The Astronaut Badge at BSides SF

The Idea

The fabulous crew at BSides SF wanted to host our Badge Village once again and asked me to come up with some ideas. My natural instinct went to explore this year's conference theme - Putting The Cyber In Space.

While our initial imagination was a black PCB with a cosmic landscape in white silkscreen, I wanted to do something closer to our iconic Hack The Planet T-shirts which came in Mars and Moon versions.

We added and rearranged a few elements to make BSides SF's special version of this artwork.

However, printing such intricate details with shadows and cosmic pixie dust looked like a moonshot task.

Holy Grail Of UV Printing

We happened to be awfully fascinated by UV Printing at the same time. So experiments were carried out to figure out to test the viability.

And 2 main issues came forward:

1. Some of the White/Grey shades were inconsistently printed

2. Artwork turned yellowish after the reflow soldering process

We switched some of the process sequences to find a delicate sweet spot for mixing both the old and new techniques. UV printing done on good old white masking with LED glow areas kept unmasked for maximum glow.

For the yellowish tint issue, we played around with the reflow profile to achieve some delicate sweet spots once again. And it worked.

May The Force Be With You

The badge hosts all the components on the backside, thus, giving a colourful sleek look on the front side.

Powered by Nuvoton microcontrollers, the badge features plenty of electronic creativity potential as well as a neatly crafted CTF in space theme.

And with all the limitless experimentation for eternity and challenging our patience, we finally managed to make our very first full-colour badge.

The CTF

The badge comes pre-assembled with a micro-USB port. In default mode, Hack The Planet screens are glowing persistently.

The CTF is crafted with space trivia and fun references to James Webb along with ample ASCII art and challenges ranging from OSINT, Crypto, and Stegano written in a story mode with space mission vibes to it.

To play the CTF, don't forget to turn off the battery power and plug in your micro-USB cable. To interface with the badge, you can use the terminal or something as easy as Arduino IDE's serial monitor. Select the right port and boot up the serial monitor. Serial monitor settings are Both NL & CR with 9600 baud.

To initialise the CTF, send three stars *** in the serial monitor. This will put the badge into the CTF mode and it'll print out the first challenge.

Solving the first challenge will glow the rocket on the badge and print out the next challenge.

To reset the badge, send blackhole command via serial monitor and reconnect the badge.

The badge remembers the flags even if the cable is disconnected. Happy Hacking!