Making 1,750 programmable PCB badges for Canada's biggest hackathon

A team built 1,750 programmable PCB badges for Hack the North to transform the typical cardstock name tag into a handheld, hackable platform with a screen, buttons, radio, battery and LEDs. The project aimed to mainstream hardware-badge culture, shipped everything open source, and produced an emulator and firmware toolchain so attendees could write apps - one group even turned badges into an Among Us game. Development followed multiple hardware cycles (EVT, DVT, several PVTs) with an evolving shape (hexagon to handheld rectangle), a constrained budget, and a clear escape hatch to de-scope to blank badges if needed.

The narrative focuses on concrete successes, failures and lessons: a part-selection mistake labeled “10u” caused an inductor/capacitor mix-up; dense FPC pins forced use of a connector JLCPCB soldered on; an NFC chip chosen as a passive tag couldn’t act as a reader so the team pivoted to a reader chip and ultimately relied on Bluetooth for peer interactions; color silkscreen was dropped after KiCad→EasyEDA import issues; and a pixel-byte-order bug produced wrong colors for weeks. Practical takeaways are explicit: label parts unambiguously, own manufacturing fixes, verify component roles before integrating, and ruthlessly de-scope to hit production at scale.