According to Louthan, who does software design for the Queer Con badge, these add ons arose out of necessity. Although Queer Con has been making its own badges for years, its 2015 badge- a neon squid-featured a connector that allowed people to connect smaller badges that looked like hats or unicorn horns. What if the conference badges themselves were circuit boards?Īdd-on badges can be traced back to Queer Con 2015. The success of Grand’s class attracted the attention of Jeff Moss, the founder of both Def Con and Black Hat, who suggested Grant should do something similar at Def Con the following year. In an effort to bring hardware hacking skills to a greater audience, Grand led a hardware hacking class at Black Hat, Def Con’s sister conference, in 2005. Grand etched his first board when he was seven and started doing hardware design professionally in his teens, but in the early days of Def Con, software hacking was in vogue and messing around with hardware was considered a niche hobby. Grand has been attending Def Con since 2001, five years before electronic badges were even a thing.
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For someone who had just spent the last eight hours talking about circuit boards, he was still full of energy as he told me about the origins of badgelife. The workshop had gone about an hour over schedule, but Grand stuck around to help attendees put the finishing touches on their devices.
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When I first met Joe Grand, he had just finished teaching an eight-hour hardware hacking workshop where attendees learned how to put together a circuit board that used an optical receiver. “I have no idea what the hell is going on,” he said as he pondered the flickering lights on our connected badges. Before I passed my badge to the other hackers I looked at the character on my badge and noticed it had moved. He pointed to a few lights on the bottom of his badge that had changed from red to green, suggesting he had made progress in the puzzle. A few lights flickered to indicate that the badges were interfacing and then he disconnected. He clipped a port on his badge to a port on my own. Now watch what happens when we connect our badges.” “That green light there is your character,” one of them told me.
But to the hackers that had surrounded me, they told a story.
When I inserted the batteries that came with my badge and the badge lit up, the LED patterns were inscrutable to me. My press badge looked more or less the same as the other attendees’ badges, except the drawings on the badges were different.
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