Double Deal: BornHack 2024 and 2025 Event Passes Available for Sale
BornHack 2024 and 2025 Badges: Innovative Design and Functionality
BornHack, a renowned hacker conference, has unveiled its 2024 and 2025 badges, both designed by Thomas Flummer, a designer with a history of creating beautiful badges and SAOs for the event.
The 2024 badge is a slim rectangular board with addressable LEDs, a BornHack logo, and electronics with an LiPo battery on the rear. It features an ESP32-C3 Mini module, battery charger, power supply circuit, and an NT3H2x11 addressable NFC chip. The LEDs on the badge are intended for persistence-of-vision displays and have several firmwares available on their GitHub repository. The NFC chip in the 2024 badge is both a passive tag and a tag that can be addressed by the ESP32.
The 2024 badge also comes with a Meshtastic node firmware, allowing for LoRa technology to cover the entire BornHack site with no more than a single intermediate badge providing a relay. This makes the badge an excellent tool for communication and experimentation.
The 2025 badge, on the other hand, is a large white PCB in the shape of an Ø character. It has a BornHack logo, a row of backlit status icons on the left hand side, and electronics with a pair of AA batteries on the back. The PCB antenna is accompanied by a Molex stick-on antenna. This badge is a LoRa experimentation board with an ESP32-C3 Mini and a European 868 MHz LoRa Module. It can provide Meshtastic service in a European hackerspace.
The Molex antennas on the 2025 badge worked well in the real-world test at BornHack. The 2025 badge's NFC chip functions similarly to the one in the 2024 badge.
For those interested in more detailed schematics or a full component list, looking at the BornHack official announcements or hardware repositories linked from their website or community forums might provide further information.
Meanwhile, the EMF Explorer badge, an analogue circuit for listening to ambient electric fields in stereo, was picked up by the author at BornHack. This badge, designed by Darcy Neal, has a UFO design backlit by a green LED. It's an interesting addition to the collection, offering a unique listening experience.
The BornHack site presented a challenging location for UHF radio propagation due to earth banks and dense forest. However, the innovative design and technology of the BornHack badges have proven to be up to the task, providing reliable communication and interactive features throughout the event.
- The 2024 BornHack badge, with its electronics integrated into a slim rectangular PCB and featuring cutting-edge technology such as an ESP32-C3 Mini module, has expanded the boundaries of lifestyle electronics, merging technology and personal accessory into one.
- The 2025 BornHack badge, with its large white PCB shaped like an Ø character and utilizing LoRa technology, offers a glimpse into the future of technology-integrated lifestyle items, transforming a simple badge into a versatile communication and experimentation tool.
