Security Conference - Propeller Badge competition and more!
__red__
Posts: 470
So, many of you guys know of the incredible job that Parallax did with the Defcon 20 badge so, not only did the hacker world learn about the prop, I'm hoping the prop world learned something about hacker conferences :-) IE, they luuurve their electronic badges ;-D
At this year's Defcon I brought some badges that I had designed for my own entertainment, met up with some friends, chatted and FINALLY convinced the guy who runs my favorite Security conference to switch his conference badge this year from being Arduino based to being propeller based. :-D
Instead of everything being hush-hush like Defcon we're going to shout from the rooftops that we're prop-based and try and push some materials to the conference attendees so they have a running-start at the badge hacking competition. Oh, the competition - I should mention that. Like defcon, it brings status and free entry for life. Typically the badge-talk is one of the first in the con and I'll have about an hour of 500 or so attendee's time to tell them why they should be using the prop over other MCUs. I'm excited.
My victory has its reward... I get to design and fabricate about 500 of these in 6-7 weeks.
So, the conference http://www.skydogcon.com/ will have a hackable propeller badge and the winner of the badge hacking competition wins free entry to the con for life.
I'm posting here for completely selfish reasons. I really want to see some strong entries into this competition and I would hate to see participation drop because of migration from arduino to propeller.
So yes, I'm cheating. I'm hoping to stack the deck :-)
At this year's Defcon I brought some badges that I had designed for my own entertainment, met up with some friends, chatted and FINALLY convinced the guy who runs my favorite Security conference to switch his conference badge this year from being Arduino based to being propeller based. :-D
Instead of everything being hush-hush like Defcon we're going to shout from the rooftops that we're prop-based and try and push some materials to the conference attendees so they have a running-start at the badge hacking competition. Oh, the competition - I should mention that. Like defcon, it brings status and free entry for life. Typically the badge-talk is one of the first in the con and I'll have about an hour of 500 or so attendee's time to tell them why they should be using the prop over other MCUs. I'm excited.
My victory has its reward... I get to design and fabricate about 500 of these in 6-7 weeks.
So, the conference http://www.skydogcon.com/ will have a hackable propeller badge and the winner of the badge hacking competition wins free entry to the con for life.
I'm posting here for completely selfish reasons. I really want to see some strong entries into this competition and I would hate to see participation drop because of migration from arduino to propeller.
So yes, I'm cheating. I'm hoping to stack the deck :-)
Comments
Liked how it was kind of a social game thing too...
I just heard Microsoft was coming out with a NFC replacement that uses only a microphone and a speaker...
Seeing this made me wonder if you could do the social game thing with microphone and speaker instead of IR...
Just an idea, might not work...
I've been a fan of using Nordic nRF24L01+ transceivers with the Propeller for a while and I recently discovered these transceivers are used in active RFID tags. I think adding active RFID to a tag opens up lots of possibilities.
I doubt there would be time to implement active RFID for these tags but I think it's worth keeping in mind for future projects.
OpenBeacon has lots of information about using nRF24L01+ transceivers in active RFID tags.
Will your badges have badge to badge communication? If so, what are you using for the communication interface?
This year, badge to badge communication will be via IR. I think we've got something pretty special and unique planned as far as what we're transmitting :-D
My main challenge today is to get an OLED or otherwise display on the badge in a cost-effective manner.
Right now I'm stalking these: http://www.buy-display.com/default/mp3-oled.html and http://www.buy-display.com/default/128x64-oled-display.html which both use the SSD1306 which adafruit uses in their displays. The different being that adafruit add 5V compatibility for arduino and charge $17 or $19 per unit instead of $2 - $3.
Oh, and there are obex objects for them written by some of my favorite people :-)
Let me know how I can help you out with this important project.
This is a nice win for the security conference and the Propeller so I'd like Parallax to do what we need to to make your effort a success.
Whether it's discounted chips, hosting the design and hacks on Learn.parallax.com, attending and supporting badge hack sessions with soldering stations and people, or whatever. Since DEFCON 20 we've got a group of people that will do anything to get to these security conferences (Emily, Jessica, Daniel, Forrest, Nick, Jim, myself) and we only need an excuse to go. Add Chip to this list as he'd benefit from such a cultural experience
I look forward to seeing the design.
Ken Gracey
I'll be looking forward to a vid of that popping up on YouTube.
I often find myself trying to convince people that the lack of hardware for UARTs and stuff on the Propeller is not a problem. Or why not having interrupts is a huge benefit for code reuse and predictable timing not a "missing feature". Or how amazingly flexible the Propeller is. Or how simple things like being able to use any pin from any COG for any purpose makes life so much easier.
It can be hard work to get people out of the traditional "MCU must have everything including the kitchen sink on board" mindset.
It would be great to have a vid to point to or at least get some inspiration as to how to put these points over effectively.
Just tell them that it already DOES have everything (including the kitchen sink) and they load from eeprom!
The demo-board micro-phone circuit and a piezo-speeker can probably be pushed to do ultra-sonic coms. Anyway they'd be nice bits to add for all the chip-tune and audio visualizer fans in the audience.
Should also be able to adapt the Walsh-modulated LED demo from Phill to do CDMA communications too. The same counter tricks should allow demodulation of 40KHz Ir without using an IR receiver chip.
Marty
Thanks for the offer of help Ken, we'll be in touch via EMail!
We'll keep this thread updated with the progress of the design as it progresses! Right now, I'm waiting for OLED samples to arrive from China. $2.50 per unit for a 128x64 pixel :-D
Those OLEDs look really interesting. I can think of a lot of uses for a display that inexpensive and that small. Thanks for the link.
Instead of having everyone possess a RFID tag and one sensor at the point of entry, reverse the roles. If everyone has RFID in their Propeller Badge, have the point of entry provide the right RFID tag for check-in.
It would be possible to have multiple points of entry and diffrent RFID tags for different venues. Also, one could require a daily download of new log in.
I know this is not really tight security, but it is innovative and might be interesting. If you want really tight security, have RFID set up in both directions and doing some handshaking.
Plus, there can be an 'easter egg hunt' of some RFID tags that offer the first locator or first few locators something rewarding.
It could be good fun.
Another Propeller feature that might be conference friendly is that is can have serial port that would accept a bar code reader. Not sure how to deploy the bar code readers, but the Propeller could stash quite a bit on a micro SDcard. Bar codes could be everywhere and obvious, or not so obvious and very difficult to acquire.
either accomodate a micro SDcard or at least jumbo eeprom... your conference goers will appreciate the added capacity. The Propeller is very expansion-friendly.
It's a solderable ribbon connector at 0.7mm pitch. I have to hand solder these.
Anyone have any experience of these? Do you use paste? A soldering iron or hot air? Do you need kapton tape to keep it safe from damage while soldering?
You're hand soldering all of the badges? Let's say:
- Each board has 20 SMD parts.
- Each board takes 30 seconds to stencil
- Each part placement takes 15 seconds to place
- You can reflow 8 boards at a time, and it takes 8 minutes.
- Each board takes 30 seconds to test
- Assembly time neglected.
That's 0.5+5+1+0.5 = 7 minutes per board. At 600 boards (500+ attendees) that's 70 hours of assembly time!
0.7mm doesn't sound too bad. Personally between 0.65mm and 0.5mm pin pitch is where I start having lots of problems with solder bridges and or incomplete joints. Recently I've started using solder-paste with an iron on 0.5mm pitch chips, seems to work better.
Given your volume, I'd look for a connector you can re-flow. Wonder how well a 0.3mm pitch with 2x the pins would work? Might even be able to get away with a something to hold the ribbon cable down on to the PCB footprint? The low contact pressure would suffer from corrosion eventually, but should hold long enough for the conference? Also, sounds like you'll need to recruit some assembly help for the final build. (unless the conference has someone lined up to machine place and solder all the easy parts?)
Marty
I'm assuming I'll end up hand-soldering the FPCs as I'd assume that wouldn't be considered a standard PnP line item?
In other news...
They natively run at 3.3V and have a fantastic OBEX object: http://obex.parallax.com/object/48
It's labelled adafruit because they provide the easiest way to get your hands on them. However, because adafruit is arduino-focussed they've added 5V circuitry to it and sell it for $19.50.
If you run it at 3.3V, you can do it for $2.50 and a few passives.
Perfect for the badge :-D
First quick video, Chad's first draft at data-input for the badge and the gratuitous use of the 5050 LEDs:
I'm working on badge-to-badge comms. My main aim over the next few days is to solidify which methods are most effective in a conference environment and finalize the BoM for manufacture.
Things are starting to take shape!
Marty
We've had the prototype running for almost a day so far with LEDs and TWO displays running with the prop at 40Mhz without any sign of battery weakness at all.
As for pull-ups on reset and brownout no. As 3.3V will be the last to die it won't really be applicable in this design but in other prop designs i've done which run on watch batteries, "premature brownout" has been a recurring problem for me. I'd love the information for that for my future watch-battery designs!
Thanks,
Red
I always figured the LDO leakage would eat the 9V battery. Maybe you're leading a charge here (or a good dischage at least). My personal favorite propeller battery solution is 3AA NiCads at 3.6V nominal. I found 2AA's with a boost converter make a really good power solution if 3.3V is all you need.
I'd like to hear more about using 2 AA's without a boost converter and/or a coin-cell with Propeller. My own coin-cell experience didn't work out very well
why are the LED's run from 5 volts? The blue LED's should only need 2.7-3.0 volts. With a regulated 3.3v supply, just the ~25ohm pin resistance should be enough for the blue LEDs if a FET is used for color select. My point here is that with only one regulated supply rail, it's easier to put a switching supply on the board and get 2-3x more battery life. I've seen several switching supply chips with integrated FETs and <100uA quiescent current. For example the LT1934 or LTC3631 have quiescent currents <15uA. But for you a higher quiescent current, cheaper part is likely a better choice. (the RT8297 looks interesting, but it's in a 0.5mm pitch DFN package, yuck!)
Marty
Marty
Doc
The OLED actually "requires"(0) 9V (although it will happily function all the way down to 6V) so we just went for it.
We didn't have much time (3 weeks) to get a working prototype so we went REALLY simple. We avoided [QD]FN because using leadless means adding X-ray inspection to the assembly process and that's cost prohibitive for our lowly budget.
So, some advice!
Parallax has been extremely awesome in not only sponsoring the conference but also provided discounted QuickStart boards for attendees to get started on learning so they can hit the ground running when they get here. I've been approached by a number of people who have bought the QuickStart boards and are now looking for guidance on toolchains. I just wanted to sanity check the advice and make sure that I'm somewhat up to date before I start them down their path 'o 'learning.
Given that we're using SPIN / PASM drivers for the WS2812 and the SSD1306 OLED display as I understand the current gcc toolchain state that probably nixes using C as it's currently not possible / undefined / not beginner level to mix C with those languages?
The firmware we're writing is all in SPIN / PASM because of the driver dependencies. We're going to be publishing 95% of the firmware sources before the con to aid people in hacking so most hacks will likely be in those two languages.
Given that, what toolchain should I be recommending for beginners for each platform? These are going to be technical people, likely with development experience, just not with the propeller.
Windows - Propeller Tool?
Linux - Brad's Spin Tool? OpenSpin?
Mac - Brad's Spin Tool? OpenSpin?
I see BST hasn't been updated since 2010, does it run on modern OSX anymore?
Thanks,
Red
(0) The OLED has a built-in optional charge-pump circuit to generate its own 9V but after experimenting with the 9V battery and realizing that everything else struggle before it we didn't see the point of using the charge-pump.
Then, you could use SimpleIDE on a Mac to run it...