THOTCON 0xA Badge
A badge that talks and listens
The 0xA badge is about sound. It has a speaker, a microphone, and a face that lights up, and its firmware was a puzzle for the whole conference.
Specs
- Event
- THOTCON 0xA, Chicago, May 3–4, 2019
- Chip
- ESP32, on SparkFun's ESP32 Thing design
- Sound
- Speaker and microphone
- Controls
- Five capacitive touch pads: up, down, left, right, select
- Lights
- Six backlit LEDs: two ears, two eyes, two halves of a mustache
- Network
- Wi-Fi
What it does
The badge shipped as a puzzle. Press the right combination on the touch pads and it reads you a message in the NATO phonetic alphabet. There was also a contest for the best badge hack.
The face on the front lights up in six places: the ears, the eyes, and each half of the mustache.
How it was built
This was our first badge on the ESP32. The plan from the start was a badge that works mainly through sound, with lights and a button to go with it.
After the conference we published examples so people could keep going: lighting up the face, turning the touch pads into a soundboard, and streaming audio off the microphone over Wi-Fi. The repo also has the stock firmware, in case a hack goes wrong.
I taught a workshop on hacking the badge at the conference.
Who made it
- Jay Margalus led the badge, with the THOTCON badge team.