It’s always nice to see new developments in the world of electronic badges, and while there are events and badge teams pushing the technological envelope there’s still plenty of scope for innovation without too many exotic parts. This year’s DORS/CLUC open source conference in Croatia has just such a badge, with a large alphanumeric LED display as well as USB and an NFC reader. During the conference it displayed the user’s name and could be used in an NFC-based game, but it’s also designed to be used as a general purpose notification device afterwards.
The write-up is familiar to anyone who has been involved with badge production, a tale of long soldering sessions as missing components had to be added later, and of last minute firmware flashing. The heart of the machine is an STM32L073, with an IS31FL3731 LED matrix driver chip and an ST25R3916 for the NFC. All the files can be found in a GitLab repo, and there’s a video below the break showing it all in action.
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