PG - Building the badge- How you can make small, cheap and custom hardware for function or fashion -

all right everybody we'll get started good afternoon welcome to be sighs Las Vegas proving ground this talk is called building the badge how you can make small cheap and custom hardware for function or fashion our speaker is James title couple announcements before we get started we want to thank our sponsors especially our inner circle sponsors critical sac and Valley mail and our stellar sponsors blackberry the National Security Agency and silence it's their support along with the rest of our sponsors and our volunteers and our donors that make besides possible so thank you these talks are being streamed live as a courtesy to our speakers and our audience please make sure your cell phones are set to silent position if you

have a question at the end just please raise your hand we'll call on you one at a time and we'll have our speaker repeat your question back so the YouTube audience can hear their question and that's it with that with that let's get started please welcome James title hi there so some background but for myself as I was in the Navy I did some pen testing broke on the ships did all that fun stuff did all these other cool little things but the important part is I had no electrical engineering stuff beforehand and we are going to talk about how to go from like absolutely having no idea about Electrical Engineering to coming up with some kind

of thing you can either have to wear or to kind of move along with designing something cool for your pin test or whatnot so why even make a circuit board back in the day Joe grant DC 14 decided to make a badge and so what Joe grand did he made basically a little tiny blinking badge they very simplest of things in in multi different colors that kind of caught on as people started doing some more interesting and cool things all the way from making just a nicer artwork to as we do start lighting things on fire and shooting out the flames and that kind of stuff with badges it's just what we do as the price

of PCB has gone down as you can customize it as if you has become super super easy kind of spawn this thing and then some of the badges we're going to quickly discuss here are the corn totem so hopefully everyone has a corn totem if not I have gotten you a little tank corn badge and then I also made the seven one three snake add-on before but this all kind of spawned on the this thing called badge life where there's all these people putting together their own cool personal things and then we have thousands of PCBs worth thousands of dollars worth of stuff to have that people play around with understand circuits better and kind of push things

along to do interesting and cool things so what we're trying to do again is people like me who just suddenly go into this you can do be doing some of these things some of these people haven't touched electric control call engineering stuff in many many years and then this is kind of their foray into it and suddenly they're doing some crazy interesting stuff so we're trying to get it so you're able to do the exact same thing and you're not screwed so here's something that's scary the hack RF of course this kind of looks it's very confusing there's lots of lines I'm not really sure what this is we're not gonna get this far in this talk but we do want

to start off with a little building blocks that will kind of build into something where eventually you can go and perhaps create something along those lines create your own custom tools that you can do interesting and amazing stuff with so another discussion point is we need to go talk about the fundamental so this was the how people had the original components where you put together radios back in the day that's kind of a lost art on a lot of us I found this in my grandparents basement back in the day when I was little and started lighting things on fire by accident but we don't have that same foothold into Electrical Engineering that we had back in the day

just our electronics are way too complex so the bad life stuff making these badges is a way to get that initial foothold to doing some of this interesting stuff and allows you to go into more difficult problems and kind of have an understanding of why you'd want to go into the interesting aspects of this this also adds into some articles which are kind of goofy nowadays like the Bloomberg article that it's basically going back to hey hard with there's a hardware problem with it and while we can get into routers and other devices along those lines we new need a basic understanding to to go into that and this is going to help provide some of that so the

standard that we want to talk about the shitty add-on standard so the people from hackaday and the badge Alive community decided to go ahead and say something that is super easy and basically all you need to know from this is there's at least some power and a grounding in there so it allows you to do the very basic stuff like making a blinking LED and why these things are really great is it because they add on additional constraints so in that you have only certain colors to work with certain artistic constraints you're not going to decide to do some crazy big project like build out something that talks across the entire Las Vegas Strip or you're not going to try to remake the

ninja badge or something along those lines instead it helps you focus down on two small things that you're able to do because I don't know about everyone else I have lots and lots and lots of projects that I've been sitting in my garage that I just haven't been able to get done and do and this also is nice because we have a force deadline so I have to get done by be sighs I can't keep putting it off until the next project next project next project so that's another good reason why these things make sense on helping you kind of push these projects along so let's talk about PCBs from the very beginning if you take a look at your corn totem you

can see the substrate is basically the stuff that holds everything together on top of that you'll have copper which is where all the electricity flows so these are for your traces and everything along those lines however with beds life we also add on its to make it shiny and make it look nice so like the corn kernels on your corn totem right now is a great example of that the top of that is a solder mask normal people saying people like solder mask wear net wherever you can possibly get it right because you don't want electricity to short out to other places however we like the shiny stuff we like making things that look nice and so

we're going to do things where we perhaps take off more solder mask than normal people would do then finally at the very top is the silkscreen which is really just for putting the names additional details those types of things on it it doesn't actually add to the functionality of the device at all so when you have all these that's for one sided board now for a two sided board like you have you just flip it right super easy when you look at like your iPhones or your Android devices those are usually eight layers about nowadays so you can see it could get really complex super quickly now if you look at the front you can see this in another way so obviously

it's not going look like a straight up cake all the time instead you're going to see some areas where there is the holes for your components to go through or you have areas where you don't have solder mask where you want to do some surface mount type devices or components along those lines another big area is making sure you have holes that go all the way through it whether you want to have it for a lanyard or if you want to have components actually just go through the entire board so you'd have components very similar to that those are the two kind of components are really looking at for that and both of them they have

different way things to think about when you do them through holes are really easy to solder if you're making a kit of some sort the the surface mounts usually are cleaner and maybe if you don't need to it makes it so it doesn't perhaps grab on to as many things and you don't it doesn't take as much board space up as well so let's talk about the artistic side of this so in here you kind of have your color palette of four things I'm substrate is kind of a wash you don't really get a choice on what that looks like because normal people don't want to show off the substrate for our badges here not the corn totem but the corn

badge actually has a substrate only layer so because we're trying to show light through it but that's where we're trying to reduce the amount of layers the lights trying to fight through and things along those lines copper is obviously just a little those areas where you can easily see where the traces are and different different things like that solder mask goes on top of those things and then the silkscreen is we have the additional color so you basically have these four colors to work with however when you're working through the different vendor options they do have different vendor options for you so as you're designing your badge you might decide oh I want to have a purple badge

well in this case you wouldn't PCB way has a purple option that you can choose so you can have that or you could go with jlc PCB and then there's other groups like OSH Park and and those other ones some considerations though make sure you are when you're looking at things when you're pricing everything out that you the vendor you're looking at will provide this because otherwise you don't want to go through the entire thing and suddenly realize oh yeah the vendor I'm going with they don't have this color solder mask they don't have this color silkscreen or things along those lines so let's talk about what you can't do once the biggest thing is like

ghostbusters you don't ever want to cross the streams the electricity doesn't know which way to go and bad things happen so super easy concept that the next biggest part is you want to make sure you don't have any right angles more of a because of a structural integrity issue where you have their traces they easily come up they have bad things happen to it along those lines also from a machining perspective hopefully you'll have the some kind of device doing this they have trouble as they have momentum of moving through all these different things based on the different manufacturer so the right angles also just produce a less structurally sound trace for you the other one is don't get too close to the

other traces so again if as long as you have good manufacturer as long as they have a very precise machines this isn't as much of a problem or if you have thicker traces because you can decide how how girthy your traces are then you won't end up creating the problems where they accidentally cross the streams and have that that bad moment with that and then the other thing to think about there's always it's three-dimensional so always have the option of going underneath bored so if you're running into an issue where you're you can't get around other ways or if you want to make it look cleaner neater nicer you can always just go underneath that and we're going to

see this in the next slide so this is a from the corn batch and one of the most complex part of it parts of this is how we're trying to do all the traces for the SAO 1.69 standard so at the very bottom of that and so as you can see very well discuss layers in a in a minute but the red is top green is on bottom we're trying to keep the prettiest stuff at on the top so we're trying to not have as many things up there so you can see where looks right here like we are crossing the streams right and that would be bad except we did this where we have this

over the top and we're minim and we can minimize that and then a these are on the bottom so we are able to use the two sides of the board to get around this issue so we can do all the programming that we need the big thing to talk about with artwork is bringing always having either Adobe Illustrator again so different layers so that when you're designing your artwork really be thinking about how you're going to be using your different artistic layers so for the snake badge this is we're saying hey this we're applying the silkscreen here and so we have the layer deciding to do that this is solder mask again as we talked

about the same people when to apply anywhere so we're basically putting where we do not want to apply the solder mask and this is for the front we do need to have copper underneath it though to have the the shininess and then the same thing on the back the big part is Meerut otherwise this it's not read the right way and then the same thing with the solder mask coming back so we don't have it for the Texas Star some art considerations you really need to take part up is standard size for wearables don't have a Flavor Flav's size badge because that won't go through the machines and can't be done usually with the sao it's about 50 by 50 millimeters

is about the the standard size be very careful about machining again if you have really crazy sharp corners if i was trying to put hairs on the corn to very make a very detailed badge you start running into a big issue because the machines can't do that and they two issues even with the corn badge I was running the issues of sharp corners with that where the machines are we're not precise enough then goes into another issue for the snake I had to make because the neck used to be more slender if people are wearing this around DEFCON besides you're bumping into people you have to be very careful of sharp corners or the fact that you could

just break a component straight off if you f is not structurally sound enough so if you're looking at the cat software that you're using you can either go with eagle or Chi CAD it's really kind of up in the air on which one's better some considerations to take even professional electrical engineers use both so the thing to really work about is price Eagles great because it's free under two layers if you're so for the first ones CAD is always free Eagle does have a easier learning curve but Chi CAD is able to move some things around a little bit more at I think wins out in the end and I like it better just because it

allows me to communicate better with some other people and it's being used more often in the community right now so let's talk about schematics so this is your basic schematics like it again it's not super difficult right here and let's walk through it so we have the eighty tiny and this is for the corn batch so they have the eighty tiny resistor LED blinky light and then we have the Sao back here to give it power down to the eighty tiny super simple all right and now ways since we have the schematic we can take a step ahead and put into what we call the footprints so these are what the components will actually like

when we started putting it in Chi Chi de Galan everything along those lines and we just want to map these out really quickly so every single thing on the schematic has a footprint that is exactly the same so you can do drag-and-drop later on in either Chi CAD regal in this case we're going to be using Chi CAD so this is kind of the the finished and we'll of where we might be able to drop all these different things if we're doing the corn badge and it's really just a simple for artwork as long as you'd have the different layers you can load and then hey this is front silkscreen load this is back soaks

written like it is really that easy to do so when when you've reached the point where these are all put in together you put them on top of each other you have all these different layers that you're like looking at and there's going to be some better talks at the hardware hacking village of some of these layers really in-depth but this is again not that scary because these are the same things we talked about before frontside mask back our front copper back copper the front silkscreen the back silkscreen solder mask the only thing that's new is the cuts around the edge so just where we want to cut out so we actually have the badge coming out and we have kind of

that outline so where we don't want any material and so again looks very scary but it's not that difficult if you've you ever used Adobe Illustrator before or being very familiar with those things components these are footprints we have before these are where we're kind of just dragging and dropping so in this case you'll see a from our layer discussion we'll see they 8 this is the green stuff that green means on the back and that's the coppers easy right and then this is for an LED same thing we have over here for a resistor so then you end up at the end of day but the nice little front side you'll notice that we're really quickly we have a

little bit of red there that's the trace on front and we tried to keep it I tried to keep as much of the stuff off the front as possible and move it to the back and so that's where it looks all kind of crazy all over the place but the idea being that we can shine light through this and then have the corn shine up slowly and there's a nice little 3d print and then finally you're able to send it off to the printer so you just have to click a little button you have a Gerber file which you can go upload to all the different printers so here are all the different vendors you

can think about me there's a really a big trade off between US and overseas and whether you want to do just board printing or also picking place or putting components down on to the badge the big things with China is its yeah it's cheaper but you have longer shipping delays you can have said things like tariffs that pop up it's kind of weird u.s. is great cost more but you can easily talk with the people so how many should you produce is this is pretty obvious overall like you more you make the cheaper it's gonna be right the difficult part is trying to figure out your demand and how many of those you're trying to figure out and that goes into

some costing and funding strategies so with my first batch I started with Kickstarter and that was great because it let me know the interest so I know how to produce exactly this number I needed so I was able to produce 200 because I needed 200 but it had a little bit higher feeding so I tried tindy this year which is great because it had a lower fee but I had to pay for everything upfront and I had a guesstimate so I guess a higher number and that was was great but the the other issue is you might have a cash flow problem if you're doing a large like thousands of dollars worth of this stuff

I wouldn't recommend it and go smaller because you could be stuck where hold your floating that money for a month and then you can also just do it by yourself I've seen a lot of people do that but then you run into that cashflow problem and then it becomes kind of like a second hand in job where you're trying to hock your wares and everything so if we're going to go discuss how much all this costs we have a corn batch that cost for the corn baggies because the eighty tiny everything was $5 you can see where all the money comes out it's really the eighty tiny 85 in the pickin place so if I'm going back and trying to

figure out a way to do a cheaper badge those would be the areas I look at there's a sliver that you can't even see which is the wrong resistors that I put in and big deal really not a big deal compared to the fact that I paid for someone to go ahead and place these things so those are some of the considerations you really need to be taking a look at if you're running into an issue of hey is this going to be a cost that people will buy because they probably won't buy a $5,000 badge but you might be losing tons of money if you're trying to sell them off for a dollar each or something along those

lines so with all that with all these different things as we run through all this stuff it sounds very confusing is it good to do is it fun and I bring up yes he absolutely should because there's a great picture of dc-7 1/3 doing soldering of the snake badge and now everyone came together to put these kits together because we didn't do pick-and-place class this year or that that year it was amazing it was awesome to see the excitement of someone pointing together something just like that and then with my my daughter was also super excited about putting snakes together which is really weird and we'll wonder about her in the future as we shift out everything out

into Kickstarter but was a great little family project and then even with Colonel Khan this year we had everything everyone soldering like for their first time and it brings up again a like where else do you get to do these things besides hacker conferences and where else do you get to put something together where people really love to do these things and really get excited about cheap little pieces of plastic so that's why I would recommend everyone has the skills to do this and go be like the next Joe Grant so again thank you to besides for putting over anything together and Rachael for helping me out with my slides these are all all beyond

later I hopefully everyone has a badge if they do not in this room please come up and see me real quick well we'll sort something out real quick but any questions yeah so yeah so the question is is there any tips for lining everything up and I think the biggest thing is make sure you run it to prototype because no matter how hard you work on different things there's always something that pops up at again and again and again so my biggest advice is for all those different things is start super early it's like so if you're ready for besides next year start now and then just so you can make sure you get the

cheapest shipping options and you can keep costs really low and then make sure you get those uh those prototypes in sooner otherwise it's all just like meticulous looking at it it's really cat sucks yes I do prototype for all of them yeah so I'm horn it's it's from Nebraska so the 402 is Nebraska's area code so similar we had the dc-7 one three snake that was a that was Houston apparently some Swift person also likes corn I don't understand it but yeah have I ever tried design spark no I have not yeah yeah footprint and so footprint libraries are kind of an issue that I ran into a lot so it's always one those just like interesting

it's like dependency hell for like Linux same way yeah so the question is do you have it do I have a standard thing of components to always think about there is it's yes except for the fact that it as people share what components they're using we tend to buy out the world stock of a component it's this weird phenomenon that the Badger life has been doing so the big thing is double check on the components I usually get my again like a small site off of like Mouse or something along those lines to make sure they're the right size I tried using a 402 resistor and for the 402 badge because that'd be clever but that's way

too small to hand solder and I think everyone hates me um from the seven one three snake badge because like they lost all those those 402 so really really be looking at something that is big enough that you can use again and again so the question is for Chi CAD is there an easy way to put in our work again and again so I felt it was very easy with the when you have load bit it's a little literally load bitmap and then you're you pull it in and in you have to there is a sizing thing so you have to always have a standard sizing aspect of it and so it once you create that you do

actually create a component so you could import it into other libraries as well

have I used the Inkscape Inkscape is also a great one I have not used it I know like tween Twinkle Twinkle and some other people so so I need to use it Inkscape some more this is what I'm hearing so yeah okay okay do I assume you like my circus before I yes I do because otherwise you run into a really interesting and bad things because so you should you should always be doing playing around with a normal bread board so actually all the corn totems actually have a debt board on the back of it if you take a look at it so in your with a hardware hacking village or something that's kind of you can use those to like

really think about your next one as well alright thank you [Applause]