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Welcome to the Maker Faire Ottawa 2015 Badge Wiki! Here, you'll (hopefully) find all the information required to use, understand, and re-use the badges we've developed for this year's Faire.
The badge is designed to meet the following goals:
- Identify the wearer, visually. This means an area to indicate the wearer's name, project, or other information.
- Identify the wearer as a Maker or as Staff.
- Provide some form of interactive component, to increase real-world interaction among the Makers.
- Be a hackable platform for people to expand on.
- Be fun.
What we've come up with is a battery-powered Arduino-based badge with two LED bargraphs, an Infrared LED, an Infrared receiver. The LED and receiver allow badge-to-badge communications. A silkscreened writing area on the badge allows the wearer to add their name and other information. An Arduino-compatible I/O footprint allows Arduino shields to be added to the badge, and allows the badge to be re-used in other projects after the Faire.
We are developing some Arduino-based software for the badge that allows the wearers to gamify the Maker Faire experience. The badges periodically send out a signal indicating which Maker is wearing the badge (through a number we call the MakerID), and which booth they're with (through a number we call the ExhibitID). The Infrared communication is used to do this. By limiting the range on the Infrared transmission, and only sending out the messages once per minute, we encourage people to actually talk to one another to bring up their scores.
The badges will know how many Makers and booths are at the Faire, and will show how many the wearer has talked to using the two bargraphs on the badge.
The actual colour of the circuit board can denote a Maker (red, in our case) or Staff (blue).
Hacking Details has information on setting up your computer to work on the Arduino code for the badge.
The Hardware Theory of Operation page breaks down the badge hardware and describes how it works.
The Protocol Documentation page shows more details of the protocol, including a secret system for playing back pre-loaded animations on the badges, under remote control.