FREE-WILi Brings Its Flexible Development and Debugging Platform to the DEF CON 32 Badge

Anyone with a DEF CON 32 badge who has grown bored of the stock firmware now has the option to flash a new one to turn it into a handy development tool and debugging device — thanks to FREE-WILi.

"The DEF CON 32 badge is a device that has similar features to the FREE-WILi hardware," the company explains of its decision to develop a new firmware for the device. "To promote FREE-WILi and make the almost 30,000 badges more useful we have released a version of the FREE-WILi code for it for free (use at your own risk). The I2C support is particularly well supported, making the DEF CON badge a great development tool for DEF CON SAO add-ins."

The badge designed for the DEF CON 32 hacker conference surprised guests by being the first public outing for Raspberry Pi's second-generation in-house RP2350 microcontroller, which has an unusual quad-core design that allows the user to pick any two from paired Arm Cortex-M33 and open source RISC-V Hazard3 cores running at 150MHz. While disagreements about credit for its development took some of the shine off, it's still an impressive device — and can now become part of a toolkit, thanks to FREE-WILi's generous offer.

The FREE-WILi is an embedded development tool built around the first-generation Raspberry Pi RP2040, using it to deliver I2C, SPI, UART, and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) support over both USB and directly on-device with its integrated color display. Additional features include an integrated USB hub, an FPGA front-end, optional sub-gigahertz radios, infrared transmission and reception, and even an integrated speaker and microphone plus on-board real-time clock and accelerometer.

The DEF CON 32 badge doesn't have all of those, but it does come close — hence FREE-WILi's decision to build a version of its firmware targeting the device. Badge owners flashing the firmware will be able to use the FREE-WILi user interface, transmit infrared signals, use the I2C bus, and control the badge's Simple Add-On (SAO) pins plus the two user-accessible GPIO pins.

More details on the firmware, and how to download and flash it to your DEF CON 32 badge, are available on the FREE-WILi website.