SHA2017

TL;DR: The SHA2017 e-paper badge is cool and in dire need of extra sponsorship!

The longer story

SHA2017 has a lot of firsts. The first hacker camp at the amazing Scouting Landgoed Zeewolde, the first outdoor hacker conference to have an actual harbor, and we would like it to be the first Dutch event to have an electronic badge that is readable in direct sunlight. But making badges is a tough and expensive job, and to accomplish the goal of an SHA badge, we need your help. 

The badge

Over the past few months, the badge team has been hard at work designing a badge centered around a beautiful e-ink display and Espressif's brand-new ESP32 microcontroller, the improved version of the popular ESP8266. This makes the badge flexible enough to write your own applications for. As most hackers like ourselves like to tinker with hardware and software, the badge will be an open platform to experiment on. The design is already fully open-source and available at github and the wiki. It will utilize touch controller inputs, a decent sized battery that should last at least a day and the most unique feature, an e-paper display that is reasonably fast and most importantly, easy to hack.

Sponsoring

At this time 40.000 euro is reserved for the funding for the badge. Espressif has been generous enough to sponsor ESP32 modules. The problem we face is that in order to build the badge in its full glory we need a significant amount more of additional funds and unfortunately, we need them fast.

In just two weeks, we'll have to decide whether to proceed into production or cancel the project. By then we need to have secured € 30.000 to be able to provide our 3500+ visitors with a badge. If we cannot secure this amount by then, we will either have to drastically simplify the badge, give only the people who obtained a ticket early a badge, or even cancel the badge entirely.

We need your support in building the badge. In return, we are offering a spot for your logo on the website, the info booklet, lanyard and on the badge itself. Additionally, we would like to challenge you to write an awesome app for the badge to interact with our visitors. 

What we need

We still need a number of electronic components, as well as PCB manufacture and assembly. We have only a couple of weeks left on our schedule before we have to start production. If we haven’t secured sponsorship by then – we need either money or a friendly manufacturer to sponsor it in-kind – we’ll have no option but to cancel the project entirely.

I would like to help!

Wonderfull! If you want to help us in any way, please contact us at +31(0)85 888 3001, badge@SHA2017.org, or through twitter @SHA2017Badge. We also have an IRC channel #sha2017-badge @freenode if you want to ask questions to the badge designers.