Thank you all for coming. This is going to be the badge life, badge panel for DEF CON 25.
In front of you we have a bunch of badge makers, independent badge makers, unofficial badge
makers. All of us are friends from Slack. We are on Slack for sharing ideas, sort of
humble bragging and all of the fun things that we like to do. I guess we'll just get in
complaining and lots and lots of complaining. So I guess we'll move forward and we'll start
with the first badge, right? So you guys want a mic? Why don't you come over and grab the mic?
Hey. Okay, here we go. Hey, I'm John, AKA Netic. We created the odds of DEF CON badge which has
been surprisingly popular. That's this guy. See, I just rebooted it. This is the problem with
your own hardware. It's so fragile. All you need to do is short out the right pins and it
automatically reboots. This is a feature. It's not a bug. We produced about 225 of these. We
had about five people on our team. We had a hardware person, software person, Bill, Paul is
standing next to me. Bill was a low-level firmware engineer. He worked on all of our
drivers, radio drivers. The concept of this was we were coming to DEF CON 25 and we wanted to do
something great for the 25th year of DEF CON. I personally have been coming to DEF CON for about
20 years. And we said, oh, Caesar's Palace. We have to do Rome. We have to bring back the Ninja
Network. So like DC 18, Ninja Networks had a fighting game and we sort of extended that and
made it more modern. I think it was next slide. So the device consists of an ARM Cortex M0
processor. The KW01 has a 915 megahertz AES 128-bit encrypted radio that runs in the ISM band.
There's a chip antenna on board because doing your own RF design really sucks. And, you know,
the effective range of this device is probably 30 to 50 feet. It's not very good. I don't really
know RF, but we made it go. We have a 12-bit DAC so we can play audio. We have amplifier
speaker, 4 gig SD card, 320 by 240 TFT touchscreen. And there's a joypad plus an FTDI chip.
So if you plug in a USB cable, you automatically get a console. And then we have 12 of the WS2812
RGB LEDs. Boo! The RGB, the WS2812 is on every, well, almost every person's badge here. It is an
epic piece of shit. Do not use it. It does not survive reflow. You should never solder it any
other way than by hand, preferably with labor that is not yours. 1,200 milliamp hour battery in
the back because, oh, my God, every time you go to DEF CON, your battery dies. The nice thing
about this is you can also plug in the USB cable and charge. Are you attacking me? You're
attacking me.
You can plug in a standard USB cable and get a console and charge the badge. Next
slide. So what did we learn? Try to use pre-made systems on a chip with RF built in. RF design is
difficult. The entire design that we had was plagued by a really shitty footprint we have for
the KW01. We had so much solder float. I have spent the last three days in a hotel room with a
microscope looking through it and re-soldering and reflowing badges, which I did start
at 830 this morning, and I haven't even had lunch yet. My entire lunch has consisted of one beer
because I have been so busy fixing badges. But we did very well. At the end, we ended up with a 14%
failure rate, which I think is really awesome. Do proper design for manufacturing. So if you're
making badges, put a test system in the badge. Make sure you test things. So at least on our
badge, if you eject the SD card somewhere, and then you reboot, you're good to go. You're good to go.
Then we blink the lights RGB, and that tells us the lights are good. And if you hold down all the
buttons, then we will light the lights white that says all your buttons are working. Exterminate,
exterminate. That's Bill's phone. It's awesome. And then also be conscious of design user. We
tried to make a really nice package and make it look great for people. Next slide. I think that
should be it. Oh, and just some photos. We used key CAD. This is the evolution of the badge real
quick. I don't want to take up all the time. But we started on a breadboard. We went from
breadboard to development board to prototype to this nice little keyboard. And then we went to a
massive ugly Flavor Flav prototype. And then we went to in April, we had our first real board. And
then we finally produced in May 2017 the final. Next one. Yay. And thank you. I hope you have fun
with it. And car hacking village team. Yeah. But can you hack it? Can you hack it? Yes. It's
completely hackable. There's a secret puzzle. And I will give you a clue to start the puzzle
underneath the screen. Take the screen off. There's a URL or something you might want to do
something with.
Okay. You'll figure it out. All right. Cool. Nathan? All right. Hello, everybody. This is Nathan Hoke.
And I'm Robert Liali. We well, when I say we, I came up with initial design and then I let Nathan do
everything else. So I'm going to hand the mic over to him. And he's going to tiredly tell you
everything that we did. I've been up for quite a while. I understand the stories about using a
microscope. I was doing that in the back of the car from the drive between 4 Wayne. Let's not get
ahead of ourselves. Okay. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Okay. Let's not get ahead of
ourselves. All right. Ready? So basically, you know, we wanted to come up with something a
little bit more unique than just a standard badge. So Robert and I came up with this idea of a belt
buckle because we have a lot of truck stuff going on in the village. So Robert came up with
this badge wearing modes state chart. So basically, you know, you have the various modes that
you can wear this thing in. Belt mode, badge mode, right? You can wear it on your armpit. Yep.
Headband. Ankle band. Thigh band. And then you decide, right. But one thing that I always try to
do with the car Hacking Village Badge is I've always wanted it to be more than a badge. You know,
being an engineer myself and working a lot with automotive stuff, I like to make a badge that,
you know, first and foremost is a badge. But after DEF CON's over, you know, somebody who, you
know, works on the kind of stuff that we do could possibly use it to, you know, every day. If, you
as a development tool. So I always try to put in a lot of, a lot of extras into it, um, that people
can use. So this year, um, you know, depending upon which badge you ordered, whether it was a
pre-order badge or the one, you know, you got here, you, you got a lot of different automotive
interfaces, some of the newer ones too. So, you know, CanFD and automotive ethernet, et cetera.
Um, you know, big thanks to NXP, um, sponsor, um, and Rapid7, um, for, for helping out on this
because, you know, there's, in order to bring a lot of these more advanced automotive interfaces,
uh, into a badge that, you know, costs $50, um, you know, can be quite challenging. So thank you
very much. So, you know, a lot of you are probably familiar with the process. I mean, you know,
we paste boards, we pick and place, we reflow, and then we work on them in the back of a rental
car between Fort Wayne, Indiana and Las Vegas because when you try to ship lots of
LiPo batteries, no matter how much process you go through, I had two people at FedEx tell me that I
had everything in place. The driver shows up a week and a half before DEF CON. He's like, I can't
take these. I'm like, well, what are you talking about? I talked to two different people. He goes,
well, you don't have DOT form this and you don't have this. So I'm actually kind of glad that I
made the decision again this year to drive them because last year I had to do this as well. But
that was my fault because I dropped the ball. I thought I could just like throw them at FedEx and
ship them. Well, that was pretty naive.
So this year I really tried. But I'm glad that I didn't because FedEx called me like two days
later and said, hey, you missed your pickup, right? You didn't give anything. So they were telling me
the horror stories of what happens with hazmat stuff. You know, it'll get accepted. It'll go
from Fort Wayne to Kansas City. And then some curmudgeon who's in, you know, whatever department
there at that FedEx facility will say, sorry, we can't ship this. Which, you know, DEF CON is not
going to reschedule for our badges, right? So got to do it.
Cool.
So but can you hack it?
Yes, you can. So last year, you know, we last year and the year before, it was kind of a closed
system that you could script using pawn to do a lot of stuff, which was cool. But this year I
wanted to kind of open it up more. So, you know, on our website, I'm just, you know, all the
schematics, all the software, everything. So somebody could actually use this in the way that I,
you know, was explaining before.
But basically, you know, use it to do stuff after DEF CON, right?
Thanks. Yay. Car Hacking Village Bash. Thank you. Who's next? All right. DC801.
Yeah, here you are.
All right.
Come here.
Hi. I am Ruchon. I'm the... What's this on? All right. I need to hold this higher. So I'm the
parts junkie, hardware guru. I did the majority of the design of the DC801 party bash. This is the
badge and that layout and how to carry it. And then Michael Peterson, celerity, he helped do the
layout and Eagle. That was the badge. He's not able to attend DEF CON here. And then we got
Hamster here, which is our master programming guru. Code monkey. Code monkey. And then we have
Nemus, which is our wizard that helped organize the backend stuff for our badge. Our badge is
a homage to Helga, which is a sheep that deals with our DC801 space that if you come to our
party, you'll learn more about. Special DEF CON 25 badge. Prototypes are all in yellow to do with
golden fleece and get in with the mythology. They all have Hermes helmets. And the final badges
are in white. They grant VIP access to our parties on Saturdays and Sundays. And then we have
Saturday night here at DEF CON. We pre-sell them early, around May or June of the year. 801
labs is the hacker space. So all the proceeds that we get from the badge just goes back to our
hacker space in Utah to help make that better for everyone else. And there's a few other hidden
means within the badge. If you look at it, different labels on it and there's some hidden buttons.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Hey, basic specs. We're using our Regato BMD300, which you notice there's a few other independent
badges using that. It uses a Nordic NRF52832 and ARM Cortex-M4F processor. It has about 32 GPIOs,
512 kilobytes of flash memory and 64 kilobytes of RAM. We run fully off of the onboard chip. And
then we have two RGBIs. We're using two RGBIs. We're using two RGBIs. We're using two RGBIs. We're
using two RGBIs. We're using two RGBIs. And they're rotating at 180 degrees, which on the final
badges are rotated at 180 degrees. So if you want full green capability, you need to learn to
desolder and resetter on your RGB. Nothing goes perfect.
And then there's going to be the 0-1-0-2 resistors that are right next to the eyes.
And then there's going to be the 0-1-0-2 resistors that are right next to the eyes.
Yes. We use small things because we fully kit out our badge and it's fab for us because we want to
enjoy DEF CON a little bit more and not spend time doing badges all the time. So...
I have a question about the
It's a lot of fun. Programming is one of our longer pulls in our development. It has a
speaker, it has six red on the wings, and then it also has a red charging LED, and then
it has seven yellow ones for the helmet, so you have a golden helmet with red wings. To
go with it, it has two capacitive buttons that you need to figure out where they are.
There is a test mode functionality code-wise that you can get into that you can play around
with to figure out where the buttons are, so when we release our source code and everything
at the end, you guys can play and program and have fun with the sheep. What else is
there? We're right in front of some of the words. It has an LCD screen, has selected
pinouts right underneath the LCD screen, right above the buttons, JTAG interface, micro
USBs only for charging.
You cannot program through it. Software development is Eclipse GNU ARM GCC. You need a Sega J-Link
to really program it. We do put the program report on the badge. You get the Education
one, 60, 70 bucks, program all ARM chips. Pretty nice. Bomber is all after the DC-801
GitHub.
hub after the con and we'll have everything released, full files, everything.
Some precursor things, we start out with the basic design of the sheep and then start doing
layout in Eagle and make sure the parts line up right, get our silkscreen the right size,
everything else, figure out a way of carrying it. We didn't want to do normal lanyards so
we decided to do six inches of Velcro and then give you an awesome S-Beaner that's also a
bottle opener. Figured it's very useful at DEF CON to have a bottle opener and have a badge
that you can print anywhere. So you don't have to wear it around your neck. Okay, go next.
Some tips. So there's always a contest for our DC801 badge. During LINE CON we usually have
some people throwing out coins and stuff like that. So if you're interested in doing that,
you can go to our website, some of our links are in the description. So if you're interested
in doing that, go to the link in the description. So you can win a badge or other things that
some of you may have picked up that has a male sheep on a ram and that goes for a contest
that you can end up winning a DC801 badge and we also have another contest for whoever
makes the best can crusher to go back to our hackerspace for recycling efforts. We'll also
win a badge. So pay attention how the badge changes. You can notice our screens rotating
because some of the other badges are also BLEE enabled. So we do have some hellos to other
badges. Another key thing, follow the BadgeMakers on Twitter if you want to learn more about
badges and when things get released and what not. And...anything else? Yeah, so we were
really fortunate to have our BadgeMaker select this year and we were able to develop something
of a common Bluetooth protocol so that the different badge groups can identify each other and
somewhat talk to each other depending on functionality. And the final thing that we did on
these guys is we're running a game of Contagion. So we'll see, you get to enter what we're
calling an offensive vector into your badge. So we'll see by the end of the weekend who comes
out on top as which team infects the most badges. So watch for that. Oh yeah, and that will
be at our party. So it comes to our party and we'll have a BLEE slipper and everything else and
projectors. And we'll have a BLEE slipper and everything else and projectors. And we'll have a BLEE
slipper and everything else and projectors. And we'll have a BLEE slipper and everything else and
projectors. And we'll have a BLEE badger and see all the fun BLEE badges at our party.
Who's... they are, they're not here right now. I guess I'll just do this. Real quick. No,
I'm kidding. So I guess we'll skip over them. They might, they might come later. We'll come
back to them. Yeah, me too. Maybe, you know, they're too busy doing flash sales right now. So
OK, here we are. Hi, I'm Borgl on the internet, the online system throughout. I'm just
I'm a random asshole who decided I was going to make a badge for Defcon because I came to
Defcon for quite a while and planned every single year to build one and then finally got off my
ass and actually did it. So it is a dragonfly. If you've read the book, The Diamond Age by
Neil Stevenson, it's a book I quite enjoy. There's a sequence in which a character goes to a party
and everyone is wearing these funny cloisonné dragonfly pins. And over the course of the party,
they notice they kind of synchronize. And then in the context of the book, there's nanites and
there's no nanites in the badge, to be clear. The team is me. I did the things. The theme of this
was, so last year I kind of tried to build a few and mostly failed. But last year the theme was
learn about electronics. This year the theme was learn about building more than one of something,
which means, God, that's so hard. So that means focus on reliability and reduce risk. So that
means reduce financial risk. And there's a bunch of money stuff in here. And it also means reduce
risk of failure, increase yield. And it also means reduce risk of failure, increase yield.
Things like that. Beep. Okay. So I have no features besides exactly what it says on the tin.
It has no puzzle. There is, like, SWD is available. So if you want to reprogram it, you can do
that. There's no, you can plug into the UART. There's no puzzle there either. It does exactly
what it does on the tin. So if you're alone, it does random RGB fades. And it beacons
periodically in infrared. And if you are near other people, it will use the beacons to synchronize
a clock. And then they'll kind of all traverse the color space together. And then as you move away
from each other, they'll spin off randomly into RGB fading again. Last year the code didn't work
at all. This year the code actually works, which is cool. It also has a button, which you can use
as a TV mute toggle button. And it also kind of juices other people's dragonflies. So that's been
neat. I don't, there's no other features. My features are low cost. So I'm using almost the
shittiest STM32F0, because it turns out they're really inexpensive from China. And I'm going to use
this one. And I'm going to use this one. And I'm going to use this one. And I'm going to use this one. And
I'm going to use this one. And I'm going to use this one. And I'm going to use this one. And I'm
using APA102s, which are sort of like a, they're a six pin. They're almost like the NeoPixel WS28
whatever's. They don't melt. Well, they don't melt sometimes. They're impossible to hand rework.
They, I successfully can do them in my reflow oven most of the time. It has an infrared LED and a
receiver and a battery. You can't charge it. That's cost. It doesn't have a switch. That's cost.
In assembly time.
In assembly time. Can you go to the next one? We'll see if. Okay. So again, reduce risk. So lots of
iterations. I have a little CNC, I have all these with me if anyone wants to see them. I have a
little CNC mill, which is really cool for cutting circuit boards. So I cut the first version of the
board, which is broken button, fucked up infrared receiver, ripped a pad off for the IR LED. But
this was enough to prove that it would work. Which meant that when I made the next one, I was
less likely to be wasting money. This one was also wrong. I also discovered that I was going to switch it.
And that required a little bit of rework. You'll notice on the final one I eventually ripped some
buttons off because that reduces cost and reduces assembly time and reduces failures. I made it a
cool shape because I figured I'd end up with a bunch of them. I'll talk about these LEDs in a
minute. I did another iteration, which is functionally equivalent to the final one. And then
a final iteration to make sure the size and the shape and everything was right. And then the real
final one that came after that had the real silk art and everything courtesy of my mom. She did a
great job. I really appreciate it.
Shout out to moms. Awesome. Okay. So these were all hand assembled. So the cost to me to build
one is about $7. The cost including all my rounds of prototypes and burned parts and everything
comes out to about $9. So that's thoroughly in the like beer money sort of zone, which was
exactly where I wanted to be. I had no idea what the market would be like. So the plan was to
reduce my personal financial risk because there's no sponsorships and if I ended up selling none of
them, I didn't want to be in a hole that was too deep. Hand assembly means optimize for things
that you will probably succeed at hand assembling. If you look at a crypto privacy badge, they use
these incredible 2 millimeter square versions of the same LED I use. I was going to use those,
but those are basically impossible for me to hand assemble. So I didn't use them. I, let's see. I
think there are other examples. I have a couple work arounds. So these LEDs fail during reflow
pretty frequently. And if you look at the back, there are these little circles. And then you can
use these little jumpers to cut them out of the chain in case they fail so I don't have to fix
them. There's also an extra pair of holes at the top in case I couldn't get the IR LEDs I was
expecting. I could just swap in a through hole one. So there are a couple things like that. If
you're building one yourself, cost compared with China, China will save you unbelievable money on
certain things. So I switched CPUs because it turned out the CPU I was using I couldn't get from
China. But boy, I could get this slightly worse CPU for almost nothing. And I got like a CPU tray
in Saran Wrap in a padded envelope from China. It was great. So at some point, it was like, okay,
cost compare. Well, if I switch to this part, it will be cheaper or easier. So that's totally worth
doing. Have test firmware. Other NETIC had test firmware. So there's a version. The first
thing I flash it with lights the LEDs in response to the button and the IR and stuff. Super helpful
for fast testing. Service mount parts are scary, but you kind of, if you want to assemble things
like in a manufacturing line, it's easiest to do service mount. If you do service mount, get a
paste stencil. It's a little bit more expensive. But if you want to assemble things like in a
factory, it's Google around or ask me or something. They're very easy to use. I built this
little programming fixture using these little spring-loaded pins out of another dragonfly so I
can just press it on top and push program and it programs it, which means I don't need to solder
headers, which saves cost and time like everything else. It also makes it really easy to
reflash them, which is useful. Let's see. It's a marathon, not a sprint. I worked on this for
like nine months. I would guess that most of these other people worked on them for similar or
longer periods of time. It's just a little bit. Every day, it's just a little bit. Every day, it's
a day, even when you really don't want to. And then at the very end, it's a sprint after the
marathon, which sucks, but that's badge life. Sorry. Let's see. Yeah, strip unneeded stuff, pull
off buttons I didn't need, things like that. I totally overoptimized my like cool animation
framework, which is great now, but it made it basically impossible to debug, which was stupid. I
shouldn't have done that. Don't optimize. You need to optimize because you'll be wasting time. I
think that's pretty much it. Cool. All right. Cool. Thank you.
Thank you very much. All right. Let's do crypto and privacy, Carl. I'm Carl Kosher from the
crypto and privacy village. Hey, Justin, do you want to come up? Sure. All right. Yay. All
right. So, I ‑‑ we did the crypto and privacy village badge. I focused on the hardware
development and the low‑level firmware as I'll talk about later. There's an 8 bit microcontroller and a
ESP32. And so the low level stuff on both of those I did. Whitney Merrill, another co-organizer
of the Crypto and Privacy Village did the badge art. She also made these PCB keys. Also in
KiCad. Also produced at the same board house. They're pretty sweet and part of a puzzle. And
developed some of the puzzles that are on the badge. And then Justin did Python development
and wrangled China a lot. Oh yeah. So specs of our badge. So we, I like to say that we have a
quad core badge. So the ESP32 module actually has three cores on it. There's two 32 bit extensa
risk CPUs running at up to 240 megahertz. There's one ultra low power core which uses some
custom installs. And there's one ultra low power core which uses some custom installs. And
there's one ultra low power core which uses some custom installs. And there's one ultra
instruction set basically to like do GPIO and other low power things when so the rest of the
CPU can sleep. It supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth low energy in there. It has a ton of
peripherals, only some of which that we use has about half a mega of SRAM although once you add
in like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all that and micropython which I'll talk about in a moment. So
minute. You start getting crunch for space. The modules we get have an antenna built into them
and they have a flash chip on them so we have four megs of flash. There's an 8 bit micro
controller that we use for power management and to talk to the LEDs and the rotary encoder. It
also does USB to serial and it's actually it's from Silicon Labs and it's actually cheaper than
the USB to serial dedicated chip that Silicon Labs sells which is way cheaper than the FTDI chip
that everyone uses. So it's a pretty nice piece of hardware despite it being based on an 8051 and
programming 8051 code is a nightmare because there's like five different address spaces and
it's a mess. We have headphone and microphone amps on here. We were hoping that the USB to serial
would get into it. But that's not the case. So we are going to go ahead and do our own
research. Okay. So the ESP32 SDK would support audio in. It doesn't have it yet. Technically the
ESP32 is still in beta so they are still developing the SDK for it. So we made a gamble there
and we kind lost on that but oh well. It has an accelerometer on it. We don't use it. We are
going to use it for other things that we'll probably do next year. Same with the crypto
accelerator chip. It has a rotary encoder and of course these awesome import and export
tiny LEDs that you absolutely cannot hand solder. You want a stencil for that in hot air. Beep.
All right. So our process. Back in so I actually forgot a lot of this so I went back on
GitHub to look at actually what we did. So our first commit was in 2016 where we committed a
rough outline of the badge design. And then through, you know, the Christmas season and into
the new year we created the schematic. Next few months we did the initial PCB layout. Made the
first prototype PCBs, had them shipped. In April I started writing from where to test all the
parts. Assembled these by hand. Unfortunately I got some of the, you know, some of the
footprints wrong especially for like the LEDs so I couldn't test that. So I started design of the
second prototype PCBs which were mostly the same just with some footprint fixes. Then we got that
back in May. We did more testing and tweaking of that. In June we finalized our hardware design
and kicked that off to PCBWay who started the production process. And then in June we
did the next part of the project. So that's the last part of the project. So to do that to
actually assemble these things they need like a very precise bomb or bill of materials. They need
assembly and testing instructions. So we have to say this LED is oriented this way. This chip is
oriented this way. And show where all the orientation markers and being very precise about
everything so you don't end up with issues with rotated parts and stuff like that. So that took a
while to actually develop. Same with the test firmware. So we had them flash some test
firmware on there. Turns out the USB to UART firmware that we have on the EFM8 doesn't support
anything. Supports OSX, Linux, and Windows 10. If you're on a version of Windows below that you
have to like install a custom driver. And so they were running Windows 7 so wrote a different
version of the firmware that pretends to be that silicon light. So that's kind of like the
labs part. And they just give you firmware for that. But it was wonky in other ways. So back like a
week or two ago I finally got micro Python building on this. And then just, huh?
. Yes. So Justin starts, you know, right about then July 22nd we get a UI framework
up and running on Python. The nice thing about Python is it lets you be very productive in getting
pretty fancy user interfaces and other things going. We wrote these bindings so they show up as
Python modules that you can make like a method call to and it calls some underlying C code which
messes with the hardware. And so we were working on that. Making some pretty good progress on
that. Past week furiously doing final assembly. Assembly and firmware development. We're
using our retrofit. Today as of 3 a.m. We started flashing the badges with things. And. Today
at 10 a.m. We started selling the badges. Another news for you guys. We just saw I
was getting noticed by a viewer. And so the difference changes every week. Another news is
Yeah, so we were, so this rotor encoder is the only through hole part and that's where the
battery goes and through hole parts and lipo batteries don't really mix. So we had to like
get some flush cutters and like make them nice and smooth. Then we put some double-sided foam
tape on there and it works rather well, but you have to cut off like 3,500 different connections
in total. And so, you know, there's metal everywhere in my room now. Boop. This is sort of
the aftermath of the initial assembly process as of last night. So this was right before we went
in, well, it was actually several hours before we flashed the firmware. But basically, you know,
this is badge life. Boop.
So some tips. So two categories of tips. One about the badge that we made and one about, you
know, making your own badges. For the Crypto and Privacy Village badge, it's actually fully
reflashable over USB. You don't need any custom tools to flash it. If you hold down the
rotor encoder while you plug it in, it will come up as a HID device which you can reflash the
8-bit microcontroller with a USB cable. You can also use the USB cable to connect the HID device to the
some of the Silicon Labs tools. And then once that's up, then you can reflash the ESP32 with the
standard ESP32 development toolkit. If you don't want to deal with that, there's MicroPython
running on it. If you plug into it, you'll get a serial port. You get basically an interpreter
interface. And you can start playing around with the badges directly from over USB like that.
There's no puzzles in the firmware. If the firmware is acting strange, it's okay. But if you're
trying to fix it, it's a bug. It's not a hint. We've had many questions like, oh, why does it do
that? It's not part of a puzzle. There are many things that we wanted to do on this badge that we
just didn't have time for. As you might have noticed, there's a lot of hardware on there that
we don't have software support for. So we might reuse a large part of at least the electrical
design on this and do something interesting in the future. For, you know, making your own badges
start earlier than you were planning. We thought we did. It wasn't early enough. A lot of making
the schematic was just, you know, picking out interesting parts and looking at the data sheets.
And the data sheets will typically have like a typical application or example circuit. And you
can mostly follow those and just mash them up together. And it will
mostly work.
So be very aware of every part on your bill of materials. Like some parts you think there would be
enough for and you go to order them and there are not 500 in the world. You cannot buy them without
an 11-week lead time. That is not going to make it work in June.
Oh, yeah. By the way, so we got
a recommendation for a voltage regulator from an Avernat Report, and it was a great
power regulator and so we put it on our first prototype and then we go to actually
build them. And it turns out Avernat Re bewusst bought the entire supply of them.
So it was either delay the badge by 12 weeks or substitute a different part. So we substituted a
different part, which required another prototype.
Why did that happen??!
sure that we weren't building 500 bricks and so that added some delay. We have these Badge
Life shirts run DRC. DRC stands for design rule check. Basically it is a bunch of schematic and
PCB tools will check for things like shorts, things that aren't connected, whether you have
traces that are too close to each other. And so this just ensures that it can be manufactured
and it matches the schematics and there's also ERC for checking that the schematics are
saying. I really like this book, The Hardware Hacker by Bunny. There's a chapter about
outsourcing stuff to China and how to make bombs that China will build. Precisely, basically
it's like you have to be very precise about what you want. You can't just say, oh, I want one
microfiber, or one microfiber. You have to be very precise about what you want. You can't
just say, oh, I want one microfiber, or one microfarad capacitor. You have to say, one
microfarad, 0603, plus or minus 10% NPO, COG, you have to specify like the precise type of
capacitor you want. But the one advantage of outsourcing is you can get parts a lot cheaper
than you can get from domestic sources. There's some pitfalls in getting stuff fairly cheap. It's
from overseas, but it definitely dropped our costs
by probably 3x, I would estimate.
Boop. Boop.
Oh, I think we're out of slides.
Yeah, well, we were talking about the engine's amenity.
You're missing one tip, by the way.
What's the tip?
You know how to ship LiPos.
What's your tip?
The tip was ask Crux.
So Crux actually ordered...
So one thing that was new for this year
is a bunch of us are in a small Slack
where we can talk about making a common Bluetooth protocol
and doing group buys of things.
And one of the things that we did a group buy for
was LiPo batteries, because they are an absolute nightmare
to get shipped here.
So we organized it with...
people at SendShop and DC Darknet Project,
and basically they ordered something like
1,500 LiPo batteries directly to Vegas.
And so, like, on Wednesday night,
we just get a text being like,
hey, I got the goods, come upstairs, bring cash.
And we did.
One floor up.
Just went down, made an exchange,
and we got 500 LiPo batteries without any issue.
So that was great.
I meant the way you got them last.
The way that we got them...
So we asked our supplier in China
if they could source LiPos for us.
And they said yes, but it might be tricky.
And then, I don't know what happened after that,
but they showed up in Beats headphone boxes.
Um...
I was not aware that that was going to happen.
It turns out you can't ship LiPos by plane.
Well, you can just on cargo.
You can't ship it as, like, on a commercial passenger.
Yeah, there's a big, like...
Oh, our LiPo boxes have warnings up the wazoo on them.
All right, here's QueerCon.
Hey, I'm George.
I'm a third of the QueerCon badge team.
This is Evan.
He's the hardware guy.
I'm the software guy.
Among the badge community,
I'm kind of known for two things.
One of them is a slavish devotion to Texas instruments.
And the other is getting added as a friend on Facebook
by the sales reps that are Chinese suppliers
and also receiving inappropriately familiar e-mails
about their vacation plans.
So, yeah, dealing with China
is a really unusual kind of experience to have.
Apparently, especially for me.
So, we're a little different in some ways
than some of the other badge communities.
We've been doing this for about five years.
And from the outset,
our goals have been mainly surrounding communities.
So, we don't have hackability as a major goal of our badges,
in part because our group is really a social subgroup
of the technical conference.
So, you know, there are some things that you can kind of do.
And last year, we had some, you know,
we had some daughter board capabilities.
But that really doesn't ever factor into our design
nearly as much as is our goal
to make people interact with each other
using the badge as the vector to accomplish that.
And that's really what informs everything
that we do as a team.
Another thing that we've done every year
that we're really proud of is
our first year, we did 100 of these.
That was five years ago, I think.
And we didn't sell any of them.
We just gave them all away.
And we've started doing paid pre-reservations for them,
mostly for people who book with our block in the hotel.
But even though we do now do paid pre-reservations,
every single year, we've given more away for free
than we did the previous year.
And that's something that we really want to continue
being able to do is to have folks who are able to,
you know, take part and get them for free.
That was partly enabled this year
by StarCraft.
Starbucks sponsoring our badge.
So that was great.
If you happen to see anybody wandering around
with a cup of coffee on their screen,
that's because they're one of the sponsors.
That's all they asked for.
They wanted a special little icon to show up on the lights.
They didn't even want anything on the board.
So that was great.
Our stack is built,
well, really the experience is built around
these really cool self-mating hermaphroditic connectors.
It's an Amphenol part called a RotaConnect.
And they're these surface mount parts
that show up on the board.
Which are technically only rated for 25 uses,
but they work.
And so you sort of,
and so the entire basis of it is connecting them together.
There's a little game based on this really irritating
but still addicting web and phone game called Alchemy,
where you start with a handful of elements
and you combine them with each other to create new ones.
And there's 44 different ones
that can be explored by all the attendees.
But you only have access
to the most recent one that you've unlocked.
Via the QueerCon app on phones,
listens to Bluetooth beacons that come from the badge
and hits a web service to populate
what amounts to a leaderboard,
even though it's collaborative rather than competitive.
So there's not really any leaders.
But in our suite, we've got a big screen up
that shows a map of all of the elements that can be unlocked.
But the ones that nobody's gotten so far are question marks.
And whenever anybody gets one,
they sort of start populating
and you can see the map of how to connect them, more or less.
Going back to my slavish devotion to Texas Instruments,
we actually kind of also have a triple core badge.
Our part is a, the main processor is an ARM Cortex-A3.
It's an RF system on a chip from Texas Instruments
called a CC2640.
It's actually got two Cortex-A3s,
two A0s on it as well,
one to run the radio core
and another that's like this low-power sensor controller
that was too complicated for me to figure out how to use,
so I don't use it at all.
But it's on there.
And then we also run a TI LED driver.
And then we have, I think,
15 channels of multiplexing across all of these LEDs.
So there's, what's 49 plus 24 is 63.
63 RGB LEDs.
And they're just dumb LEDs.
In a neat little 0606 form factor.
Bought from China for 2.8 cents each.
That's actually the vendor that added me on Facebook.
We've used them a couple years in a row.
They're great.
They are.
They're great.
And they're very cheap, but kind of strange.
Kind of talking about the production thing.
Last year, I don't know if you saw the bloopers,
the little squid badges with the aqua-colored LED eyes.
Those are the ones that we used.
Those eyes that made it, or the LEDs that made up the eyes,
we bought all of them, as far as we were able to tell.
We couldn't find a single U.S. supplier
that had any left after we were done.
And we couldn't even find a Chinese supplier
that had any left after we were done.
We had to kind of cobble them together from multiple sources.
We bought Arrow, DigiKey, Mouser.
Yeah.
And then that weird Chinese distributor
whose logo was the Windows logo rotated 90 degrees.
Yeah, I was like, well, you know,
it's worth the $60 to find out if they're actually real.
So anything you want to add, Evan?
Sure.
So as they mentioned, you really want to start...
Sorry, this is only my second time with a microphone.
The other time was this morning, and I was hungover as fuck.
Still am.
So...
Yeah.
Overdoing it.
So, yeah, whenever you think you need to start,
start two months before that.
So we'll start the design for next year,
probably on Sunday, and...
There it begins again.
So other funny stories from this year is
we had a really cool idea, and we'd been wanting to do it,
and we were working really hard on it.
I hadn't started designing at all in January,
especially waiting on the kind of graphics.
And we suddenly decided
that that's going to be a low return on investment,
going to be a lot of work.
People aren't going to understand it.
I can't tell you what it is,
because we might actually end up doing it next year.
So we scrapped everything in January
and started over again.
And this was sort of the,
okay, this is just what I have sitting around in my brain.
Let's just make it happen.
I'd already started the schematics,
because I kind of saw it failing.
And so we cobbled that together pretty quickly,
and it works fine.
Another funny, to the lead time,
problem is one of the resistors,
which is a normal, like, 2K resistor.
We went to order them, and it was like,
oh, yeah, they're out of stock.
Okay, what's the lead time?
52 weeks.
No, 54 weeks.
I'm sorry.
It's like, so if we order them now,
they won't be here in time for next year.
Good.
Okay.
So, like, sometime next year,
we're going to get a little packet of some LEDs,
or some resistors,
and wonder where the hell that came from.
A couple things in terms of kind of process
of developing these things.
Some people touched on this,
but we typically go through a handful of designs
that have nothing to do visually with the final design.
So we'll typically buy an evaluation board
of whatever chip we've wound up deciding to use,
and then essentially build a development board
that can plug into it using breakaway headers
and just hookup wire to validate it electrically.
And then, as of the last couple of years,
we've also been doing orders of boards
that we have no intention of actually assembling,
just in order to test out different visual elements.
So we actually ordered one of these
with all four corners having different designs on them,
just so we could sort of evaluate
which ones looked good or not.
There's a shop, Crypto Privacy Village,
uses them for all of their assembly.
We use them for prototypes called PCBWay,
and they are faster than any U.S. shop that we've used.
You can order...
You can make groovers on Sunday,
get them in your hands Friday morning.
Yeah.
For like five bucks.
Yeah.
Well, it's $25 shipping, but...
Well, yeah.
So it'd be nice to send them in batches.
Yeah, but it's fantastic.
They're a great tool for that.
I mean, it's cheaper and faster
even than using one of the batch services
based in the U.S. like Osh Park
or batch PCB before them and so on.
Cool.
All right.
Want to try that?
All right.
So I guess there's a new event.
There's a new event at DEFCON this year
called Whose Slide Is It Anyway?
Where you present someone else's slides
and you have no idea what they are.
I have sort of seen these in advance,
so we'll just try to BS our way.
You know, some people...
I don't know.
One of them actually designed
the original Crypto Privacy Village badge
because that guy,
he was very interested in doing a badge
and then we tried to get him to do last year's
and he's like, no, I'm doing Bender,
instead, so whatever.
Boop.
All right.
These were the guys who suggested
the BMD 300 with BLE to talk to everyone.
It does BLE.
It has, you know, a nice, fancy
128 by 128 color LCD
that can do like 20 frames per second of video.
That is pure BS.
They actually were going to use
the APA 5050 LEDs,
but they melted in the LED-free process
and actually the WS2812Bs did not,
so they had to replace that at the last minute.
Slow power, has SD card,
has lots of puzzles, blah, blah.
They were hand-building all the LEDs.
Oh, did they?
Because the LED-free process wouldn't work for them
because it was too hot,
so they got them in as fully assembled boards
without the WS2812Bs.
Oh, right.
Yeah, yeah.
So they have this Ship 8 emulator,
which is some like retro console emulator thingy.
They have a mode on here
that will actually connect to a bottle of vodka,
which has a LED display on it that talks BLE,
and they like reverse engineered that.
It has some tickle-ish scripting language on there
that it supports.
Boop.
You know,
it was a long process.
They started the day after DEF CON last year,
and they, you know,
they were a lot more on top of their game
than we were.
Boop.
They have some tips.
I guess they make fancy charts
because they actually do that for a living.
They're in like management hell.
Yeah, and then Kickstarter,
and yeah, stuff.
You can read the tip.
Boop.
All right, that was it.
Yay.
Yeah, one more thing.
So when I first sat down to do the software for this,
when I got the screen working,
I thought, how can I do video?
And when I saw how much trouble it would be,
I put it aside for a while.
And then when we joined the Slack,
where everybody was demoing their stuff and talking,
I saw an early prototype of the Bender badge
with a little video player on it.
And I'm like, well, shit, now I have to make it work.
So I went back and finally managed to do it,
but it was a real big challenge.
But that was what inspired me in the end.
All right.
All right, guys, so thank you guys very much.
Thanks, badge makers.
Thanks, badge buyers.
Really, without you guys, honestly,
what are we doing this for?
If you think about it?
Yeah, we got your money, and you have a badge.