It’s time to tell the tale of how the DC540 “Tree of Life” badge came to be and memorialize its compiled history into one grand telling.
The badge had humbled beginnings as all great ideas do. Our crew had long wanted to conceive our own glorious badge. A badge that was both aesthetically beautiful but also offered more. We played around with several different themes that stretched from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Lovecraft, an Escape Room to Ham Radio.
We quickly learned the importance of identifying which hardware we wanted to use early on. Initially we played around with the ESP8266, found that it wasn’t robust enough for our grandiose plans, moved to the ESP32, and then abandoned all for the pico. Our OLED screen changed quite a bit as well, with us at one point using a 1.8 inch SPI TFT LCD Display module. While lovely, cost and other practical implications kept us from pursuing a larger OLED. We were loath to have the badge burdened down with batteries and needed to keep it light.
It was the end of May where we finally got serious. At one of our in-person meetings, the whiteboard came out and we started scribbling. In the next two hours, we had more forward progress than the last 6 months. We made some guesses on how much parts would cost, our general “theme” and some potential games. Shockingly, we were pretty on point with our cost estimations and were able to keep our final product at the $50 mark per badge.
Bob played around with many ideas for the badge design and finally had inspiration with the “Tree of Life” theme, in a fit of creativity, he quickly produced one prototype after another, making each one a bit better. He used KiCad for the board designs and then gave us all a lesson on how he did it. Our imaginations went into high gear as we started planning our future badges and Shitty Add On (SAO) we could make.
Our first prototypes came in unexpectedly quick which was a relief, we were a month in and had little more than a month to finish up the project. Kevin worked hard, rewriting the libraries and code, each time one of us fortuitously had another good idea that resulted in more work for him. Critiques included morse code had too much fade when flashing, the badges didn’t just need to send messages to each other but also have default messages hidden inside, badges had to flash in a spectacular manner when paired with a Boss, and I needed more menus! Oh, let’s not talk about the great hash wars where we debated the merits of each encryption and nearly stopped talking to each other. At one point, I swore Kevin hadn’t slept for a week and had developed an uncontrollable twitch and would yell “no more” every time I spoke up, even when it was just to say hello.
The development of the games was especially frustrating as the goal was for the games to be very achievable by new DEFCON attendees, offer a way for people to interact with each other but still be challenging. I learned a lot about steganography, stegdetect, githubs Steganography online, using WordPress, a member helped by created a Hitchhiker’s themed crossword puzzle, the intricacies associated with morse code (using ‘dah’ and ‘dit’ over ‘dash’ and ‘dot’ and so much more.
One particularly important lesson was learning to speak “developer”. What made sense in my mind didn’t necessarily make sense to our developer and how he envisioned code. There was many nights of butting heads, exasperated sighs and outright frustration over the lack of communication.
Finally we had the boards, now it was just time to solder and assemble them. In these desperate times, we called everyone together and had one large soldering party, troubleshooting any connections that just weren’t right, cursing, and drinking more whisky to sooth our burnt fingers.
Now the last step, playing the games, traversing the rooms in the badge and seeing what would break. I hid away in a the Shenandoah Mountains for a weekend and did nothing but drink more coffee, try and break the badge and code, and debug away. With only five days before we would leave for DEFCON, we had a product we all agreed was magnificent. Our last Monday before we left, we double checked each bag, wrapped them in bubble wrap and carefully placed them in a baggie with batteries, stickers and a lanyard.
Our last task would be to hand them out at DEFCON and enjoy.
Well, except we ordered 50 more badges just a week ago, so it seems we will be packing those up and shipping them out once we get back.
Oh, and our war-torn developer just happened to ask about our next big product…..he’s already got a suggestion and we’ve begun to brainstorm away.
#game3