is to focus on the people first before the tech. Here, that essentially means making the experience as simple as possible in order to leave room for the players to put their own spin on it – it’s a role-play event after all.

Next is providing opportunities over demands. In this game, for instance, if you’re playing the bounty hunter role, you have to deliver a “Declaration of Intent to Seize” when you encounter a bounty player, but what deciding on your personal catchphrase for this is left up to you. Continue reading “Elli Furedy Brings Cyberpunk Games To Life” →

Lithium-Ion Batteries: WHY They Demand Respect

November 4, 2025 by Arya Voronova 65 Comments

This summer, we saw the WHY (What Hackers Yearn) event happen in Netherlands, of course, with a badge to match. Many badges these days embrace the QWERTY computer aesthetic, which I’m personally genuinely happy about. This one used 18650 batteries for power, in a dual parallel cell configuration… Oh snap, that’s my favourite LiIon cell in my favourite configuration, too! Surely, nothing bad could happen?

Whoops. That one almost caught me by surprise, I have to shamefully admit. I just genuinely love 18650 cells, in all glory they bring to hardware hacking, and my excitement must’ve blindsided me. They’re the closest possible entity to a “LiIon battery module”, surprisingly easy to find in most corners of this planet, cheap to acquire in large quantities, easy to interface to your projects, and packing a huge amount of power. It’s a perfect cell for many applications I and many other hackers hold dear.

Sadly, the 18650 cells were a bad choice for the WHY badge, for multiple reasons at once. If you’re considering building a 18650-based project, or even a product, let me show you what exactly made these cells a bad fit, and how you might be able to work around those limitations on your own journey. There’s plenty of technical factors, but I will tell you about the social factors, because these create the real dealbreaker here. Continue reading “Lithium-Ion Batteries: WHY They Demand Respect” →

Supercon 2025: Streaming Live

November 1, 2025 by Tom Nardi No comments

While we’d love to have you all join us in Pasadena, the next best thing is to connect up to the festivities through the magic of the Internet. As always, the main stage talks will be streamed live to our YouTube channel, while the talks taking place in the DesignLab will be recorded and posted afterwards.

Though it’s not quite as immersive as being in the alleyway and listening to the dogs bark (if you know, you know), you can also join the #supercon-chat channel in the official Hackaday Discord server if you want to virtually rub shoulders with some of our favorite people in the world.

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The Supercon 2025 Badge Is Built To Be Customized

October 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

For anyone who’s joined us for previous years, you’ll know that badge hacking and modification are core to the Hackaday Supercon experience. While you’re of course free to leave the badge completely stock, we encourage attendees to tear it apart, learn how it works, and (hopefully) rebuild it into something unique. There are even prizes for the best hacks.

As such, every decision about the badge’s hardware and software is made with hackability in mind. It’s why we always try to add an expansion port to the badge and, in recent years, have leaned into MicroPython to make it easier for attendees to modify the code.

But one thing that’s been largely missing in previous badges is aesthetic customization. Sure, you could strip out the firmware and write something entirely new, or hang some oddball peripheral off the side of the thing, but ultimately it still looked like the badge we gave you at the door. That’s because, at the end of the day, the badges are just PCBs. Short of designing your own enclosure (which has certainly been done), every badge looks the same. That is, until now.

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Get Ready For Supercon

October 25, 2025 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

It’s just about all we can think about over here: the week leading up to the 2025 Superconference. From what we hear, it’s all-hands-on over in Pasadena right now, as everyone is putting the finishing touches on preparations for Hackaday’s annual US gathering.

We’ve been heads-down in the badge for a little while, and between that and all of the logistics, it’s easy to get lost in the work. And then we saw this video that [InstantArcade] shot, just casually walking through the event a couple years back. It’s not particularly a highlights reel, but seeing so many of the people I recognized, and remembering the many fantastic conversations we’d had. So much energy, interest, and simple excitement in sharing stories, what they’re working on, or just what they’ve seen lately that blew their mind.

There is no substitute for being there in person, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try! We’ll be putting the talks up on our YouTube channel next Saturday, and as always, you’re invited to join in the discussion on our Discord server both during the event and whenever. If you’re not going to be there in the alley, join us virtually!

We’ll be meeting up Thursday night at 7:00 pm at King’s Row for an informal pre-meetup. Bring a hack if you’ve got something to share! Then things start for real on Friday morning over at Supplyframe HQ. We’ll talk badges, get to know each other, and just nerd out and chill. (I love Fridays!) Halloween / sci-fi costume party Friday night, get some sleep, and head on over to the LACM and Design Lab for two tracks of talks and a full day on Saturday going late into the night. And as usual, the change back to standard time gets you an extra hour of sleep so that you’re rested and ready for Sunday.

There is still a lot to do behind the scenes, but seeing you all there makes it more than worth it! See you at Supercon.

(Oh, and no newsletter next week, but you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday watching the talks. That makes up for it, right?)

Announcing The 2025 Hackaday Superconference Communicator Badge

October 23, 2025 by Elliot Williams 44 Comments

It’s the moment you hard-core hardware nerds have been waiting for: the reveal of the 2025 Hackaday Supercon Communicator Badge. And this year, we’ve outdone ourselves, but that’s thanks to help from stellar collaboration with folks from the community, and help from sponsors. This badge is bigger than the sum of its parts, and we’ve planned for it to be useful for you to hack on in the afterlife. Indeed, as always, you are going to be the final collaborator, so we can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it.

We’re going out – wide out – on a limb and trying to create a dense mesh network of badges talking to each other at Supercon. It’s going to be like a badge-hosted collection of chat rooms, as connected as we can make them without talking over each other.

You look up a topic, say Retro Computing or SAO trading, punch in the channel number on the numpad, and your badge starts listening to everything going on around that topic. But they also listen to everything else, and repeat anything they hear on to their neighbors. Like IRC, but LoRa.

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