Want your own copy of the DEFCON Badge Rap? Get it here!

Also, check out The Brothers Grimm, who recorded it for us.

This is Joe Grand.

Joe makes cool electronics stuff, like this year's DEFCON badges.

They're powered by an 8-bit Freescale microcontroller, and they do cool things like:

scrolling text (which you can change using the buttons on the badge)

and persistence of vision (which is hardcoded :( )

And, best of all, you can flash them with this little USB gadget.

Joe wrote a poem about his badges.

170 hours of total time spent

2 nights of my honeymoon (oh, how I lament!)

3 circuit board revisions to get it all right

863,600 total components bring them to light

6,800 hackers wearing the badge in all its glory

If you want to learn more, please read this fine story...

This is me and my husband Len.

Len read Joe's poem and said, "Wow, that needs to be a nerdcore rap."

I looked at the badge and said "Wow, that could be used as a line level meter."

Clearly, something had to be done.

The microcontroller on the badge has an analog-to-digital converter on it.

We also had an iPod Shuffle. (Ours is blue.)

Fry's had cheap external speakers. They were kind of crappy, but they were small.

So we started asking around, and we found a guy who has a World of Warcraft buddy who's also a rapper.

+ =

We also found a couple of other guys who knew more about microcontrollers than I did, and we got busy with the schematics.

Then we got busy with our soldering irons, and thirty hours later, we had this!

(It would have taken a lot less time if we knew that the goddamn motherfucking USB dongle has a DIP package version of the microcontroller inside it, and we'd been flashing that for twelve hours straight. But we managed to convince Dustin not to do this to it:)

Once we had the prototype working, we turned around and made a production version. Even with the surface-mount soldering, it only took us about an hour.

And here's what it looks (and sounds!) like in action!

Making one of these for yourself is really easy -- just get a DEFCON badge, some headers, and some enamel wire. You'll need to solder a lead to the ADC6 input (which has a teeny-tiny solder pad where the Zigbee wireless chip is supposed to go), and another to ground. Then find a 1/8" audio splitter, cut one of the female ends off, and solder ground to shield and either the ring or the tip to the ADC6 lead. Then flash the microcontroller (I'll have the code up shortly), connect an audio input, and enjoy your new line-level meter!

 Create your own free wiki!HelpPublic, Premium Early Adopter wiki Privacy Policy RSS