Hackaday Superconference is just a week away (precious few tickets remain), a celebration of all things Hackaday, which naturally includes creative projects making the most of their hardware. Every attendee gets a platform for hacking in the form of the conference badge.
To make the most of your badge hacking fun, plan ahead so you will have the extra components and the tools you need. At the most basic, bring along a serial to USB cable and a PIC programmer. These are common and if you don’t own them, ask around and you will likely be able to borrow them. Now is also the time to put in a parts order for any components you want to use but don’t have on hand!
The badge is hackable without any extras, but it’s designed for adding hardware and hacking the firmware. We’re excited to see what you can do with it. We gave an overview of this retro themed pocket computer a few days ago, today we’re inviting you to exploit its potential for your hardware hacks.
Expansion Header, Board, and Custom Firmware
With a full keyboard, LCD screen, audio speaker, and a BASIC programming environment on board, the badge will be a friendly on-ramp for curious beginners attending Supercon. And for our hardware hacking veterans, there’s a header for an expansion board: a gateway to endless possibilities. Serial communication is a good starting point to familiarize with badge expansion, and you should bring your own USB-to-serial adapter to follow our badge serial communications guide.
When you’re ready to venture beyond talking to your computer over a serial link, each badge also comes with this expansion board. It plugs into the badge and brings out all the pins for through-hole soldering plus some common surface-mount footprints (0805, SO-8, SO-16, TSSOP-16, SOT-23). And last but not least, it has three Shitty Add-On headers. Our badge hardware hacking reference guide will continue growing up to (and through) Supercon to help answer your questions.
The expansion pins can be controlled from badge BASIC. But if BASIC should prove limiting, the badge is ready for that, too. The heart of the badge is a PIC32-series processor donated by (along with the Flash chips) by Microchip The expansion header brings out all the pins necessary for in-circuit programming with a PIC programming tool. Microchip’s PICkit (3 or 4) are popular choices, but there are other options out there. And finally, a computer with the firmware development tools installed. Our C programming guide lists the required downloads and steps to install them.
The image above shows a red circuit board as this is one of the five prototypes. We’re using Macrofab as the contract manufacturer for this project (they graciously donated a portion of the assembly cost) and we just received word that the full production run of 500 badges with black solder mask has completed!
What Will You Make?
As fitting for the retro computing theme, most badge features in …read more
Source:: Hackaday