SHA2017 Badge

About SHA2017

SHA2017 is a non profit outdoor Hacker camp taking place in The Netherlands in 2017 on August 4th to 8th.

It is the successor of a string of similar events happening every four years. These are GHP, HEU, HIP, HAL, WTH, HAR and OHM.

Similar events are EMF Camp 2016 in the UK, CCC Camp and congress in Germany.

The location is the Scoutinglandgoed in Zeewolde, 55km east of Amsterdam.

The festival is organized for and by volunteers from and around all facets of the international hacker community.

Knowledge sharing, technological advancement, experimentation, connecting with your hacker peers and of course hacking are some of the core values of this event.

About SHA2017 Badge

We are designing a badge to help our visitors and volunteers navigate the camp. It will feature an e-paper display for visibility in bright daylight, as well as a powerful ESP32 module for wireless development.

Over the past months, the badge team has been hard at work designing a badge centered around a beautiful e-ink display and Espressif's brand-new ESP32 microcontroller, the improved version of the popular ESP8266. This makes the badge flexible enough to write your own applications for. As most of us like to tinker with hardware and software, the badge will be an open platform to experiment on. The design is already fully open-source and available on github and the SHA2017 wiki. It will utilize touch controller inputs, a decent sized battery that should last at least a day and the most unique feature, an e-paper display that is reasonably fast and most importantly, easy to hack.

First and foremost, the badge will have a 2.9" e-paper display (296x128pixels). This is a 1-bit monochrome display which supports partial refresh, and with some firmware hacking we are able to emulate a larger bit depth and increase its responsiveness.

Footprints for six SK6812 or pin-compatible addressable LEDs are placed above the display. These were chosen to match the official SHA2017 design, which includes a freedom flag consisting of six RGB colours based on the SHA1 hash of some text or data. Using the ESP32's hardware SHA1 unit we may be able to display the colours corresponding to for example the name on the badge.

Any interactive badge needs input. To keep the badge a single-sided load for production, we opted for eight touch buttons (up, down, left, right, a, b, start, and select). The battery will be decently sized, and should be able to last for at least a day when used interactively. The battery life will of course be better when only used as a badge, thanks to the e-paper display :)