[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made open source, zero power PCB hackatho...
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Show HN: I made open source, zero power PCB hackathon badges
I love getting cool swag from hackathons and I also love designing
PCB's, so when my friend asked me if I would design hackathon
badges for a large game jam in singapore, I was absolutely down!
The theme of overglade was a "The game jam within a game", pretty
cool concept right! High schoolers from around the world were flown
out to the event by hackclub after they spent about 70 hours
designing their own game. These badges needed to be really cheap
and simple, because we were going to manufacture about a hundred in
a pretty limited amount of time. I went with a zero-power approach,
which means sticking with e-inks, and I decided to include NFC if
the organizers wanted to introduce it into the roleplay of the
event, and so participants could add their website or github if
they so choose! I used an RP2040-based architecture because it's
really easy and cheap to get on the first try, and then added an
ST25 passive NFC tag which was really simple to configure. The
badge is in the shape of a ticket, because you got a "ticket" to
the event after spending a lot of time designing games to qualify!
20 GPIO's are broken out onto the edges if you're ever in a pinch
at a hackathon, and I wanted the badges to feel really fun so
there's a lot of art designed by various people in the community!
The badge worked really well and I learned quite a lot in the
process. My takeaways are to manufacture a BUNCH of extra badges,
because some will end up breaking; to think about your PCB in 3D,
because one of the inductors was a bit tall and caused more badges
to break; and to have a strong vision of your final product,
because it really helped me to create something unique and
beautiful :D I like to journal about all my projects, so if you'd
like to read my full design process, feel free to take a look at my
journal (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Overglade-
Badges/blob/master/J...). If you also have any questions or
feedback, I'd be happy to answer them!
Author : kaipereira
Score : 12 points
Date : 2026-04-04 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| robertclaus wrote:
| How much did they end up costing? We do a similar PCB medallion
| every year for another event and haven't been able to get quite
| that fancy due to cost. We usually only manage to get some LEDs
| and a processor in our lower budget range.
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(page generated 2026-04-04 23:00 UTC)