Over the last year, the production of homebrew electronic badges for conferences has exploded. This is badgelife — the creation of custom hardware, a trial by fire of manufacturing, and a mountain of blinky LEDs rendered in electronic conference badges. It’s the demoscene for hardware, and all the cool kids are getting into it.

At this year’s World Maker Faire in New York, there was a brand new badge given out by the folks at Consumer Reports. This badge goes far beyond simple swag, and if you take a really good look at it, you’ll see magic rendered in breadboards and wire.

The Consumer Reports breadboard badge is simple and apparently designed to introduce kids to the world of electronics like the old Radio Shack, ‘100-in-1 Electronics Projects’ kits. Unlike most of the ‘beginner badges’ we’ve seen, this isn’t a badge where you only solder a few LEDs and a battery holder to a PCB. This is a breadboard badge. This is hacking with 74-series logic. This is an impressive piece of engineering given away by Consumer Reports. No one saw this one coming. I don’t think anyone at Maker Faire realized there’s now a viable way to create breadboard badges.

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