 Thank you all for coming. This is going to be the badge life, badge panel for DEFCON 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 end complaining 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, here we go. Hey, I'm John, aka Netic. We created the IDES of DEFCON 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. 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 next to me. Bill was low level firmware engineer. He worked on all of our drivers, radio drivers. The concept of this was we were coming to DEFCON 25 and we wanted to do something great for the 25th year of DEFCON. I personally have been coming to DEFCON 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 DC18 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 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 joy pad 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. 1200 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? No. You're attacking me. Someone else is. Anyway, 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 flow. I have spent the last three days in a hotel room with a microscope looking through it and resoldering and reflowing badges, which I did starting at 8.30 this morning and I haven't even had lunch yet. My entire lunch is 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. 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, 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. That's Bill's phone. It's awesome. And then also be conscious of design. The 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 KeyCAD. 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 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? Oh, 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. You'll figure it out. All right. Hello, everybody. This is Nathan Hoke and I'm Robert Leely. We, well, when I say we, I came up with an 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 four way. Okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Okay. 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, 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. 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 to be more than a badge, you know, being being an engineer myself and working a lot with automotive stuff. I like to make a badge that, you know, person foremost is a badge. But after DEF CON is 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 as a development tool. So I always try to put in a lot of a lot of extras into it that people can use. So this year, you know, depending upon which badge you ordered, whether it was a preorder badge or the one, you know, you got here, you got a lot of different automotive interfaces, some of the newer ones too. So, you know, can FD and automotive ethernet, etc. You know, big thanks to NXP sponsor and Rapid Seven for for helping out on this because you know, there's in order to bring a lot of these more advanced automotive interfaces into a badge that, you know, costs $50, 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 in 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 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, 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 the 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. So but can you hack it? Yes, you can. So last year, you know, we the last year in the year before, it was kind of a closed system that you could 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 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 was explaining before, basically, you know, use it to do stuff after Def Con, right? Thanks. Yay! Car hacking village badge. Thank you. Who's next? Alright, DC 801. Yeah, here you are. Hi, I am Ruchan. I'm the, this is on, oh yeah, I need a whole tire. So I'm the parts junkie artwork guru. I did majority of the design of the DC 801 party badge and that layout and how to carry it. And then Michael Peterson, Celerity, he helped do the layout and eagle of 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. And then we have Nemus, which is our wizard that helped organize the back end stuff for our badge. Our badge is a homage to Helga, a special, which is a sheep that does what our DC 801 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 getting with the mythology. They all have Hermes helmets and the final badges are white. They grant VIP access to our parties on Saturday night here at Def Con. We pre-sell them early around May or June of the year. 801 Labs is a hacker space. So all the proceeds that we get from the badges 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. Okay. Thanks. Hey, basic specs. We're using our Regato BMD 300, which you notice there's a few other independent badges using that. It uses Nordic NRF 52832 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 RGB eyes, which on the final badges are rotated 180 degrees. So if you want full green capability, you need to learn to desider and resider on your RGB. Nothing goes perfect. The 0102 resistors that are right next to the eyes. Yes, we use small things because we fully kit out our badge and it's fabbed for us because we want to enjoy DEF CON a little bit more and not spend time doing badges all the time. So it's a lot of fun. Programming is one of our longer poles in our development. It has a speaker that has six red on the wings and 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. They have an LCD screen, has selected pin outs right underneath the LCD screen right above the buttons. JTAG interface, micro USB only for charging. You cannot program through it. And that's basic there. 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. So you get the education on 60, 70 bucks, program all ARM chips. Pretty nice. Bomb gurus all after. Look at the DC-801 GitHub after the con and we'll have everything released. Full files and everything. Okay. Some precursor things. We started with the basic design of the sheep and started doing layout in Eagle and make sure the parts line up right, get our soap screen the right size, everything else. Figure out a way of carrying it. We didn't want to do normal land years so we decided to do six inches of Velcro and then give you an awesome S-Beaner that's also a bot opener. Figured it's very useful at Defcon to have a bot opener and have a badge that you can pair 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 DC-801 badge. During line con, we usually have some people throwing out coins or other things that some of you may have picked up that has a male sheep on a ram. That goes for a contest that you can end up winning a DC-801 badge. And we also have another contest for whoever makes the best can crusher to go back to our hacker space for recycling efforts. We'll also win a badge. So pay attention to how the badge changes. You can't even notice our screens rotating because some of the other badges are also ble-enabled. So we do have some hellos to other badges. Another key thing, follow the badge makers on Twitter if you want to learn more about badges and when things get released and whatnot. Yeah, so we were really fortunate to have our badge maker 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 a 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 projector and see all the fun Blee badges at our party. They're not here right now. I guess I'll just do this real quick. No, okay. So I guess we'll skip over them. They might come later. We'll come back. We'll come back to them. Yeah, me too. Maybe they're too busy doing flash sales or something. Okay, here we are. Hi, I'm Borgo on the internet. I'm a random asshole who decided I was going to make a badge for DEF CON because I came to DEF CON 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 Cloys and A 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 other crazy shit. I don't have, there's no nanites. 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, things like that. Okay. So I have, 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 in 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. I'm using APA 102s which are sort of like a, they're a six pin. They're almost like the NeoPixel WS28 whatever's. Well if 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, infrared LEDs 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. 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 CPUs and that required a little bit of rework and I, 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 outer and everything courtesy of my mom. She did a great job. I really appreciate it. Can you? Shout out to moms. Awesome. Okay so these were all hand assembled so the cost to me to build one is about seven dollars. The cost including all my rounds of prototypes and burned parts and everything comes out to about nine dollars. 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 optimized for things that you will probably succeed at hand assembling. If you look at a crypto privacy badge they use these incredible two 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 solderable jumpers you can use 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 compare 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 head test firmware so there's a version. The first thing I flash it with lights the LEDs in response the button in 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 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 dragon fly 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 everyday 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 over optimized 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 if you need to optimize because you'll be wasting time. I think that's pretty much it. Cool. Thank you very much. Alright let's do crypto and privacy Carl. Alright I'm Carl Kosher from the crypto and privacy village. Hey Justin do you want to come up? Sure. Alright. Yay. Alright so uh I uh we did the uh the crypto and privacy village badge uh I focused on the hardware development and the low level firmware um as I'll talk about later there's a an 8-bit microcontroller and an ESP32 and so the low level stuff on both of those I did uh Whitney Merrill uh another co-organizer of the crypto and privacy village did the badge art she also made these PCB keys um also in chi-cad also produced at the same board house uh they're pretty sweet and part of a puzzle um and developed uh some of the puzzles that are on the badge uh and then Justin uh did python development and uh wrangled china a lot. Oh yeah. Uh so so specs of our badge uh so we I like to say that we have a quad core badge uh so the ESP32 module actually has three cores on it. There's two 32-bit extensa uh risk CPUs running at up to two hundred forty megahertz. There's one ultra low power core which uses some custom instruction set uh basically to like do GPIO and other low power things when uh so the rest of the CPUs can sleep uh it supports um wifi, bluetooth, bluetooth low energy in there uh it has a ton of peripherals uh only some of which that we use has about half a mega of SRAM although once you add in like wifi and bluetooth and all that other and micro python which I'll talk about in a minute you start getting crunch for space uh the modules um 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 um the LEDs and the rotary encoder. It also does USB to serial and it's actually it's so it's from silicon labs and it's actually cheaper than the USB to serial dedicated chip that silicon lab sells which is way cheaper than the FTDI chip that everyone uses uh so uh it's a it's a pretty nice um 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 uh it's a mess. Um we have headphone and microphone amps on here. We were hoping that um the uh ESP32 SDK would support uh audio in. It doesn't yet. Technically the ESP32 is still in beta so they're still developing the SDK for it. Uh so we made a gamble there and we kinda lost on that but oh well. Has an accelerometer on it. We don't use it. We were gonna use it for other things that we'll probably do next year. Um same with the the crypto accelerator chip um has a rotary encoder and of course these awesome uh tiny LEDs that you absolutely cannot hand solder um you you want a stencil for that in hot air. Beep! Alright so our process uh back in so I actually forgot a lot of this so I went back on Github and to to look at actually what we did. Uh so our first commit was in 2016 where we committed a rough outline of the badge design. Um then through you know the uh Christmas season and into the new year we created the schematic. Uh next few months we did the initial PCB layout um made the first prototype PCBs, had them shipped. Uh in April I started writing firmware to test all the parts. Um uh assembled these by hand. Um unfortunately I got some of the um uh 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. Um then we got that back in May we did more testing um and tweaking of that. Uh in June we finalized our hardware design and uh kicked that off to PCB way who started the production process. Um uh so to do that to actually assemble these things they need like a very precise bomb or a bill of materials. Uh 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 uh orientation markers and being very precise about everything so you don't end up with issues um with rotated parts and stuff like that. So that took a while to actually develop. Uh same with the test firmware so we had them flash some test firmware on there. Uh turns out the USB to UART firmware that we have on the EFM8 uh doesn't support anything. Supports OSX, Linux and Windows 10. If you're on uh version of Windows below that you have to like install a custom driver and so uh they were running Windows 7 so wrote a different version of the firmware that um pretends to be that silicon labs part um and they just give you firmware for that but it was wonky in other ways. Um so back uh like a week or two ago I finally got MicroPython building on this um and then just uh yes so so Justin starts you know right about then July 22nd we got a UI framework up and running on Python. The nice thing about Python is it lets you be very productive in getting pretty fancy uh user interfaces and other things going. Um we we wrote these um uh binding so they they show up as Python modules that you can uh make like a method call to in it call some underlying C code which um messes with the hardware and so we're we were working on that um making some pretty good progress on that. Uh past week furiously doing final assembly assembly and firmware development uh today as of 3 AM we started flashing the badges with the final firmware and today at 10 AM we started selling the badges. So yeah uh so this was yesterday. This is my uh room room at Caesars uh we uh huh so you know the the beds are unusable and we have boxes everywhere and uh people uh yeah so we we were uh so this this rotary 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 uh 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 3500 different connections in total um and so you know there's there's metal everywhere in my room now. Um boop uh this is uh sort of the aftermath of the initial assembly process um as of uh last night uh so this was right before we went in um well it was actually several hours before we flashed the firmware but basically you know this is badge life boop uh so some tips uh so two categories of tips one about the badge that we made and one about you know making your own badges um for the crypto and privacy village badge uh it's actually fully reflashable over USB you don't need any custom uh tools to flash it uh if you hold down the rotary encoder while you it uh while you plug it in it will come up as a uh hid device which you can reflash the 8 bit microcontroller with some of the silicon labs tools uh and then once that's up then you can reflash the ESP32 with the standard ESP32 development toolkit um if you don't want to deal with that uh there's micro python running on it um if you plug into it you'll get a serial port you get a um basically uh an interpreter interface and you can start playing around with the badges uh directly from uh over USB like that there's no puzzles in the firmware if the firmware is acting strange it's a bug it's not a it's not a hint I've we we've we've had many questions like oh well why does it do that I'm like no it's not part of a puzzle um uh there there are many things that we wanted to do on this badge that we just didn't have time for uh 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 uh do something uh interesting in the future uh for you know making your own badges start earlier than you were planning we thought we did wasn't early enough um 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 um yeah 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 gonna make it work in June oh yeah buy by the way so we got a recommendation for a uh a uh voltage regulator from and not XOR 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 and not XOR bought out the entire supply of them so it was either delay the badge by 12 weeks or substitute a different part so we just substituted a different part which required another prototype to ensure that we weren't building 500 bricks and so that added some delay uh we have these batch life shirts run DRC uh DRC stands for design rule check uh basically it is uh a bunch of um schematic and uh PCB tools uh 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's uh it can be manufactured and it matches the schematics and and uh there's also ERC for checking that the schematics are same uh I really like this book the hardware hacker uh by Bunny uh there's a chapter about uh outsourcing stuff to China and how to make bombs that China uh will uh build um precisely basically it's like um you have to be very precise about what you want you can't just say oh I want one micro farad reason or one micro farad capacitor you have to say one micro farad 0603 surface mount plus or minus uh 10 percent uh NPO COG you have to specify like the the precise type of capacitor you want um uh the but the one advantage of of outsourcing is uh you can get parts a lot cheaper than you can get from uh domestic sources um there there's some pitfalls and getting stuff uh from overseas but uh it definitely dropped our costs by probably 3x I would estimate uh boop boop oh I think we're we're at we're out of slides but what what's the tip uh the tip was ask crux so so crux actually ordered so um so one thing that was new for this year is a bunch of us are in a uh small slack where we can you know talk about making a common bluetooth protocol and doing group buys of things um 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 uh we organized it with uh people at sin shop and and uh DC dark net project and basically they ordered something like 1500 lipo batteries directly to vegas and so uh 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 made an exchange and we got 500 lipo batteries without any issue so that was great the the way that we got them so so we we asked our supplier in China if they could source lipo's for us um and they said yes but it might be tricky um and then I don't know what happened after that but they showed up and beats headphone boxes um um I was not aware that that was gonna happen well well you can just on cargo you can't ship it as like on a commercial passenger but yeah there there's a big like uh or lipo boxes have warnings up the blot zoo on them alright here's queer con hey I'm George I'm uh a third of the queer con badge team this is Evan he's the hardware guy I'm the software guy uh among the 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 at our Chinese suppliers and also receiving inappropriately familiar emails about their vacation plans so yeah dealing with China is a really unusual kind of experience to have apparently especially for me um so we're a little different in some ways than some of the other uh badge uh communities uh we've been doing this for about five years and from the outset our goals have have been uh mainly surrounding community so uh we don't have hack ability as a major goal of our badges in part because our group is really a social subgroup of the uh of the technical conference so you know there are some things that you can kind of do and and last year we had some uh 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 um 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 as a team um and another thing that we've uh done every year that we're really proud of is our first year we did a hundred of these that was five years ago I think and uh 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 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 uh have uh folks who are able to you know take part and and get them for free uh the that was partly enabled this year by Starbucks sponsoring our badge so that was great if you happen to see anybody wandering around with a uh a cup of coffee on their screen um 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 on the board so that was great um our our stack is is built well really the experience is built around these these really cool self mating hermaphroditic connectors it's an amphenol part called a rhoda connect and they're these these surface mount parts that are technically only rated for twenty five uses but they work um and so you sort of and so uh the the entire basis of it is is connecting them together uh there's a little game uh 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 forty four different ones that can be explored by all the attendees but you only have access to the most recent one that you've unlocked um via the the queer con app on phones listens to bluetooth beacons that come from the uh the badge and uh hits a web service to populate what amounts to a leader board even though it's it's it's collaborative rather than competitive so there's not really any leaders but in our in our suite uh 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 question marks and whenever anybody gets one they sort of start populating and you can see the excuse me the map of of how to how to connect them um more or less um going back to my slavish devotion to Texas instruments uh we actually kind of also have a triple core um badge our uh our part is a uh the main processor is an ARM Cortex-A3 uh it's uh it's an RF system on a chip from Texas Instruments called a CC 2640 uh it's actually got two Cortex-A0s on it as well one to run the the radio core uh 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 um and then we also run a uh a TI LED driver uh and then we have I think 15 uh 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 in a neat little 0606 form factor bought from China for 2.8 cents each and uh that's the that's actually the vendor that added me on Facebook we've used them a couple years in a row um they're great they are they're great and they're very cheap but kind of strange um kind of talking about the production thing last year I don't know if you saw the uh the the bloopers the little squid badges with the aqua colored LED eyes uh 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 um we couldn't find a single US 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 yeah and then that weird Chinese that weird Chinese distributor who's uh whose logo was the windows logo rotated 90 degrees yeah I was like uh you know it's worth the 60 dollars to find out if they're actually real um so anything you want to add Evan? Uh sure so uh as as they mentioned you really want to start sorry this is only my second time with a microphone and the other time was this morning and I was hungover as fuck um still am uh so yeah overdoing it um so yeah whenever you think you need to start start two months before that so we'll we'll start the design for next year probably on Sunday and um there it begins again uh so other funny stories from this year is we had a really cool idea and we've been wanting to do it and we were working really hard on it I hadn't started designing at all in January because we're still 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 um 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 um and so we cobbled that together pretty quickly and it works fine um another funny uh to the lead time problem as one of the resistors which 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 uh some resistors and wonder where the hell that came from. A couple things in terms of kind of process of of developing these things some people touched on this but we typically go through a handful of uh 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 break away headers and just hook up 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 uh with all four corners having different designs on them just so we could sort of evaluate which ones looked good or not um there's a shop uh Crypto Privacy Village uses them for all of their assembly we use them for prototypes called PCB way and they are faster than any US shop that we've used you can you can order yeah yeah but it's it's fantastic they're they're a great tool for that I mean it's it's cheaper and faster even than using one of the batch services based in the US like Osh Park or batch PCB before them and and so on uh so so I guess there's a new event uh at Defcon this year called who's slide is it anyway uh where you present someone else's slides uh and you have no idea what they are uh I have sort of seen these in advance so we'll just try to to BS our way uh you know some some people um I don't know uh what one of them actually designed the original Crypto Privacy Village Badge because uh 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 alright uh these 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 uh by 128 color LCD that can do like 20 frames per second of video uh that is pure BS uh they they actually were going to use the APA uh 50 50 LEDs but um they melted in the lead free process and actually the WS 28 12 B's did not so they had to replace that uh at the last minute uh slow power has SD card uh has lots of puzzles blah blah um oh did they oh right yeah yeah so they they have this chip 8 emulator which is some like retro console emulator thingy uh they have a mode on here that will actually connect to a bottle of vodka which has a uh LED display on it that talks BLE and they like reverse engineered that uh has some tickle ish scripting language on there that it supports boop uh you know it was a long process they started the day uh after DEF CON last year and they you know they they were a lot more on top of their game than we were boop uh they have some tips I guess they they make fancy charts because they actually do that for living they're in like management hell um uh yeah and then Kickstarter and yeah stuff you can read the tips boop all right that was it yeah uh one one one more thing so when I first sat down to do the software for this uh 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 uh and talking I saw an early prototype of the uh uh Bender Badge with a little video player on it and I'm like well shit now I have to make it work um 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 alright alright 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 bet