Thotcon 0xD Design Rundown - A Hackaday Post
The Fourfold design process detailed on Hackaday
Check out our post over on Hackaday about our design process for the Thotcon 0xD badge.
Brief description:
For THOTCON 0xD (Chicago), we built 2,000 ESP32 badges with a 1.3″ IPS TFT and a capacitive touch wheel—no moving parts—for iPod-style UI and mini-games. Firmware shipped with OTA from day one, plus MQTT so badges could chat and feed a live stats board. The wheel was parametric around the display to keep ergonomics fixed while we iterated the enclosure. Choices like 1-oz copper, 8/8 mil, and dropping a mechanical dial cut BOM and assembly time at scale. Enclosures were laser-cut acrylic with M2.5 hardware; we also navigated a fun tariff misclassification on the TFTs mid-production. Want the guts? See the logs for firmware + CAD, the capacitive wheel math/delta mapping, OTA pipeline, telemetry dashboard, and a blunt postmortem on assembly and what we’d do differently when you have to ship fast to thousands of people.