The Def Con 29 badge details #defcon29 @defcon @Hackaday
This year’s DEF CON is being presented in both physical and virtual forms simultaneously. If you made to Las Vegas, great. If not, you can follow along through chat rooms and video streams from the comfort of your own home. Following the theme, the DC29 badge is not only a practical tool for virtual attendees, but an electronic puzzle for those who are able to bring a few of them together physically.
The DC29 badge is a four-key RGB mechanical macro pad that connects to your computer over USB-C. Out of the box the keys are configured to work with Discord, allowing you to do things like mute your microphone and fire off some appreciative emotes. Along the right side of the device are three touch pads which are configured to work as a volume slider.
The badge enumerates as a serial device, and if you connect to it with a terminal emulator, you’ll be presented with a simple user interface for re-configuring not only the function of each of the four keys, but their individual RGB color values.
The board uses an Atmel ATSAMD21G16B, a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller.
Firmware updates are installed using a method that will be familiar to anyone who’s worked with MicroPython. Holding the bottom right key while plugging in the badge will cause it to show up as a USB Mass Storage device that contains the firmware in UF2 format.
Those attending DEF CON physically may find they need to perform a firmware update before their badges will actually do anything interesting when connected to each other, but by all means, give it a shot and let us know.
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