Camp 2023 – The flow3r Badge

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 09:30:00 +0200

Music brings us together. Vibrant colors captivate us. The flow3r is an electronic instrument - it turns touch and gesture into sound and light. Its illuminated edge is a mesmerizing accompaniment to its music and serves as a canvas for all manners of light effects. The badge invites you to create art and beauty together.

Programming is primarily done in MicroPython. This makes it easy to directly modify the built-in programs or create completely new ones. The surface can detect touches on all of its petals simultaneously, allowing for a wide range of interactions. The flow3r can be anything you want. You might already have some ideas.

Hardware

The heart of the flow3r is an ESP32-S3 with 8MiB of RAM and 16MiB of flash memory. With this platform, you have access to a plethora of existing software projects. It has a round color display with a resolution of 240x240 pixels, two built-in speakers, 3.5mm audio input and output ports, 40 RGB LEDs along the edges, and a USB-C connector. Inside, you’ll find a microSD card slot. As always, the electrical and mechanical design, as well as our firmware, are open source and can be edited with free software. The battery is optional this time, and its connector is compatible with the MCH2022 Badge battery. Of course, you can also just power the flow3r using something like a computer or power bank.

Cost

Thanks to generous support, we can source many expensive components at discounted prices or even get them for free. However, we still need to purchase the rest of the parts and cover the costs of assembly, transportation, packaging, and accessories. Since we do not want to make the tickets more expensive or accept monetary sponsorships, the badge is once again an optional add-on. So, if you want to have a flow3r, you can reserve it for an extra 32 euros. This price just covers our costs.

One more thing: We will have badges available for approximately half of the tickets. If you want one, make sure to reserve it!

Demo

Finally, here’s a sneak peek of our early prototypes:

Contact

You can find us on Mastodon at @flow3rbadge:chaos.social and in our Matrix channel #flow3rbadge:events.ccc.de.

rad1o

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 20:23:29 +0000

After r0ket launching into the world of electronic name badges four years ago, this year we bring you rad1o.

We enjoyed seeing r0ket being used for all sorts of purposes, even years after camp, still in use with old and new ideas. With rad1o we want to go one step further and give you a Toy and Tool that will stay a huge, useful playground after camp.

Inspired by the HackRF, rad1o wants to give you access to the world of Software Defined Radio – the generation and reception of electromagnetic waves, controlled by software rather than analogue technology. Where previously large chunks of money had to be invested in analogue hardware, SDR can save quite some money and every camp visitor can become an SDR hacker. And if that’s not what you’re planning or looking forward to, please hand on the opportunity to someone else, e.g. in your local Hackerspace.

With the rad1o transceiver you can send and receive between approximately 50/100 and 4000 MHz. Have a look what is going on in that spectrum (for example here)
If you got your hands on the HackRF, it’s a quick switch to rad1o. The software is compatible. Exact specs will be available soon on the rad1o website:

More details on hardware and software: https://rad1o.badge.events.ccc.de

Last camp we already were impressed by the large variety of projects using the name badge — but since we chose to surprise you with the first badge some projects were lacking the needed hardware (especially the micro-USB cables…).

This time we want an even larger variety at camp! We tested our first prototype and we are optimistic that they can do everything we want to offer. While we now spend the remaining time until camp moving thousands of components across the globe* and placing them onto PCBs, the challenge for you is to find things to do with rad1o! (*please, please wait a few more weeks if you fancy a few hundred of the components on our part list in your electronics lab)

If you have rad1o questions that are not answered in the wiki, feel free to contact us, ask questions and then fill the answers in the rad1o wiki.

Contact:

IRC: irc://irc.darkfasel.net/#rad1o (Port 6697 or 9999, TLS-only, IPv6 Support)
WebIRC: https://webirc.darkfasel.net/#rad1o
Mail: team@r0ket.badge.events.ccc.de
Twitter: @rad1obadge

You want to make your village something special? Maybe some of the objects you brought can be controlled via rad1o. Or you have some SDR riddles to solve with rad1o. Or you’ll use rad1o for transmitting… radio? or …

For more fun and games with rad1o, we recommend to definitely bring a micro USB cable, and a external power bank will also come in handy. Additionally an external antenna might come in handy, see the wiki for Details. For more blinking lights we added space for LEDs (WS2812B LEDs). We probably don’t need to mention the opportunity for more crazy cases for the badge, right? :) (find CAD data in the Wiki, too).