Thotcon 0xD Design Rundown - A Hackaday Post
The full THOTCON 0xD badge design rundown, as posted on Hackaday.io.
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.