Making 1,750 programmable PCB badges for Canada's biggest hackathon

Are they throw away?

These are programmable devices given to programmers. The rate of these being thrown out or underutilized is so much lower than so much of human activity.

On the scale of hosting a hackathon, a few kgs of badges likely rates below the trash generated for just the take out food in terms of impact.

Maybe we can recognize that this is so minor of an issue that we don’t need to start here, or even really look too deep at this. Let’s fight these problems on a scale where it really matters.

EMF Camp in the UK is looking at this and doing an experiment: The same badge back with most of the electronics on it, the same battery, and a swappable front plate to give some variation and new functionality. The badge is intended to last 3 events (6 years) and has thus far done 2 events.

We're also hoping the expansion connector might be used by other boards - i2c, 4 fast gpios, 5 slow gpios/pwms, 700ma of 3.3 power. A standard similar to SAO for identification via i2c flash

That's awesome! I'm really happy to see non-tech conventions running badges. It's so cool that with today's technology you truly can "just make things".

What does your badge do? I'd love to see it!

There are small-time assembly houses everywhere.

They’re going to be much more expensive than JLCPCB, if they take the job at all.

Some conferences can find small businesses trying to get started who do the jobs at cost or a loss, but that’s rare.

Yes, Hack the North is run at the University of Waterloo!

Mostly cost for us. JLCPCB's scale lets them make money on orders that would be too small for most fabs. Quoting, ordering, and part selection are all a battle tested web form. They also stock most of the parts in-house, so a small order costs them almost no engineering time. A local fab probably wouldn't have any of these advantages. JLCPCB really have it down to a science.

Thank you! We had very limited storage (2MB) to work with, and only 480KB of RAM. It was certainly a challenge to get it all to fit!

Author here! I'm sure an experienced PCB designer could get it done quicker, but we were in it for the learning aspect too. Hack the North is entirely student run!

My best guess is an experienced designer would have made fewer mistakes and been more familiar with the process, so maybe they save two iterations and can get the initial schematic capture and layout done in a few days rather than a week.

A good experienced designer who has done esp32 before will have all these modules or similar enough in a library and can just plug them together.

Possible in a day depending on risk tolerance, almost always better imo to sleep on it. There would be no iterations.

But they will not likely do it happily in that timeframe. And you would practically never get them to quote it at one day, especially not without an inflated rate.