PCB badges have exploded in popularity in recent years. Starting out as a fun token of entry to a conference, they’re now being developed by all manner of independent groups, with DEFCON serving as the heart of the #badgelife movement. After DEFCON 26, Kate Morris and associates decided to undertake the development of their own badge, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing. Kate’s talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference serves to tell the tale of creating a retro game to run on a badge platform.
A retro classic running on an attractive conference badge – what more could you want!The benefit of creating your own badge from the ground up means that you can select hardware that’s perfectly suited to your end goals. Given that Kate’s team wished to recreate Lunar Lander, they wanted some serious grunt so their game could have fancy graphics and smooth animations. To this end, an ESP32 was selected as the heart of the build, running at up to 240MHz — blazing fast as far as microcontrollers go. The badge would also need an appropriate display, with a color LCD with 320×240 resolution being chosen to do the job. A smattering of LEDs and buttons were designed in, along with the obligatory SAO port for the fans out there.
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Kate begins the talk by exploring the hardware and toolchain used, with a special emphasis on project management. Software takes ages to write, so it pays to get a head start while the hardware is still in development. Waiting for final PCBs to ship wastes valuable coding time, after all. Coding f ..
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