The newest offering from the AND!XOR team is out and it delivered exactly what hardware badges were missing: light pipes. No joke, the DEF CON 27 edition AND!XOR badge will be most recognizable because of two arcs of light pipe material blinging RGB goodness in three dimensions. But if you can peel your eyes away from that oddity there’s a lot to love about the new design.

A Departure from Bender

Is this a Bender badge? Followers in the cult of #Badgelife will remember that the Bender character from the smash show Futurama has been the official mascot for the AND!XOR team since they began making badges. This badge goes away from that aesthetic and the design achieves a new depth with a gas-mask laden, hoodie-wearing character more reminiscent of Fallout.

Yes, there’s a snappy RGB matrix in the shape of goggles, but it is the art and how it is treated on this board that really catches my eye. This badge looks fantastic even if it’s not switched on. The art is by Kevin Pentecost, a fan of the team who gave them the illustration during last year’s DEF CON.

The familiar PCB color palette of black, white, and gold is at work here, but it’s easy to mistake how it’s put to use. In this case the white is the solder mask, indicated by the exposed gold on either side of the goggles which has white reflection marks on it. The black silkscreen is put to work as a very fine matrix of dots on the hoodie, giving it both an interesting hue to the eye, and a texture under your fingers. Both have a glossy, picture-perfect finish.

But look closely and you’ll see a new trick at work: stickers. The two canisters for the gas mask are stickers whose finish makes it easy to use the capacitive touch scroll wheels built into the board underneath. At the same time, this brings glow-in-the-dark phosphorescent material to the badge.

All past version of AND!XOR badges have included a screen, either OLED or LCD. This one moves away from that in favor of the RGB LED matrix. I most closely associate the goggle layout with the DC Furs badge from 2018. It was a great idea then and it’s a great idea now. Layout breaks up the monotony of a rectangle for an obvious reason, yet still allows scrolling characters as you would with a drab LED sign. Where you could have had a 7×17 matrix, you lose just 17 LEDs …read more

Source:: Hackaday