so the day started as it usually does, i installed 300ft of low voltage wiring around the house, installed some ELD 3W lights that i picked up from alixpress for $each with transformers from lowes (the equiv lights from lowes are usually around 20-30$ each ) , picked up some R G and B ones was well as the white, used warm white since cool white doesn't usually work for traditional landscaping. i spent an hour or two soldering in lamp wires since i don't care for the vampire taps , t taps or the style they sell at the hardware stores, plus they're like $5 each, almost as much as the light!

another one of my siblings came by and wanted their iphone 6 vs the 6s i did last week, fixed, so far screen swap, battery swap the usual stuff.

anyway on to the badge, i'd swapped out a npn transistor to a npn darlington, should have done a npn to pnp darlington or just bit the bullet and went back to the straight up mcu pin to npn transistor to current limit+ leds for the backlight. with the npn darlington it just wouldn't pass the current properly, so it ended up around 2.4V and flickery, if you saw me on twitter i posted about it being late, lack of sleep and possibly jumpering the wrong two pins on the transistor! so redesigned that circuit, or rather went back to original since we also decided we don't need to carry the module as well as the FPC LCD.

fitted out the battery holder, sourced that and started the new layout....again...

giant! so all that stuff gets shifted down about 30mm.

decided to check out different sdcard arrangement and remembered the one used on the voice, it was small and easy to repair solder ( very important at hacker cons) ,so switched to the molex 0475710001, which is cheaper, after ordering 20 for testing, then looking for a vocore dock i find strip of 50 for other projects in boxes, if we ever decided to sort out our component stocks, we'd likely be able to build a full set of badges without buying anything, it can be crazy, boxes of LEDs, i still have a box of every 0603 value resistor mouser sold about 4 years ago, and its never really been opened.



test fitted the lanyard, i always copy the holes from the previous years badges, so that is usually all good but since they're often metal clips, watch out for shorts.



ordered some more parts, we don't usually make this many prototypes, only the proxmark variant had so many built. going to reach out to a friend of mmca's in china , who doesn't speak english, but does speak chinese and korean, but apparently not for electronics and see if they can help us get the displays from taobao, most LCD modules or bare LCDs are crazy expensive from US suppliers, ebay or amazon, or even alixpress, and wading through alibaba these days is just awful, for a multiple store quote, 90% of the time its the same seller and they don't have it, and if they did its 3x the price listed.

taobao is usually better price wise because unlike aliexpress+alibaba they haven't really penetrated the western markets, so the prices are set what you'd pay in china, and not pay in the west, its a huge difference. it can also be a bit more work, depending on which store you use.



a year or two ago i saw an sms conversion, so i started to look at porting that over, it is an interesting area, since i've written many emulators over the year both for fun and professionally, last one i did was for sega to do the megadrive, so it can often limit what i want to do, better to use someone else's and just port it.

mmca wanted to change to the micro usb vs the mini, i dislike micro usb, but i accept that is the much more common cable, mini is a lot rarer for people to be carrying.

a while ago when hackaday started their store/tindie thing there was a beta, i was part of that so i bought something, it was a usb power meter something i have a few of and they're ok, but this one looked neat and i like to support people making stuff as well as HAD. so i picked it up and immediately put it in a drawer for ages, it seemed to split...