CG - DefCon DarkNet Badge Hardware And Software: An Introduction To Custom Badge Building - Edward A

first thing we're gonna do is go through why do we do this like why do we do the darknet in general which is not just a badge but a whole contest but before I get started I actually won the guys sitting up here in the front is the reason for our badge this year and pretty much almost all the badges before that he's the one who does all the hardware design he's the one that gives me headaches at night because I'm the one who writes all the software so he does the hardware and hands it to me and goes please make it all work so thank you for that appreciate it zero and Gator bite I'm going to turn

over to zero to talk about kind of what who we are what we do well so my interest in this talk actually was that I also want to learn how to build badges I part of this organization been with the darknet for a few years and I've always wanted to jump in and and actually I never knew where to start what do i do how do I put Hardware together how do I get a bomb together what what's a bomb and and so so I was interested in this talk and I'm glad I'm here so I can hear how to do that but let me tell you look about the darknet first the darknet as you as you may know

is a contest that we run at DEFCON it's a game it's a sort of like an MMO we're driven by a chatbot that presents questions and challenges to our agents who are players and they answer the question then interact with the chat bots and they get points as they go along now the the overall story that goes behind the demon comes from a pair of books by daniel suarez called demon and freedom and actually change age and is his newest book and so our game has an in game storyline that follows our agents and our operatives for the people who put on the game every year through this this game through this challenge and we we award points and get people to

the end and one of the primary goals that we have is in introducing everybody to Def Con to introducing them to hacking to Wi-Fi cracking to lock-picking and so we try to be an introduction and a learning game and an educational experience as well as a community besides being an event we're also an organization that runs all year round were an L see that supports this game and we support this game with many many volunteers we're all doing this just because we love it and we support ourselves actually by making money by selling these badges which support us to make more badges than next year and not like that and so we focus on many

different aspects we focus on publicity we focus on the technical aspect of what we do we focus on having user relations and getting new people in our organization to help us build bigger and bigger games every year and building and growing is something that we're very familiar with now so when I first started working with the darknet about four years ago we were four five maybe six people working on it and we had a total badge count of something like three hundred four years later we're looking at almost four times that many both volunteers with the organization and badges that we're going to be moving through both of our players and for people who are just curious to to get

these badges so I'm going to hand it over to Gator talk a little bomber a community tech okay so we're building a community that self-motivated individuals to actually get in and work with each other which is the exciting part about this and we're here to learn teach and play in the technological realm we're not claiming to be experts we're trying to get away from the elitist attitude and we're actually trying to be able to open up our arms and the opportunity for more people to come into the field so again we're supposed to be going back and forth with each other in the community so we've actually created subcommittees called Hollins and the idea behind the whole

LAN is that it is citing both hole-in apart so you're able to go through and say the same thing that we see in one individual inside of a hall on is the same idea as the hall on to where we're supposed to continue to feed back into the community and create a positive environment so with our community anybody can volunteer to get into it that's the awesome part there's a lot to do you have to be able to teach something and we're not asking for just teachers we're saying are you willing to be able to give back so this is part of our onboarding process you have to teach us something and it could be well

well we'll get into that and wherever whatever you'd like to do we have places that need to be filled and there are more things that we could be doing with your help so we usually have you come in check out a couple meetings see what areas that you guys like and then teach us something even if it's underwater basket-weaving it's all about sharing our knowledge so we're not siloing any information we want to share as much as we possibly can so the cool part is is our agents are actually starting to step up in this case they're giving back to the community past winners are helping out with current people to be able to push their knowledge forward and then

even other people are going through and arranging parties now parties anyone helping other players when they get stuck inside of the disc or channel and creating communities that encouraging again each other and giving back so I'm gonna hand it to man cook I'll actually talk about badges and I sort of think one thing I do want to make clear we are an LLC but that is only because the federal government got a little upset with us after we deposited money from the badge sales so we actually we uh we operate as a non-profit and we are still in the process of getting our nonprofit but we did have the register as an LLC because the government got a little bit

about putting all the badge sales into one person's account and the money just burst the next day some reason I thought that was upsetting to them next slide so we'll start from the badges actually year one and year two I actually wasn't a part of it I think even you're one you weren't a part of it you started on here too right right so year one was Smitty and year two is this guy I don't even know it's spinning around affirm work for that year oh cool all right and then your so when we started this was like ten I think and I think that one was a hundred and then second year our third year I'm we moved

on to this one which we had 300 Smitty wrote most of the firmware for that one and I took over the firm where the following year we actually added a display board every year we added more functionality the things that we learned was you can only fit so much into cave memory so by the third year of trying to get even at one bit per pixel and 64 128 by 64 display that's one K a memory so out of 2 K of memory thanks for getting a little tight so the third fourth year we moved on to an stm32 stm32 had 12 k of ram and was 48 megahertz so never problems with the display anymore so we got even more

aggressive and added a 9:15 transceiver nine hundred fifty megahertz transceiver display the touch buttons a whole bunch of more LEDs and this time we ran out of pins because we only had 48 of those and the keyboard plus the SPI for the radios got ate up all our pins so when we get to the sixth year we learned a whole bunch of things last year last year we learned that having two hundred and sixteen solder points for relatively new Sauter's was long and we had the hardware hacking village yell at us many many times so it's a good learning lesson not so many the other thing we learned is small SMD parts is hard for people that have

never started before so we had like a whole but at one point we actually ran out of extra resistors because people were dropping them and then couldn't find them on the floor weird so one of the things we went into this comment this year with is how do we reduce solder points how do we use bigger parts but not wanted it like we wanted to hit the balance between how do we make it easy for the newbie but also a little bit of challenge for somebody that's actually soldered before so it isn't done in five minutes that doesn't feel like you actually learned anything so hopefully we hit a good medium one of the things that we did do is we move the

capacitance buttons so that whole keyboard went away so we didn't have all those sorts anymore we also I think buddy realized last year we we actually bought the Deb boards and then you slip the Deb board into our board this year we actually laid out our crux laid out the MCU and all passives and everything for that MCU directly on our board now we got a pic in place so takeaway for us as we move from OFS tml f103 to a 32 SMT 32 302 this also moved us from 48 48 pins to 64 pins so we actually have a few left over and there are a few surprises pulled off the board every free pin is pulled out on the board this

year so you can do something with it next slide we also went the 30 30k of ram 2 and 128k of flash and I still can't fit all the code on the flash and I have packed it in as bad as tight as I can do it and they're just there just isn't enough fun that speaks more to the amount of functionality we have on the board and less to do with how horrible my software engineering skills are so this year's badge kind of waited a second for me to build up to a gator

so cool design huh crux good job huh so we we keep advancing the bench but keep going back in time so we had the t9 keyboard before more like what can we do even before a t9 keyboard well we could do the old rotary phone thing so it still is still uses an IR transceiver and it's actually compatible year five that does not mean the firmware can be uploaded because it is a different MCU but it does mean that you can pair with badges from last year and you can still send the 915 megahertz transceiver text-messaging like we did last year as well it does have a full full-color LCD screen on 30 K of RAM if you calculate

one byte per pixel on 128 by 160 you don't have a lot of RAM left at the end another lesson learned especially when someone wants to write a 3d render or with a z-buffer so the z-buffer has an entire 4 bits of Z buffer and a whole six bits of color wall it's running here in 3d mode so we did pull out pins for the audio but that code is commented out of currently because if I come if I uncomment it I don't have enough space there is a USB port on it for both charging for the lipo battery and there was also going to be for serial communication but that is also commented out because memory and

then as we said before it's powered by the stm32 302 many people when they hear the STM I think of that force and go well that's why you could do the 3d rendering no the F force have a lot more RAM than this f3s do and there's there's a few more things that I'll I'll save because that would give other prizes surprises away I'm going to turn over to Gator kind of go through how we go about setting up this development environment cuz the other thing that we learned through doing this is last year we had a good number of people try to set up our development environment and struggled a bit so this year we're actually putting

step by step by step instructions on how to do we've also had a number of people within the team now set it up and get it working this is that we wanted to make sure that we had a platform that anybody could get up and started so we started some very basic we just went with a bun - and 1604 so it's stable long-term edition and lessons learned don't try to do it on machine less than four gigabytes if you want to talk about it give me a beer afterwards going through and saying setting up the development environment there's only a handful of tools that you need but they need to be installed in an order so these are a

couple of them the arm tool chain yeah you need Java it sucks but that's okay it's cross-platform so we can go through and grab the our arm embedded tool chain you go through and grab the Eclipse long story short instead of boring you with 97 pages of how to how to videos check out the site we're gonna be go posting that after this week so then you can set this up and start playing with it so you can follow us on discord get us at Twitter or follow us on reddit as well and with that I'm gonna hand it back off to connect code so a good number of questions I get is so when I

start developing a board what should we be communicating over like if if I have a profile should I be using I squared C should I use SPI so they just use digital shows I use PWM pretty much it depends on the actual device I will say that programming wise I squared C is a dream to program with SPI is a it's my personal opinion I have a lot of problems with SPI usually but we have at least three components on the bed just here to talk SPI so it does obviously it works but there are the handling of chip select so essentially you have the master in slave out master out slave in and then the two power pins and then you

also have a chip select pin so if you set them up and in serial you have to have a difference chip select pin for each one and you pull it low each one will know which one you're talking to so if it's the second one in the chain you pull that one low the first one knows to ignore the message and pass over the second one essentially whereas I Square C you just give it an address you talk talk over to wires done so the same wire you send over the same wire receive over the display this year is actually a spi half so it it's half duplex so there's a master in or a

master slave in but that's also used for the master in slave out so there's a whole bunch of timing issues about sending it and waiting long enough before you switch back the to listen from if you want to like pull the version off the display or things like that there's very few commands you can actually run against the display but those get that there's timing issues in there that I found that even as I was moving between badges of our own badges that I was that timing wasn't working because we wanted to the next one and then digital so we use digital for our LEDs this year you could use PWM too and get different levels of brightness but

we didn't have enough hardware PDM of our PWM s to do that with this year so and I ran out of space to write it all in software ok so a little bit of a journey of building badges as we started from 300 the if I'll start from the 300 years you know getting an out getting all those things built fronting all the money upfront because they share we fronted about thirty three thousand Frank between a small number of us to get these badges built parts were going to cruxes house my place zeros house and then somehow miraculously on Monday they all ended up at the sin shop here and some very awesome people that I see

sitting in our third row helped us put it together and literally spent like nine hours this inch appleís bagging all the back badges up it was truly a group effort and it was it was really nice to see a couple of things as you once you've picked your badge and you've set up the boards we use Eagle to do board layouts all that's done you sent off your badge you get it manufactured you could be crazy like we did and have somebody else pick and place it for you which means then you have to order all the parts and get them shipped to the place that's doing a pick and place for you they then pick and place everything

for you and then they send it back you really really hope that the board works because if it does and you're gonna have to go through that whole process again so we actually had three runs of bad this year yeah three three three runs of the badge this year to make sure that we didn't run into a spot where that first display board by the way you're for when you put the display board on basically an adrenal chip we had the board it was a error on the board and one of the traces so we literally had to sit there and cut 110 boards cut the trace and put a bodge wire in place it's awesome you get stuff

really cheap from China you can order it from there twice so far this year let's place four three times twice rate twice we got caught by customs one because in that the beds which I'll do a demo of here in a bit has these cute speaker spacer so we can actually have the lipo's inside it underneath the manufacturers are though when he sent them to me I spent two hundred and three dollars for all thousand pieces that we needed they put a thousand they put a hundred and ninety seven dollar to two hundred and four dollars per piece rather than for all the pieces so our government said wow that's a really small box be

worth like two hundred grand what are you doing with this thing so it took and took many months of going back and forth with that or not many many weeks not many months going back and forth of them to finally realize because they wouldn't even tell me what what it was it was shipped and I had like seven things coming so I didn't know which one they were talking about finally I got a hold nice lady and she said they look like this little plastic spacers I was like oh I paid two hundred four dollars for the whole thing they're like it's in the wrong space and finally we got if I worked through and then the panic the

last panic was we were shipping the batteries and they wouldn't actually make the batteries until we paid for them made the batteries paid for him shipped them there one of the last things that were going to show up and they hit customs and customs said yeah we're gonna hold onto those up to sixty days for you and this was about three weeks ago so I was actually said next to zero and watch his rather para fight paleface even turn more pale as that happened that was that was stressful but within about a week I think we got it worked through and many panicked phone calls that solved that problem as well especially because we actually partnered with the crypto

village and actually bought their their batteries with ours just so we could get a large enough to get the discount last year when we ordered ordered parts I was leaving on vacation and ordered them from Aliexpress so ordering from Aliexpress and they cancelled the order as I was getting on my cruise boat so I had to call back to zero and say please could you reorder these because I don't know why they canceled them he ordered them a week later the kids in order to now I get back and we're like two and a half weeks away from the actual con and we still don't have any parts yet it appears that the first time you order

through all I express if you order more than a thousand dollars you actually have to prove your credit credit credit worthiness to them before they'll actually allow any purchases to go through so oh my god China that's all saying you got all kinds of cool stuff from there but man it could be a pain to get in the States oh one more thing so yesterday our Monday Monday we all didn't want the bad does it come in and someone assemble it and not know if it on or not so we're like okay well we'll flash the badges how long it takes the flash of thousand badges by hand about nine hours about nine hours is what it

takes what two of us going at whole time um it was it was long but I think next year we'll be looking at figuring out how to do that so we aren't literally moving a little plugs over and over again so how about demo so first there's actually a power switch this year assuming it actually turned on there we go cannot be seen that's the big disclaimer this is alpha firmware and not ready yet there I made something do what your leads of LEDs - are you happy Hey so we have the IR paring like we had last year we have the address book that once you paired you can actually look at who you paired with then you can go and

actually send them Quizzle into a text message we also have a simple 3d render running no rule for that come on guys if any idea how long it's write a software rendering the funnest part the actual dialer youtubing was counting how long it would take it's like okay that's that's how long it should take all right get her I think you got the next one right but wait there's more so we'll be presenting more information on the badge build at DEFCON in the hardware hacking village and with that I'm gonna hand it off to zero I just could say thank you thanks everybody for for supporting us for coming to this talk you know we

can't teach you everything about badge building in one hour we tried maybe takes two hours we want to thank everyone who's you know who's who's here everybody who has helped us with stuff in the back end every one of our agents who's been out there on discord for weeks and weeks working with us thanks everybody for for all of it and you know for supporting us and this badge like I said it's it's integral to our organization it funds us it it is exciting and come see us at Def Con thank you [Applause] and we targeted this for about 30 minutes so we have plenty of time for questions Dan because we assumed there would be many many hopefully we were

right no question here okay great thanks guys seen this here oh I've got a question on ER you said the the ramus I mean obviously a big limiting factor is that just because there was only 30 K a bill on that f3 chip or is it but a cost issue or what was the only have the 30 available on that f3 chip okay it there is one other one that you can go up to 48 48 would actually been enough this year cuz it would I could have at least done a color on the renderer rather than 6 but I mean you need to get and if you have a 128 by 160 or 160 pixels and you

one full color you look at 18 bits per the math I can't do math right now I had too many beers other questions you mentioned that the overarching MMO was slightly based off of the Daniel Suarez books so since this is the 20th anniversary are there going to be any autonomous murder cycles in the game can we get yeah bets yeah we actually voted on that it was a close vote I won't tell you how it turned out just out of curiosity question for you guys how many darknet agents are in the room can I get hit show hands nice guys for coming out snubz you know my question is because I'm not super familiar with writing code

but I'm pretty familiar with doing the electronics part the hardware hacking do you have any recommendations people I could talk to you books that I could read to get me more familiar with writing the programming for badges in case I wanted to build my own so the fun part about that is we actually have something in the works to where we're creating a site that you're able to reference and that there's not only just reference ins for that but there's references for a lot of the rest of the DS the darknet as well so check out Holland that network and more on that will be coming in the future and hold on hol Oh n dot n ET wo RK and

we also badge code is open sourced years before you can see the source code and see how that works and then for this year we'll open source it after the conference one more thing there too it is not easy especially if somebody hasn't done like the hardware hardware stuff I did a little bit with crux this year and I have crux to teach so that helps but the software side of things it when someone says I squirt see and you're like okay what does that mean and the best best examples and the best learning tools I found so far as excellent Sparkfun I literally usually when I'm doing this up I have it sitting up and I'll read through what I squared

C is again refresh my memory then go back and do it even if there's API to work from cool part about the STM is there is a hardware instruction library so you can write the code once and as long as you pound to find out your pins right you can move between their bed between their MC use without changing a bunch of code so that does help that guy we had one in the back so is someone who is familiar with software and like you know websites and stuff like that what some of the challenges you face in the software with regards to like where the hardware doesn't behave is it promised or tell me that never

happens or there's variance between this allegedly same component and how'd you give me smiley handle pain like this its button versed this one here that are right next to each other but somehow this one you have to push on harder on yes I spent many many hours literally sitting there for that literally touching the buttons and having a stream of readout so I can see how much the capacitance was dropping and how fast it was dropping off to the point where I actually skipped over the Hal code and was just reading it directly off the capacitors just so I could see how fast was dropping going okay maybe they have a bug in their library and that's why

I'm not picking up the change enough sometimes this is what you have to do the other thing about a program an MCU level I mean a lot and I probably sound like an old man here but I mean a lot of the new languages that get taught I mean you don't get taught what a section is how to read a map file I mean all that stuff is still in play so I mean it's like going back to the late 80s and still reading map files when you compile something and figuring out where was that when I ran out of space there's nothing to tell me what ran out of space other than to literally go mat file

looking at the BSS section going ok for some reason when this thing got added to the executable and I went up by 2k of 2k of space why did that happen go look for the structure find the structure go pack structure tighter do the same and I spent hours doing just that [Music] hello-o last year I thought that they had a sign up that said that you had to pre order to get the badge is that standard that you you have to buy it ahead of time or do you have badges available now we always so we we don't do ahead of time the only thing we do is anybody that completes the case file that we put up

which is three and a half times warned we've had the complete last year which is kind of Awesome what's that this year we're three hollows 300 in the we just have badges and we'll post one this badges are gone will be available so the people who create there who are able to go through that entire process get first access to is what happens that was another key learning there was a year where we didn't do that and we actually had people that were very into the contest that then couldn't complete it because they couldn't get a badge because someone else too so we're trying to make sure that the people that play your first dibs on it and actually have

reserved badges the people have finished I don't so we don't talk about how many we actually bring because there was incident a couple of years ago so when we run out we run out more than the nape last year though yeah literally more than last year because like I said $32,000 out in front front and I put out a chunk of that myself so huge fan of this for his books but I think soul ball might have killed me I'm a terrible agent and so I'm looking for assistance since this was a selfish ask for help so I don't know yeah that's what I'm asking right now that's why I'm doing it so anyway after we're doing who wants to

help me I would appreciate it if darken that tables always there me and discord we have a lot of people on discord all there are no spoilers channels yeah right so it's not just spoiled the cool the cool part about it's not just spoilers and people are not supposed to be posting answers you're supposed to be encouraging other people to move forward and being able to say here's how I or the right path that I wouldn't you solve it but not giving the answers another question what's that you'll see it in all our social media channels and in this court announcement channel I gotta ask one quick question how many in the room this is gonna date me how many in

the room have actually played a mud before okay good I'm at we got this that's all I'm gonna say okay yeah I got a question things with the young lady just ask they're winning in case it's on air they're already winning where they're gonna be on soil I we will post both in our discord channel on our Twitter and in all the all the operatives which are the staff will be posting on their own personal Twitter's as well to make sure every to get the word out we'll do it on the reddit as well so any time that we do it on ones we're doing it across all other social medias not just an interesting part of

growing up sorry Gator is growing to a team of 20 we actually now have like a sign off thing before something goes out so we don't get one group like announcing one thing and someone else going because we did that last year and I bet everybody I'm mad at us because the two different piece of information we're out it's it's interesting trying to hurt a bunch of volunteers hey what's up um so is somebody who's helped people solder the darknet badge for the last four years really glad that we have less surface mounts did you hear that well last year with the reflow oven that was super cool but how did you guys do the

balance between having that sharp look of a surface mount board with kind of making it easier this year we cheated we had to pick a place force that's how any other questions more than that Victor I don't want to hear let's go go back first I'm just curious about two things so the first thing is are the cost breakdown I'd like to share a bit about the cost breakdown and secondly what was the timeline like for the creation of the batches so I guess that's another lesson that we learned last year has last year we were actually we had the last prototype of the badge made I think July 10th and then had to order the official ones had to pay extra

to get them built and made on time and they got shipped the cruxes house I believe two days before the concert there was many nervousness at that point this year we had all the components saved the actual PCBs and the batteries by the end of June and the batteries with the the last-minute Customs thing didn't help nerves and then the PCBs I think we had by July 11th 12th its owner started the development cycle way early we started pretty much right after the con last year rather than waiting till almost March when we had the whole ABR we gonna go with the new bad design old bad design we started really early proved it out very early and then just

kept on iterating on components and and prototypes from a management standpoint I'm managing a group of 20 volunteers breaking them down into the site where we had all the different groups so one group took story another group took badges another group took software another skin breaking that in and putting leads in at each one and having leads come back to a meeting initially every other week for an hour just to go over hey what's the timeline for your group when's this going you know what and not that we dictated anything but you guys tell us what you're gonna do and then we're just gonna track to it that helped a ton and as the as we get

bigger we're enough to keep coming up with better ways of managing a group that large there was you mentioned the trade-off between it sounds like there's a little bit of an arms race between the hardware and the software and figuring out what the right components onto no argument ever and then you get to a certain stage where you have to come out some code can you talk a little bit about I imagine some of this a cost a decision about whether you're gonna go for 32 Ram versus you know 64 you know what do you have in terms performance so so this year it was it was really driven around oh my god we better not have that many solder

joints ever again or a bunny will kill us run the hardware hacking village and we don't want that because we like bunny and I think crooks was up one night and said hey what about if we just use touch buttons and that kind of drove us to hey we need a processor actually has a sampling capacitor built into it so that kind of started limiting it and then he's then I think I told him that I'd kill him if he changed the architecture processor architecture again because going from our from an Atmel chip to a an m4 was painful enough I don't think I wanted to do that again so that's kind of how we

got there I'm think it was so much around cost because actually the sctv X the ST chips are pretty cheap to begin with I don't know roughly two bucks apiece so other questions we got one in the back

I um so I had a question but first I wanted to say I've had a lot of exposure to kits going all the way back to like heath getting grey mark and stuff like that last year's def or last year's darknet badge was one of the funnest kits I've ever made period so thank you oh um second you you talked a couple times about RAM constraints do you is there a way to augment that to make it easier on you and second like could you add an external RAM or something and second do you leave it at what it is as kind of a personal challenge or what I have to admit there's probably a little bit of

that yes I didn't have to add the 3d renderer but I did and considering the room wasn't all that impressed maybe I shouldn't have it was just spinning cube I gotta get something right I think some of its at but the the RAM is harder to come by I mean we could add external RAM but it's gonna be really slow I can add an extra flash flash is a little bit easier to work with the flash constraints are usually gotten around by just realizing if you usually put static cost in front of whatever you're doing though the compilers will usually recognize that and immediately right at the flash and yes the the way they all the ARM

processors are is that's just mapped directly into memory for you like the st's ST it Maps it in it at hex million I believe that's where it gets mapped in at so you can address it like you address any other piece of memory another question so for each of you if you could go back and give one piece of advice to yourself you know back a year back two years related that's whether it's the software for the badge of the hardware for the badge storyline whatever building out what the awesome is the darknet is today what would it be for each of you okay so plan every year we go through and we have these grand

schemes and making sure that you push as much as you possibly can forward you have yourself a time line if you don't set any goal by saying hey I should be able to accomplish this in this amount of time then move on to the next project you will find yourself on Wednesday needing to enter a whole bunch of quests I and as soon as we're done with the talk being able to finish anything like I'm just gonna go ahead sir so for sure for me it would be to remind myself that we should only change one major thing at a time last year we took a completely new software infrastructure a completely new user interface a completely new

badge I'm sure it was like a completely new everything and we did it all in the same year and it was difficult I would remind myself that that's not a good idea I'd say we did do that last year and it was incredibly painful I think you guys probably all seen the scurrying around trying to write the back end code even while the conference was going on last year err um for me I mean there's there's a sarcastic side of me that says never a told Smitty I'd take over the firmware the part of me that says that but I think I would go back and say hey don't just look at it as software you have to

learn the hardware side too because the first couple of years I was like crux has got the hardware it's all good it was only till last year in this year where I actually started digging and I could actually read the Eagle files it solved a lot of problems and just starting I'd say even just now after two years of doing it finally the terms are not like oh god I gotta go look that up again it takes a long time there's a lot of them especially with somebody that I mean I'm classically trained as a chemist and then became a software engineer never touched hardware before so it's it was a long road any other ground any other

questions Kruk so you want to add to that good call start earlier yep so questions about battery do you guys shoot for like a specific amount of run time or is it just like as big a batteries you cram or how are you how do you figure out what size battery um well correct figured out what size battery but we do try to target so that's what the rechargeable one it was a little bit easier because we figured that we only had to make it through a day and then everybody could charge it at night when we had the three batteries we did try to make sure that the three batters would actually make it all the way through the

con and I'll admit that I only just figured out how to do that about three weeks ago so and where I like literally hooked up the badge and had the amp meter running going oh that's why the battery goes down so much when I turn on all the LEDs sweet so anything you want to add to that correct a lot of it's a swag it's like ah that should be good right there is actually a way to measure it though and I've figured out how so it's good you need to patch together first though which is the hard part alright any other questions oh god I gotta I gotta make it to Sunday first it

but knowing this group by Monday there'll be all this chatter of like we could do this we could do this and I'm like guys sleep we have a meeting on Tuesday that's sure we do okay um how hard was it for you to source all the stuff that you need to make the badges from China I mean did you just order online blindly or did you actually fly out there in Ohio there I mean I'll stress again that this is all a group of volunteers it is an LLC but we run it like a non-profit in fact every year so far we've actually been in the red not into black it's this group of people just love doing this and quite

honestly it's my one of my funnest times a year because I get to be with these guys inside the Eagle you can actually just say generate bomb so once you have all your pieces laid out you can generate the bomb and then crux does some voodoo black magic spreadsheet work and then we just order off the voodoo black magic spreadsheet look you'll have to talk to crux about what how many chickens he has to sacrifice to create that spreadsheet many looks like we got one more yeah one here too awesome they're just making sure they're on a complete opposite side of the room to keep you bouncing back and forth the money already that's what we do so I have to second

this individuals comment this is an absolutely funnest most addicting aspect for myself but I have noticed that the challenges have progressively gotten harder from when the game first is started okay thank you very much I've always been an advocate for people to join this do you have a targeted audience that you'd like to see start to play this because I felt it was very good for me to learn in the beginning it was easier it's getting harder to hang in there so do you have like you know a particular audience that you're looking because I thought it was great because it touched every aspect of the con and I don't want you guys to lose that sure so

that's a tricky problem in general you know I mean for the first few years the content was pretty introductory and pretty repetitive for that reason and so as we started to branch out and get more people the flip side of that comment is oh that's just the Tor quest again the same one that we had all those other years so we constantly struggle to hit the balance between introductory content branching into new areas and keeping the old content and and then giving more advanced stuff to make it a more and more challenging contest year after year we welcome you know feedback any anybody wants to should jump in the discord and help us with that because it's not a

soft not a soft problem by any stretch and one of the things that we've worked really hard to do year after year is try to come up with a system where we can keep all of the content up year-round and we're this close and with this I mean as long as you keep up with primes you'll get most of zero stuff but you need to make sure he understands that primes suck in general and that relative rhymes are much better by the way and along with that is that ultimately our goal is to be able to still keep some beginner stuff so people can be able to get their foot in the door and then they're able to have a next level

so a newb a advanced and then oh my god what did they do this here so we're we're getting into the swing of things trying to create quests that have that in mind when we're here awesome thank you you're awesome I just given your chemistry background you might want to clarify Bom Bom to the audience that's a good point you know you too young can I three and you put none you make really cool stuff what an i3 though don't any other questions can you give us an easter egg for the badge for this year then Oh so the dialer there might be phone numbers you can enter in the dialer and get stuff maybe there you go there's

particular song back in the eighties I probably was I did expect everybody in a room to get it y'all old is me damn so for the content that's on the badge is if it is it all stored in source I'm sorry the the content that's on the badge is that all stored in source I cuz what I was thinking is if you offload the content onto you some slow storage like an SD card it may save up some room for round to be able to work so this year's been I guess I didn't point this out but this year's bed does have an SD card reader but that codes commented out too cuz I couldn't fit a sticker or kit

and for financial reasons couldn't put it give everybody an SD card along with it so if that was alright thank you guys [Applause]