What images might pop into the head of a typical hacker when he hears «conference badge»? A circuit board with hundreds of components? Plastic card with a scatter of flashing LEDs? Vinyl record? Maybe interesting assignments?
It seems like we’ve seen it all before. Nothing new, right? Well, this time we decided to change the rules of the game. Craft your own badge yourself. Help yourself to a soldering iron and rosin, all this can be found in CRAFT.ZONE, which is open all two days of the conference.
A brief reminder of how to work with the badge, if you have one, then there should be batteries for it, 4 of them. Yes, yes its post-apocalypse and all that, sure there are no more factories producing lithium batteries. But we know of a warehouse stuffed with batteries.
You will need to insert all 4 batteries in the right way, ready? Something should blink, if alas the thing is up in smoke, then find CRAFT.ZONE, we’ll apply some magic to it. The badge is also a tool for payments, it’s your wallet with OFFCOINS. To top up the wallet or to use it to pay for stuff, press the SW1 button. Be careful of hackers, do not just mindlessly press the button where-ever. See the PWR jumper? By rearranging it up and down, you can choose the power mode, either batteries or USB. Looking ahead, it makes sense to turn off the badge at night, you do not want your batteries to die at the most crucial moment?
That’s it, you’re ready now! The conference awaits!
What’s that? You think that your conference badge is not complete and could be properly modified? You think there are some tasks to be found on it, apart from its payment functionality? Hmm, you might be right! In the stock version you can try find something through the usb interface, or you can just enjoy the flashing of multi-colored lights. Oh, and don’t forget to upload proper drivers for your USB here github.com. We know you’re scared Arduino STM32, we’re close to dropping a few bricks ourselves.
If the heart longs to play, then there is a whole big CRAFT.ZONE you can check out, where you can give your badge a good tune. We have the following directions for modification:
In any case, you first need to solder the dip-switch, and 8 resistors on the back of the badge. This is still quite a challenge, but then you can choose the task. The first four levers are 4 bits that specify the number of a task, for example, 1 is 0000, and 4 is 0011. The second four levers are already one of the tasks, click around a bit. You’ll be alright on your own now. If you do not have enough usb laces, or batteries, write to CRAFT.ZONE. The rest of the task are available @offzone_bot. Sign up for CRAFT.ZONE here is @offzone_craft_zone_bot.
Best of luck!
