Badge Designers

did I James tell us what was your inspiration to design the hardware what is what inspired you to do inspirations are very strong word but I think in the context of the Cybermen's thing I've tried to think about something that was like I don't know very some enhance but also very tech and you know the idea of a 3310 swinging from a lanyard it sort of struck the right vibe and I mean from a hardware perspective I think ymo is always to get people thinking about hardware and actually thinking about the constraints of probably because it's everywhere so the choice of components and things

constraints and people have to think about memory and have to think about a lot of the techniques that people used to use another device designing embedded systems gaming consoles it was all actually very clever hacks and tricks to actually get like functional user experiences I think that's we'll talk to Peyton in a sec about the hacks that he did for it but you've made the choice of which is that it's working really we'll be there to kind of all the people if they want to go there and accessories we've got a couple of our own that are in the works at the moment that's also yeah there's always one of things I mean you've got a

such a constrained device and you want to put so much chomping tell us tell us a little bit about I think it started off with me actually giving you a hard time but my talk last year complaining about the the screen size and color resolution of the previous page and the state you gave me a monochrome badge to kinda see you know see what you can do it's a it's probably most constrained swapper environment of ever worked in I am a lot of the initial prototype work I did in C++ but that creeks uses a lot of memory so I moved to a lot of it back redid it in to see things like um there

are images that get display of the badge and I was running out of bucks I think the final firmware has like four bytes left in the program space which is incredible and literally taking images of retirement house and cutting off the flag putting it as a separate image and then drawing back on so I can save the bikes on the science there's a lot much other things like so snick which is also a badge because you can't have and not be out with that snake and there isn't enough Rams like two kilobytes of RAM so you can't still the quarter for every segment of the snake so instead I still the first quarter and then I have two

bits to represent whether the next segment is up or down and then it kind of draws it back and then every application on the device reuses that same two kilobytes of RAM and reason and I have no doubt that there's a whole bunch of bugs and stuff in the software they wrote for it but it was pretty fun and I think it's very much a cover vision of the working within strengths it's actually a really fun way to program I've I found it quite challenging and I hate to think of how many hours I put into it I think things like um I was looking for ways to store strings and images so I created a file

system layer as well and there's yeah there's amazing things you can do even with only 32 kilobytes of program space so but just to sort of give us a high-level overview of some of the functionality of people using the Badger in the back you'll see so it has the UM it has a really good feel with the opening menu we've put the power and battery bar on the slide I think that'll hit a big nostalgia button it has a dollar so all those old-school Nakia codes you know get out your manuals and how good a play around I think there's some interesting ones and there's also some undocumented ones for those to find it has a snake and Tetris

and with the games that actually when you get a game over you'll get a QR code so kind of like scan and upload this code so for the first time ever you can actually compete against everyone else at the conference for schools at points in the games but the tokens themselves given that you know it's just an Arduino it doesn't have any like security chips and features I'm expecting that um towards the end of the second day there might be some interesting scores have started to appear on the scoreboard but I think as long as it lasts the first day I will consider that an achievement I think that's great you got to do an

awesome job and thank you so much