The Tiger Badge for BSides TLV

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The Design

When I was thinking about a badge for BSides TLV, most of my design ideas were centred around their rich history and culture. During brainstorming with the lovely BSides TLV team, I was told that the conference theme is "Welcome To The Jungle".

And so the idea of Big Cats became an instant hit. White Tiger for attendees. Black Panther for the sponsors. And Red/Yellow big cat for the crew and speakers.

We wanted to make a soldering activity easy enough for everyone to do but also challenging enough that everyone learns something.

After fiddling with the schematics and taking inspiration from tiger artworks, we arrive at the final draft.

With that, design renders were ready.

The Working

The badge comes pre-soldered with a couple of components - a through-hole battery holder soldered in SMD way and the speaker microcontroller. During the production, we couldn't source enough SMD battery holders on time. So PTH battery holders were soldered in the SMD way with some ninja-level soldering trickery.

The roar idea was an experiment done for the second time which came with its own memory IC that stored the audio file and played the speaker on loop.

When the badge is all soldered, it glows its eyes and roars when pressed the tactile switch.

The badge soldering tutorial is here.

In the hardware village we hosted, attendees soldered the components in a variety of soldering difficulty levels since the badge had a combination of through-hole as well as SMD components and also needed a unique soldering trick for the speaker.

We had an immensely overwhelming response at the hardware village and ran out of all the badges within 3 hours. Thanks to everyone who showed up and became a part of #BadgeLife.