Electronic conference badges are now an accepted part of the lifeblood of our community, with even the simplest of events now sporting a fully functional computer as an eye-catching PCB on a lanyard. Event schedules and applications are shipped on them, and the more sophisticated ones have app libraries and support development communities of their own.

The trouble is that so often those badges fail to live up to their promise, and one reason behind that stems from the enormity of the task facing a badge team when it comes to firmware for a modern badge. There is some fascinating news from the Netherlands that might reduce some of those firmware woes though, badge.team is a freshly-launched project that provides a ready-made badge firmware with the promise of both stability and long-term support. If you’re making a badge, or even a one-off project using the ESP32, this is a project worth checking out.

An Event Badge Team’s Job Is Not An Easy One

This steady stream of official badges and a burgeoning scene of unofficial ones from the #BadgeLife community has given us amazing diversity, but at the expense of huge duplicated effort and a significant number of promised badge features never quite working on the final item. There are plenty of tales featuring conference badges that have been delivered to event attendees in a non-functional condition and even a few which have never ever seen a working firmware update. Producing a badge and the software which runs upon it is a non-trivial exercise that can be beyond even the most capable teams when the clock is counting down to opening day.

If you could put your finger upon the root of the problem, it might be that there have been so many entirely different badge platforms, with each one using a different architecture and having its own software stack.The possibility for re-using code or hardware designs from other badges is reduced, increasing the workload while removing the possibility of benefiting from the bug fixing work of other teams.

In 2017, the SHA hacker camp in the Netherlands featured a particularly successful badge with an ESP32 module at its heart. It was notable for its e-Ink display and touch buttons, but it also shipped with working firmware and an easy-to-develop-for MicroPython app store it referred to as the Hatchery with apps described as eggs. This proved robust enough to withstand malware attempts from camp attendees, and went on to feature a huge number of eggs for all possible purposes. After the camp many surplus and repaired SHA badges ended up in European hackerspaces where they found homes as display-equipped microcontrollers (Dutch, Google translation) and in other mundane tasks, and for which the firmware received ongoing development.

In 2019, the same team that created the SHA badge had a hand …read more

Source:: Hackaday