Hackable Electronic Badge at OHS 2015 - and a tremendous "thanks" to Seairth and daughter!

Ken Gracey

Hey all!

We had a very successful badge introduction last weekend at the Open Hardware Summit 2015 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Forum member Seairth and his very tech-savvy daughter saved the day by joining me in the badge programming and education. Without them, this would've been impossible. I'm not sure what I was thinking going there alone.

Seairth now has a Propeller 1-2-3 FPGA Development Board, so he's as equipped as the rest of the P2-prepared forumistas.

The whole story is here: https://www.parallax.com/news/2015-09-21/parallax-hackable-electronic-badges-unveiled-open-hardware-summit-2015-philadelphia

Thanks again Seairth and daughter!

Sincerely,

Ken Gracey

Seairth

Ken, thanks for letting us go along for the ride! My daughter and I had a blast helping out! I was excited to see the number of people who wanted one (or two) of those badges! I saw quite a number of people playing the the badges. Some were transferring contacts, some were playing with the accelerometers. The guys at the Hackaday table next to us were modding the code during the event! I also helped one of the other attendees swap out the stock OSH logo with a Tindie logo!

Then there were all of the conversations that the badges started! A number of people had never heard of the Propeller and seemed genuinely curious to find out more. Others were aware of it, but had not realized just how capable it was until they saw the badge in action! There were even a few people who knew about the Propeller 2 effort and were excited when I told them what new features Chip had managed to pack into it.

I'm still working on some more software for the badge. This thing is just outright fun to work with! Incidentally, it might be worthwhile putting the current codebase up on GitHub. That way, badge programmers will be better equipped to contribute to it.

Electrodude

I live 20 minutes away by public transportation from where this was and only just discovered it was in Philadelphia! How I wish I had known earlier!

Buck Rogers

Does this mean we might see Parallax at this year's Maker Faire in NYC?

jac_goudsmit

Ken, as I meant to suggest via Twitter: The next batch of badges (pun not intended) should have some edge connectors or some pogo-pin contacts on the board that are connected to P28 and P29 on the Propeller (EDIT: I just noticed on the schematic it already has those pins exposed on one of the hacking areas), so that you can easily put it in some sort of jig to program the EEPROM from an external device (not necessarily a PC). It should be easy to make an EEPROM duplicator for the Propeller, which programs seven or eight or more EEPROMS simultaneously: A spin or PASM program can start itself 8 times, and the last cog that gets started can replace the hub memory with an image from e.g. an SD card or the high part of a 64K EEPROM. Then all cogs start reading the hub memory and writing it to an EEPROM on two pins that are different for each cog, as soon as it detects that there's something connected.

I know you had to customize the program every time you downloaded a badge, but there's a way around that too: you could change the program that gets downloaded on the badge so that it checks for a PS/2 keyboard (or serial port, or IR signal) when it starts the first time (or every time) and allows you to type the name of the user followed by Enter or some other magic key, which the badge then stores in its own EEPROM. You could then use the same jig as above, or another one (and you could use the touch sensors to connect the PS/2 keyboard), to boot the badge after programming, verify that it runs correctly, and type the name of the new owner (or source the name from a text file on an SD card in another device that gets connected via serial port) before you remove the badge from the jig.

That way, preparing a large amount of badges doesn't have to take longer than the time it takes to type all the names of the owners...

===Jac