 We are here at DEF CON 30 with MK Factor yet again, who designed an incredibly cool DEF CON 30 badge. And I have the goon one here and the human one here. And I remember when I came out of registration, all I could hear was all the notes it was making. When you said earlier, the inspiration was sounds around DEF CON. This is definitely not what I had in mind. And what was so funny is on the goon badge specifically, I heard special notes to it. So all of a sudden, if you push a button, I hear this, make a hole. Which is what all the goons shot when the crowds get a little too close and it's a little against fire code. How many badges did you end up making? You have the goon one, you have the human one. Yeah, so we made nine different badges plus the Uber. You said ten different badges? Yeah. So I think of like, will you be able to name them all? There's goon, speaker, human. CFP, village, contest. Press. Press. Press. Sorry, couldn't understand what you were saying. Press, where are we at? Speaker. Gosh, there's so many of them and each one has different sounds specifically for it. Every one of them, the art and the DJs and the music, all of them have different noises. So I know there's still a lot of discovery. What can you tell me about the badges? So one of the coolest parts about it is that it's a sampling keyboard. So not only do you have the built-in sounds, you can record your own sounds and play those and shift them up and down the keys. Oh my goodness. So there's a microphone and a line input to record your own stuff. As an aside, what you do not want to do is hook your own line out to your own line in. Right. What will actually happen if you do that? So if you do that, the audio amplifier chip immediately destroys itself. Like goes up in smoke. Yes, literal smoke. Oh my goodness. We call it permanent silent mode. I remember I had a teacher who said all electronics are powered by magical smoke. Is it the smoke ever leaves the device? Well, stop working. You'll let the smoke out. You'll let the smoke out. So I also noticed you added an SAO port as well. Yeah. How early did you make that decision? Very early. That was one of the things that was kind of requested that we have on there. And being part of the Badge Life community, it's been a thing. And so, yeah, we were happy to be able to fit it on there. Was there any inspiration you took from someone else's badge? Were you like, oh, that was really cool. I want to do something like that. Or was this just completely... So last year at DEF CON, I was talking to a guy. Yeah, I remember his name. And he's like, wouldn't it be cool to have a musical badge? And I said, that would be the coolest thing. Because music is my life. I love music. I do a lot of singing and I'm slowly learning how to play the piano. And so I was like, that would be really cool. So we sat on it until when we started talking. And we also love Bob's Burgers. And Gene has a sampling keyboard. I was like, what is better than a sampling keyboard? Nothing. So that was our start. That is so cool. Again, you just hear him being played around the conference of people playing around with him. Have you seen anyone actually hacking? I mean, it's the first day. People just got their badges today. Yeah, I've seen quite a few people hacking, dumping code, disassembling, trying to figure out what it does and how. And I've seen lots of good theories and lots of crazy theories. Any advice for someone who's just picking up a badge of how they can start going into the badge and messing around? Are we talking like challenge-wise or just playing with it? Because both. I mean, playing with it, most of the stuff is there's kind of on-screen instructions, you know, kind of guide you through it. And just play with it. I mean, for challenge stuff, I mean, there's nine different badge types. You'll see what the differences are and see what's out there. Oh, I cannot. This, I have been coming to Def Con for a very long time, yet I don't think I have ever seen anything which has used both a line in and in line out where you're actually recording different sounds. Like, this is definitely one of a kind. Out of curiosity, like, at one point, you said, like, you said something which was one of these components was the most expensive components. Which one was it? Was it the chip? Was it the audio conductors? Um, I think the single most expensive component on there is the screen. Okay. We had to get it specially made so that it would fit the badge. Okay. Because we needed to have a shorter lead. I don't... Cable. Cable. Okay. So most of these types of displays, they've got a little flex connector on the bottom. And usually they're really long because they're meant to go to the bottom side of a board because the top is flat for the screen. We needed the opposite. And so these are custom created for us. There's very short cables so that they fit on the top of the badge. Oh, that's so cool. The other piece of this is we talked about such how the artwork is such a heavy impact in the badge, especially, like, if there was no artwork, it's effectively a circuit board that plays music with some really, really great challenges on it. For the artwork, obviously, there's a keyboard. What else inspired you with the artwork on the badge? Well, I was curious to what... So the shape is what mostly inspired me for the human one, right? And on my phone case, I have a concert tape. And I was like, wouldn't that be just funny? Because, like, we're doing music. We need a mixtape. So we have our Def Con 30 mixtape. Mixtape, right? So this is our mixtape that we have running around. I imagine homecoming, too, for most people. Think of, like, Back to the Future, Marty McFly, like, putting in the tape deck. Or even, like, you know, new movies, Guardians of the Galaxy, where there's just the mixtape. And I think it's cool that you have an official mixtape for Def Con 30, especially with so much of the music. And obviously, it makes sense with it being the sounds of Def Con. Right. Some of the other ones, you'll see, we have the mixtape again on some of the other artwork. Not these ones, like your speaker one. And that's my bad, because some of it's all covered up in here. But I didn't know how to, like, bring that artwork out. So if you ever get looking under there, on the speaker one, there's the mixtape is on there again. The mixtape is on the back of the press one as well. So not all of them have it, but most of them. Yeah, these are really cool. It is amazing, just the sheer amount of artwork. I love the style of it too, because sometimes you get this very rigid style on some of the artwork. And again, it fits the badge really well. Like, last year was very square, so it was very rigid artwork. I love almost like the cartoony-like style in here. I think it fits the theme really well. So legitimately, I actually think this is a really cool badge. I haven't seen anything like this before. It is massively sophisticated. But the thing I have is, like, when you purchase this badge, there's a list of, like, don't do this, or you will, you're frying your badge. Like, you hook up the audio, you create a loop, it overpowers the circuit. I have no idea what I'm doing with badge design or hardware for the most part. Was there problems like that? Like, how frequently do problems like that happen in, like, I think of, like, some of the audio equipment I have. If I do a loop, like, come out of audio in and out and do that, either A, it will detect it or B, it won't, like, go up and smoke. Why do those issues exist in this badge and not in those things? So there are multiple reasons, one of which is I'm not an audio engineer. And so mistakes were made, obviously, right? I designed the circuit poorly. We ran into supply chain issues, of course, which I'm not making excuses, but, you know, we ended up having to change things last minute again, and the circuit didn't get fully vetted the way it should have. And so... Yeah, there wasn't any time. There was no time to get extra prototypes and everything, and so did the best I could, and we ended up having this problem and not finding it until too late. Well, the question I also have, though, is even in the best circumstances and things like that, these banders don't just, like, oh, they're going like a piece of electronic that gets encapsulated in clothes. People are wearing them, they're banging around, they're hitting things. People are also, like, soldering on top of them, connecting wires, they're going around Vegas, things are connecting pins. So you made them really, really resilient, but some of those things, is it, like, even with a chip shortage and things like that, like, oh, this chip wouldn't have had those issues, but the chip we had to use, you know, doesn't have, like, a resistor or something like that to prevent these type of issues? Yeah, so if we want to get a little technical here, what happens is the amplifier we're using is made to drive a speaker, and it does that really well. We are abusing it to also provide a line out, which it's not meant to do, and it doesn't have proper protection for that, and it drives the speaker with a differential output, which means it flips the voltage back and forth between the two pins. So one is not grounded, one's positive, they're flipping back and forth, and so when you plug it back into the input, now one of those outputs is referenced to ground, and it shorts and kills the amplifier. Okay, so this chip, you're actually using a chip which was easily not intended for this purpose. Not at all. So it was made to just drive a speaker, which is great. That's really cool. Is there other chips like that? And again, whether it's chip shortage or things like that, was there other pieces on the board where you're like, this was not intended to work this way, but I am most definitely putting it on here? Yeah, absolutely. So this is kind of meant to be a little bit retro, right? It's running 8-bit audio, which is mostly a limitation of the parts we had and could get, and so the inputs are kind of staticky and whatnot because the input op amp is not audio rated, it's not for that, it's just a general op amp, and so it's not perfect, right? And again, prices and, you know, there are compromises that have to be made. And same with the main microcontroller, it doesn't have any DSP capabilities or anything like that, so all the audio processing is just happening in software, which is also not great. And so it's just tons of compromises and things being forced to do what they shouldn't because time and money and everything. Well, especially like we talked about, like we had the entire stream on all the crazy complications, that you had just a chip supplier, just like, you know, this was like last year's, like disappear on you, and you didn't have as much time as you thought this year, chip shortage and things like that, you had to cram it into a much, much shorter time frame. So like that is incredible. And I even noticed like even the things like the touch pads, I cannot imagine like, again, maybe you know the history of this, when this type of pad came into being, we'll say, was it meant to be a touch pad or no? I honestly don't know the history of that type of thing, but even on this board, we're not doing it the proper way for touch. And why is that? I guess what would be the proper way? And so there are chips dedicated for capacitive touch, because it's a complicated thing. Environment changes, humidity changes, all that stuff plays a factor. Your hands are sweaty or not? Yeah, people with, yeah. You said if your hands are sweaty or not, like damp or sweat or anything like that? So I have sweaty hands and he has dry hands. And so when we were playing with it, he's like, why do you keep getting it to do weird things? He's like, I don't know. So yeah, so it's very finicky because it's not made to do that. When you said there's chips dedicated, so are you running this in a chip which really is not meant to do this? So we're running that straight into the RP2040 main microcontroller. So yeah, and I'm ashamed to say this, it's a two core processor. One core is just doing that. That's its only job in life is run the touch controls. Because it's such a time sensitive thing and we need it to be consistent. And so that's all one core does running at 125 megahertz. All it does is touch bits. For the budget you had, I really cannot believe how much functionality you put into this. Like sincerely, this may be the coolest badge I have yet to see at DEF CON and I can think of no other conference but DEF CON 30, like the 30th anniversary, which this like to see something like this. And so thank you. Thank you so much for making such a cool badge. I hope you guys enjoyed watching. Thanks for watching. Check out the badge and hack on.