Defcon ID badge comes with its own technical manual

ATTENDEES AT DEFCON 15 will get a hacky treat when they show up for badges.

“We don't need no steenkin' badges!” you might think be the motto out of an event that deals in cash only and never, ever gathers data on attendees to the long-running hacker event because they might have to turn it over to the Feds one day. If you don't collect it, you can't hand it over.

Badge design at DEFCON has evolved into an intricate science over the years as organizers want to quickly distinguish between paying attendees (humans), speakers, goon (staff), vendor, or press. In past years, skinflints have tried to get out of paying their $100 at-the-door attendance fee by quickly creating copies. One year, an attendee badge could quickly be turned into a good badge with some spray paint, thereby blurring the line between the unwashed masses and the organisers.

This is DEFCON, what do you expect? Some attendees are genetically wired to try to find a way to exploit the system, for fun, for profit, or just because they can.

Last year's badge was a fine piece of round circuit board with the DEFCON SmileSkull and Crossbones cut into it, a bunch of circuitry, two lit LED eyes, a single watch battery, and a toggle switch to make the eyes blink in sequence. If you were really clever, you could hack the code in the badge to blink out your own secret messages - cool, if you and your buds knew Morse code, but obscure if you don't. Prizes given to the three best ideas for hacking the badge by the end of the convention. [Are you paying for the prizes, Doug? Ed.]

Please attend to this year's badge, as illustrated in the photos. The sucker has a Freescale MC9S08QG8 microcontroller and contains a 5 column by 19 row matrix of LEDs to allow user-customizable scrolling text messages. The default message is I (heart) DEFCON 15. Power source is a pair of lithium coin cell batteries.

Touch the top SmileSkull icon and it turns things on. It's not a clicky switch, it's a touch switch - major improvement from last year. A second touch control under the rotary dial symbol (and there's one to explain to your kids about) allows one to type in a customized message.

If that wasn't enough, the LEDs are also programmed to deliver a persistence-of-vision (POV) secret message if you trigger the proper mode then wave it around in front of your eyes in one direction, kinda like those hand-held trick LED signs people were having fun with a few years ago.

No, but that wasn't enough for badge designer Joe Grand, who spent 170 hours of time on the design, along with 3 circuit board revs and supposedly two (2) nights of his honeymoon. The circuit board is designed to be populated with a 3-axis accelerometer and a 2.4 GHz RF transceiver, and also has a USB interface optioned; these are user-installable options because trying to implement all the extras for 6,800 pieces ran into unacceptable failure rates.

In short, the DEFCON 15 badge is a beautiful piece of work. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I wish Joe Grand was building bigger pieces of hardware. Via, can you send the lad some of your nano-boards and ask him to build me a laptop? µ