ZaCon is a community driven infosec conference held at the Kingsway Campus of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Andrew Nohawk developed the ZaCon V badge using an Arduino and RF components. He provides a detailed chronicle of his design and development process in this post. He explains, “For ZaCon V I built some electronic badges for the conference that are based on an Arduino framework (at least using an ATMega328 with an Arduino Bootloader) and communicate to each other via 433Mhz RF (the same that is used in remotes). The idea with the badges was to have a way to see who was interacting with whom and show it in a visual representation. Additionally I needed the badges to be cheap as.. well… I am cheap!
The badges took about 3 months to go from breadboard to finished and a large majority of that time was spent learning how electronics work (and don’t!). This however was not my first attempt at building badges, for the last 3 years I have built a design on a breadboard and then basically done nothing with it (apart from make a shaky cam video at 3am and suggest the idea).”
Part 2 can be found here.