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Tildagon

A hexagonal camp badge, with three smaller hexagonal PCBs containing breakout pins peaking out from the edges, and a screen showing @emfcamp

This year's badge is the Tildagon badge. It's a hexagon with a slot on each side that you can plug hexpansions into. A hexpansion is a 1 mm thick object with a hexagon shape on one edge (a six-sided polygon like this: ⬡). It can be made of card stock, so you can quickly add some cat ears to your badge, or it can be a printed circuit.

Unlike in previous years, Electromagnetic Field is trying to make a longer-lasting platform so any apps developed for it will work for multiple years.


What would you like to do with your badge?

Need help? Ask here:

  • irc: irc.libera.chat #emfcamp-badge
  • matrix: [#badge:emfcamp.org][matrix]

Badge specs

A hexagonal camp badge, made up of two PCBs with a gap between them, lit by RGB LEDs on top, with more LEDs shining inside. It has illustrations of cats on the silkscreen.

  • ESP32-S3 microcontroller with 2MB of PSRAM and 8MB of flash
  • USB-C connector
  • WiFi
  • Six hexpansion connectors
  • Round screen, six buttons, lots of colourful LEDs
  • Power management, motion sensing
  • An IMU (gyro + accelerometer)
  • Bluetooth (BLE)

The processor in the badge is the same as in 2022, and it will run MicroPython.

Hexpansions

Hexpansions are accessories that plug into the badge's expansion connectors. Almost anything can be a hexpansion - the simplest hexpansion is just a piece of 1mm card cut into the right hexagonal shape. Here are some community examples: (1)

  1. If you want to add your hexpansions to this gallery, you can add them to the registry or add them to this issue or let us know on the IRC/Matrix! We'd love to feature all of your creations!
hexpansion exposing pins OG Hexpansion by kliment

👀 VIEW FILES

👀 VIEW FILES
Tildagon badge with five duck hexpansions and an emergency hot sauce hexpansion Ducks hexpansion by Tiff

EMF ducks sixties style flying porcelain ducks

Link: Instagram

 Keyboard hexpansion Keyboard hexpansion by Alex Skyler's Goosespansion Goosespansion by Skyler Mansfield

👀 VIEW FILES

👀 VIEW FILES
LED Rainbow Filament hexpansion LED Filament hexpansion by John Thurmond interposer hexpansion Interposer by The Untitled Goose

💰 BUY HERE

👀 VIEW FILES

💰 BUY HERE

👀 VIEW FILES
Plotter hexpansion Plotter hexpansion by Danny Walker A prototyping hexpansion for the EMF 2024 Tildagon Badge. Protoboard Hexpansion by Jake Walker

💰 BUY HERE

💰 BUY HERE
Hex-Drive plugged into Hex-Dev Hex-Drive and Hex-Dev by Team RobotMad

💰 BUY HERE

💰 BUY HERE

Add your hexpansion! We'd love to feature all of your creations!

If you want to add your hexpansions to this gallery, you can add them to the registry or add them to this issue or let us know on the IRC/Matrix! We'll do the rest!

For more information, see:

A reusable platform with an interchangeable part

Instead of redesigning badges from scratch every two years, we're building:

  • a reusable platform
  • a base part which will remain compatible over multiple years. The base contains power management, communications, USB, expansion connectors, storage, motion sensing, and battery charging into this board
  • an interchangeable part that is specific to the event

Why are we doing this?

We want to let you make physical things that interact with the badge more easily, in the knowledge that those things are going to continue working with future event badges. In previous years, expandability has always been an afterthought - people still managed to do amazing things with their badges, but it was a lot of effort.

Additionally, we're tired of building the same thing over and over just to make it new and special. We're tired of putting ever-increasing stacks of e-waste into the drawers of the hacking world. We're especially tired of people not being able to meaningfully build things for the badge before the event, and none of those things working by the next event.

The Tildagon will not only let us waste fewer materials, but it also provides us and attendees with a stable base to build on and invest in.

For us, the stable infrastructure means we do not need to rewrite software and drivers for every event. Instead we can focus our efforts on the smaller event-specific part.

Investing in the Tildagon for multiple years also means we've put more effort and better parts than usual into the base board. We put all the expensive and hard-to-get-right functionality on the base part. In future events, we will reuse this base part and maintain compatibility in software and hardware for existing hexpansions.

The most energy-intensive part of each badge is the battery, so we've made it compatible with the batteries from the 2016 and 2018 badges.

Instead of having a lanyard, we are making the USB cable itself be the lanyard for this badge - cables in different lengths are available for people of different sizes, and it can also be used for badge-to-badge and badge-to-computer communication.