ETHDenver 2021 - Attendee Hardware Badge

Conferences and hackathons have been creating custom hardware based badges for attendees to use, hackers to hack on, gamers to game on, and businesses to integrate with.

Why not ETHDenver?

TeamBadge set out a mission during this hackathon in order to create an open source attendee hardware badge for the ETHDenver conference. While the designs and code are very much hackathon quality level, we have duplicated existing analog conference badge functionality (attendee name, role, and QR code). Going past our initial MVP goal, we added additional functionality including a FIO address view, map of the conference floor, regional maps, and advertisement cards for local businesses.

TeamBadge

Ronald Stoner - @ronaldstoner (GitHub) / @forwardsecrecy (Twitter)
Paul Pham - @cryptogoth (GitHub)

Hackathon Links

Github - https://github.com/ronaldstoner/ETHDenver2021
Presentation - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lKfAteGLD9OGmtw0hz3KvVq7pTEihyAI2j_oX4J-8Pw/edit?usp=sharing
Demo Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1VwFemwl1w
PCB Silkscreen - https://github.com/ronaldstoner/ETHDenver2021/tree/main/pcb

Prototype

The prototype was designed over the course of a few days by TeamBadge using the following hardware:

• Raspberry Pi
• Pi WiFi dongle (optional, but required for online mode)
• Adafruit TFT 2.8inch 320x240 Display Screen
• 4 Physical touch buttons
• External battery pack

Tech Stack

• Python3
• Wand Image library
• FIO addresses
• Adafruit TFT display and drivers
• InkScape
• Eagle PCB CAD
• Ethplorer API

Features

Attendee Badge View

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• Programatically generated from attendee JSON data
• Can be scripted to run in batches and pre-loaded to badges -OR-
• Generate badge attendee data and image on the fly
• Interact with vendors (POAP/NFTs/scanning badge QR codes)

FIO Address View

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• FIO integration bounty
• Can be scripted to run in batches and pre-loaded to badges -OR-
• Generate badge attendee data and image on the fly

Sports Castle Floor Map

• Opportunities for heat mapping (online only mode)
• Track which exhibits are popular
• Bathroom wait estimated timer

Regional Map

• ColoradoJam Department of Agriculture bounty
• Provides maps and locations for points of interest around the conference
• Load map tiles based on city, county, or state (very large)

Local Business Advertisement

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• Sponsorships
• Advertisements
• Daily Announcements
• NFT hunt

NFT Viewer/Screensaver

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• Downloaded NFTs associated with ETH address (via online mode w/ Ethplorer API)
  • Pulls coin website and image from token metadata
• Displays cached token images (offline mode)
• Can be automated to provide a screensaver like feature
• Attendees can bling out their badge!

PCB Silkscreen Proof of Concept

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While the prototyping phase took place on a Raspberry Pi, the ultimate end goal is to produce and fabricate a custom PCB hardware badge design for ETHDenver. Unfortunately due to the length of the hackathon we were not able to fabricate a physical badge, but did want to provide a silkscreen proof of concept and images to convey what a physical badge may look like.

Future Features

• Scaling down [Hardware]

  • ESP32 / Arduino
  • Smaller operating system footprint
  • Smaller battery due to smaller components and resource usage
  • Better component tracing and layout

• Scaling Up [Software]

  • Badge Check In
  • Heat Mapping (online mode and voluntary only)
  • Badge Tracking (online mode and voluntary only)
  • Conference Daily Announcements Push System (online mode online and requires an on site daily check in network and system)
  • More bling! [LEDs]
  • Easter eggs!