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So this is what I've spent the last month of my life on: the 2008 Freescale Technology Forum badge. I added some photos too.
Instead of a boring normal paper badge for our biggest conference, this year it's an actual development board with a 5x16 LED matrix array, 8 touch sensitive buttons, a small magnetic speaker, and runs off a rechargeable Li-Ion battery. Meaning that essentially all 2,000+ attendees will be wearing a mini-computer around their neck that is the same size and weight as a normal conference badge, but that lets people do all kinds of fun things with it.
There's four pieces of Freescale silicon on it:
If you're uber-nerdy, the website has full code and schematics once you register.
I wrote all the demo software and my job in Orlando was to fix any issues that came up and answer questions about it. It pretty much owned my life for 4 weeks, but it was a LOT of fun to play with and work on. Some of the fun stuff I wrote was Pong, a Magic 8 Ball demo (ask the badge a question, shake it, and it will tell you if it's right or not), a electronic keyboard using the speaker, and if you plug it into a laptop, it acts like a mouse. You just tilt the board around to move your mouse cursor. And I snuck in a easter egg to make it scroll "Go Gators!" if you pressed the right buttons (3, 1, 3, 3, 7. Get it?)
And one of the coolest features (for the engineers anyways) is that it has a USB bootloader (that part was written by another co-worker). So to run new software, all someone has to do is connect the badge to a laptop, it enumerates as a USB drive, and you drag and drop your program into it.
So by using that we were able do a software design contest during the conference, and an Etch-a-Sketch program ended up winning first place. There's quite a few videos of the badge up on Youtube actually.
So this project is why I get to go to FTF, and what I've spent sooooo many hours on. In the 3 days before the conference, I got a total of about 5 hours of sleep, and I also pulled the very first all-night of my life the Thursday night before. It's been a really fun project to work on, but also quite stressful at times. For most demos, if it doesn't work or something isn't done in time, at worst it affects maybe 30 people. But this badge was given to over 2,000 attendees. It's also been a very interesting experience seeing how a project like this gets created and executed, and all the behind the scenes work for the marketing and conference details that have to happen.
And I could do an update without some sort of political note. Fox News had some fun the other day with Obama's fist pound with his life as he got up on stage to win the nomination. Because "Fair and Balanced" means starting off your story with: "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?". Yes, that's not a shallow attempt at a smear at all. With all the news this story got though, I came across this explanation of The Etymology of Human Male Non-Verbal Communications (or, Why Men Fist-Bump). Who knew?
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