building badges for fun not profit
Mailchimp told us in May they were killing rich HTML on the free tier. Not a warning shot .. an email that showed up in the same batch as that month’s newsletter, saying the format we’d used for six issues wasn’t going to render right anymore unless we paid up.
Last time was the models .. the brains. This time it’s everything else: the boxes, the wires, the dull little programs that turn a few language models into something that actually runs a business while I’m asleep.
Here’s the question I get more than any other, and the one I’ve spent six episodes not really answering: what are these things actually running on?
If the first five posts in this series read like everything works, that’s because I edited them carefully. This one is the cutting-room floor.
When people ask how I run seven AI agents, they want to hear about the agents. The clever prompts, the personalities, the moment one of them did something that made me sit back in my chair.
Most mornings, before anything else, I open one page and look at it for about thirty seconds.
A few weeks ago I sat down with a Monster and found a job already finished .. one I’d never assigned to anyone.
For most of last week, I didn’t manually triage a single email.
A few weeks ago, my inbox automation surfaced an email I’d never opened.
If you’re looking for the CactusCon 14 badge (CC14) files—this is the one link you want.
MyBadgeLife Has Reached MVP+ Status – Here’s What That Means 🎉
Updated: 4/27/2025
This article is an opinion piece based on our experience at Badge Pirates. While there are many great microcontrollers out there, we’ve found the ESP32 to be the most capable and flexible platform for building electronic badges—and here’s why.
.PROJECT TITLE
Celebration Handout Anaheim 2022 - (grogu)
.PROJECT TITLE
SOA Totem - Sword is our current SAO Totem for wearing, Displaying and Powering your SAO’s.
.CURRENT VERSION
Shitty Add-On (SAO) Totem version 1.69bis version 2 .. or 2022/23 version? or Iteration 2?
How about SAO Holder - Sword
New for 22/23 is our newly designed SAO totems. Expanding on our very popular SAO Totems
(link) we have designed these with an additional SAO connector
(5 total) and designed as an 8bit sword. Just like the older version these will hold your SAOs you collect and power them during the conference and Beyond.
.BOM
The Badge:
We finally had all the planets align, Covid is gone, Supply chain is slowly (very slowly) starting to move in a forward direction, which allowed us to re-visit our BSidesKC 2020 badge design.
.PROJECT TITLE: LED Board/S2 Dev Board
This project was a pet project of mine (fg). The problem I had was that around my house we had several
of those really cheap LED strip lights, you know .. the ones that you find at Walmart for a few bucks (or on Ali). The problem
with these cheap strips is that they usually only had an IR sensor and a remote where you could change the color or set a pattern.
Well, this is the 21st Century and most of the things in my house are things now (IOT), having to manually change the color of
some LED’s is out of the question, I am above that. Yeah, I know what you are going to say, Go buy a Hue light strip that works
with your hub and you are good, price is only 70$+. Honesly, I am a maker, I am sure I can make it much cheaper and in the process
learn some skills that MAY go into future BadgePirate projects.
.PROJECT TITLE: SNOWFLAKE LTS
This project was a pet project of myself (fg). I wanted to create a Learn to Solder kit (LTS) that BadgePirates could
use as a basic and or advanced kit for use at conferences were we run Learn to Solder villages. I thought it would be cool to
have something people could make and then hang around the house, in this case on a christmas tree. Noting that each year
familys pull out those orniments that little jimmy make of his hand in plaster or paper pictures with a year froms school. Well
why not the LTS kit that Sussie made at her first hacker con that one year. Maybe badge pirates would live long into the future
after we are all dead and gone.
.CURRENT VERSION
The current version here is a Through Hole version that uses 5mm LED’s, a CR2032 battery, with a power switch.
Unique with this is that 2 snowflake board can be joined together to make a 3d like snowflake.
.FUTURE VERSION
Badge: The OzSec21 Badge was an LED Badge that was designed for the Witchita OzSec Conference on Oct 22nd 2021.
The Badge had the OzSec Logo and tied into the years theme of “Somewhere over the Rainbow table” over the Cityscape of Witchita KS.
The flame on the XXX Statue is back lit by a single reverse mount LED. The Badge also had an SAO Connector with just 3.3v and Gnd traced.
The badge was powered by a single CR2032 3.3v coin cell battery.
There were 5 version of the badge:
The Badge: This is actually pivot number 3 for the BSides KC 2021 Badge, with supply chain issues we attempted to pivot our original plan to a different BOM but still had issues with availability of parts so we had to come up with a “non-electronic” style badge. What we ended up with was the intention of having a Badge that you could sit on your desk and display SAO’s (shitty Add ons). This gave us the ability to still create something unique that was “electronic-ish” and work with those components that we could with the supply chain woas of the year. The design allowed for up to 12 SAO’s to be fitted on the Badge.
Want to connect to the BadgePirates2022 Badge? The one running the ESP32-S2-ROVER?
So you are going to BSidesKC 2021, and want a little insight into the mysterious SAO v1.69bis standard that everyone is talking about?
OR
You have no idea what we are talking about but needed to waste 5 minutes while your coffee finished?
So you have acquired one of the Bsides Charleston Lock SAO’s and discovered its just a kit and are wondering now what do you do? Fear not, we have your back. We will assume you have basic soldering skills.
This year, Kevin drew the short straw to give the talk about our badge for Bsides KC 2019. Aptly titled The Hardest Way to Present at a Conference he explains a lot about the development process and why making a conference badge isn’t (in itself) worth free admission! This year, to up the difficulty level and take advantage of the fact that we had more than 2 months we created TWO badges. We wanted something special for our growing number of youth attendees and it really seems to have paid off!
So you have picked up one of our 8266 Dev Boards, congrats, we have sucked you into our addiction. Now lets get you programming that bad boy
In the Spirit of Add-Ons we have used the format of the DC26 #Badge Life Shitty Add On (SAO) Connector on this years BSidesKC 2019 Badge. This is a modified SAO in that we only provided VCC and GND but we also layed out the design so that if you did not get an electronic badge you can solder on a CR2032 holder and Power the SAO port. below you will find the layout of the ports for the SAO and image of it on the BSides Badge.