Badge Bodgery

Electronic conference badges are a thing. I like to hack them into weird delicate blinky sculptures.

supercon monster matrix (2016)

The 2016 Hackaday Supercon badge had an 8x16 red LED matrix. I felt it was too small, so I used a few chunks of FR4 and a bunch of magnet wire to embiggen it. Won Best Dead Bug in the badge hacking contest. More documentation here, article here.

tindie binary counter eyes (2017)

The Tindie Badge is a simple learn-to-solder project, where the user solders a pair of insertion mount T1-3/4 color-changing LEDs to the front and a battery/switch to the back. I swapped the LEDs for a pair of 5-element midair loops:

... and added a QFN ATTiny84A to the back, along with a few support components:

Jolly Wrencher + Teensy (2018)

Like the Tindie badge, the Jolly Wrencher originally was a learn-to-solder project with a few blinky LED eyes. I added all the parts of a Teensy 3.2 (ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller, bootloader, bypassing, oscillator, etc), along with a MEMS microphone, analog amplifier, power supply, and ten LEDs. The badge used the ARM CMSIS DSP FFT capabilities to display a real-time audio spectrum from the microphone (LEDs in test mode below).

That is, until something broke. Some things are too delicate to survive. More documentation here.

Dead-Bug Linux computer (2018)

Based on the Octavo OSD335x SiP running BeagleBone firmware. The chip enumerated over USB but I never got it to boot, but to be fair it was a busy weekend and SD cards can be fussy.