This Conference Badge Is Nuts! ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/_jPm_zN95FE/maxresdefault.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: This Conference Badge Is Nuts! - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[video-notes]] [[youtube]] - Summary: this conference badge is nuts! - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jPm_zN95FE Now, this is a cool conference badge. This is from GitHub Universe, their developer conference. And the entire badge itself, actually, a printed PCB. Look, I pulled one out of the garbage cuz I'm a monster. But it's got a Wi-Fi Bluetooth chip on it, little antenna. It's got a Raspberry Pi 2350 IO out the wazoo. Obviously, a full color screen and some GPIO pins up top, which I'm going to show you how I actually use that in just a second. So, the badge itself has a bunch of apps already preloaded on it. You see there's a uh Tamagotchi, there's a Etch a Sketch on it, there's Flappy Bird, which is really fun to be able to play. And then finally, they have a badge itself, which if you load it up, connect it to the Wi-Fi, it goes and fetches all of your GitHub details and displays them right on the badge. So, I thought, of course, we got to be able to figure out how to hack them. So what I did is at the conference as well they were giving these lights out which is a kind of a 3D printed light with some 5V addressable LED pixels and then they have a spot where you can put like a ESP32 but I thought we don't need that. This is a microcontroller in itself and it has a battery. We got to be able to power it. So if you take a look up here there is a Oh, I already broke one of my shitty solders. I'll have to solder that back on before I show you. But you see we've got 3.3 volt and ground down here and then four different GPIO pins um on the top. You can see a little bit better on here. So, what I did is these things here have power, ground, and a data line which allows you to address every single one. All right, I got them soldered back on. And then when you go over to my app that I built, I'll show you the code in just a second. Start that sucker up and boom. So, the badger itself comes with a bunch of utils for doing things like drawing shapes on screen and listening for button clicks and button events. So, I made this thing where you can obviously just change the color based on where the cursor is. I did another one where if you click it once, it will just push the color that into an array and light them up like that. Of course, I had to do rainbow mode. If I hit it five times, one, two, three, four, five, then it moves into rainbow mode. And then once I get this thing fully hooked up, you can kind of see the effect that you'll get is diffuse beautiful rainbow LEDs. The code behind this is all written in something called MicroPython. So you simply just need to upload some Python code to it. I wrote a little util here to work with addressing the individual LEDs. Normally there's a library on these things called NeoPixel, but it wasn't on this one. So I just kind of wrote the minimum viable one to get me working with that. and then a bunch of Python code for listening for button presses and sending that data out to the pixels. These are all made by a company called Pimarini. Uh, and they actually sell a package for these. They make them for conferences mostly, but they sell them if you want to just grab one and hack it, which I recommend because it's kind of fun to be able to fuss around with this stuff, especially with LLMs now. It allows you to push past if you're just a lowly JavaScript programmer who's tinkered in hardware, you can sort of push past that and make some some real stuff. I do have the uh E in one from last year, which is pretty nifty, but this one just blew it out of the water. And I think it's really cool that this is this is like totally it's not plugged into anything. It's all running on a battery and it's totally it's connected to Wi-Fi. So now I'm curious, and this is probably a sentence that has never been said before, but I'm curious if I can hook up my conference badge to a previous project, which was my robot controlled vacuum cleaner. Let me know down in the comments below if I should try, This Conference Badge Is Nuts!, YouTube, 01k90b12dgj4bcsc6p7cy52760.