badge2026

RVASec Badge 2026 Firmware

Initial Setup

There are two ways you can run the badge software:

1. You can build the badge software and run it on hardware. This is helpful when seeing how well something works on the badge itself.
2. You can build a simulator that can run the badge software on your computer. This is usually more helpful when developing an app, since debugging tools on your computer are more sophisticated and easier to set up.

They need a few different things in order to set yourself up to build and run the badge software.

In both cases, you will need CMake, which is a build system / build system generator. (Version 3.13 or higher)

Simulator

The simulator is intended to run on a Posix-y (that is, Linux or Mac) environment. Windows can build and run it, although by using Windows Subsystem for Linux if your Linux subsystem has a window manager (e.g. X11).

To build the simulator, you will need a C compiler for your computer ("apt-get install build-essential" on Debian based distros). The simulator relies on SDL2 for graphics and keyboard/mouse/game controller support, so you will need to install SDL2. For images, libpng is needed. ("apt-get install libsdl2-dev" package on Debian based distros, libpng-dev is usually already present, on Mac, "brew install sdl2" and "brew install libpng").

Prereqs

Linux

apt install build-essential
apt install cmake
apt install libsdl2-dev
apt install libpng-dev

Mac

brew install gcc
brew install cmake
brew install sdl2
brew install libpng

Make sure you have the directories that brew installs to in your PATH environment variable.

Windows

The simulator can run on windows through wsl using wslg

note: I think wslg is installed by default with wsl2

Once you have wsl setup, you should mostly follow the linux instructions.

You will likely need X11 (you don't necessarily need to run an entire desktop environment).

You can check if you can run graphical apps from wsl by installing x11-apps.

e.g.

apt install x11-apps
xeyes

Running the Simulator

To generate the build directory:

bash ./run_cmake_sdl_sim.sh

This will create a directory called build_sdl_sim

cd build_sdl_sim

make
./source/badge2026_c

note: when iterating on code, you only need to rerun the make command. This will rebuild the binary with your new changes.

Building for Hardware

The firmware build requires a git submodule:

git submodule update --init --recursive

note the git submodule not required for building the simulator

For more info, see the Pico SDK README.

When building the software for badge, you will need a cross-compiler. This takes code written on your computer and compiles it into machine code for the badge. The compiler used is the ARM Embedded GCC compiler.

This may be available in your package manager (maybe called "gcc-arm-none-eabi"), or here. If downloaded from the ARM site, you will need to take steps to add it to your $PATH or equivalent environment variable. (If it works, when you open a new terminal window, the arm-none-eabi-gcc program can be run).

Flashing the Badge

To flash your firmware to the badge, press and hold the small white button just to the right of the screen on the badge, and connect the badge via micro usb cable to your computer and release the button. This will cause the badge to act as a USB storage device, and you should see a filesystem mounted on your computer. On linux this will typically appear at /media/*username*/RPI-RP2. Copy the firmware to this location:

cp source/badge2026_c.uf2 /media/$USER/RPI-RP2/

note: on Windows WSL, you can run explorer.exe . from within linux to launch a file explorer with your linux dir opened. From here, you can copy the uf2 file to the mounted RPI-RP2 external media.

Windows

This link has a bunch of useful information for getting started and installing prerequisites. Note that you don't need to do the PICO_SDK_PATH setting portion, and when running and building this repository, you will want to use "NMake Makefiles" instead of "Unix Makefiles" (unless you want to install and use make as well).

You can use Ninja, if you like, as well. (Specify -G Ninja instead of Makefiles in the cmake command.)

Adding Your Own Apps

Apps are mostly contained within a single .c/.h file in the apps folder. Take a look at the comments inside the badge-app-template files for help getting started. See also BADGE-APP-HOWTO.md

Dir Layout

The overall structure of the repository is:

• CMakeLists.txt in the root directory is the main project definition. It includes subdirectories to add files/ modules to the build. pico_sdk_import.cmake is provided by the Pico SDK.
• Code for apps and games is in the source/apps folder.
• Code for an interactive terminal (which may or may not be useful after the main application is running) is the source/cli folder. To run the CLI, hold the D-Pad left button down as the badge is starting. The display will show noise, and if you connect to the serial terminal that shows up on your computer, you can enter commands.
• Code that depends on Pico interfaces is within source/hal/*_rp2040.c files, with a platform agnostic header in the corresponding source/hal/*.h file. Code built for the simulator is in source/hal/*_sim.c.
• Generally helpful system code (main menus, screensavers, and the like) is in the source/core folder.
• Code for display buffers and drawing is in the source/display folder.

Optional Editor Setup

Some notes about editor setup: EDITOR-SETUP.md