It hangs around your neck, comes with the cost of admission, and would blow away a desktop computer from the 1980’s. This is the Hackaday Superconference badge and you can get your hands on one for the price of admission to the ultimate hardware conference.

Everyone through the door gets one of these badges featuring a 320 x 240 color display, a full qwerty keyboard, and limitless hacking potential! The stock firmware runs a BASIC interpreter, the CP/M operating system, and includes games and Easter Eggs. It’s a giant playground, and we want to see what you can do with this custom hardware during the three days of Supercon. Get your ticket now, then join me after the break for a demo video and plenty more info.

This badge design by Voja Antonic was premiered at the Hackaday Belgrade conference in May and is seeing an encore performance for Supercon. It looks amazing, but what you don’t realize until you have it in your hands is how much fun it is to hammer out some BASIC code on the incredibly clicky keyboard. Check out this fun figure: we ordered over 30,000 momentary switches for the assembly of these badges!

Hardware Design and Hacking

The display on the badge is superb and provides plenty of room for highly readable text. Of course it’s full-color and begging for some great visualizations — demoscene anyone? The badge is being assembled by Macrofab, who have also donated a portion of the assembly cost. They use red PCBs for prototypes — you’re looking at #1 of 5 — but the final solder mask will be black. In the upper right you can see the white component with is an RGB LED controllable from inside the BASIC interpreter.

The hard work is happening on the back side of the badge. A PIC32MX370 microcontroller drives everything, with an SST26VF016BT flash chip for an additional 16 MB of storage — both of these chips were graciously donated for this project by Microchip.

Also on board is a speaker and amplifier circuit. That’s right, this badge plays music! You can code in BASIC or in C for three-voice audio.

<img width="250" height="145" src="https://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/2018-supercon-badge-expansion-boards-in-place.jpg?w=250&h=145" …read more

Source:: Hackaday