Circuit Break Podcast #69

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May 26, 2017, Episode #69

Zapp and HyR0n of AND!XOR talk about #BadgeLife and Defcon.
  • HyR0n
    • Mathematician, Computer Scientist, & Systems Engineer making the world a better place with homebrew booze and electronic bling.
  • Zapp
    • Has been writing software since age 8. Eventually making a career in developing for Java systems. He has since been promoted away from they keyboard and his life is now MS Office and meetings.
    • Didn’t know how to solder before DC23 .
    • Arduino was his gateway drug – all 15 projects of the starter kit in a few days.
  • Defcon Badges
    • Official badge has a deep puzzle – other badges filled with goo and mechanical.
    • Becomes part of the culture.
    • And!xor – is unique – most people are hacking badges. There are many ways to hack their badges. Ways to hack between badges.
  • Taco Town
  • Defcon 25
    • Hack everything from cryptography, cars, voting machines, bluetooth, lock picking villages, people will teach you if you’re willing to learn. Social engineering is a big village
    • Villages – way bigger than booths 2,000 square feet each, have their own badges, demos, hands on events, IoT village
    • 20K – 30K people attend
    • Defcon for newbies – don’t bring a phone, no wireless, bluetooth, no photos. Just go, have fun and learn. Cash only.
  • New Defcon Badge
    • HackADay.io Page
    • KickStarter Page
    • Specs
      • Shout out to Rigado BMD-300 SoC
        • Based on the Nordic NRF52 BLE SoC
        • ARM Cortex M4F
        • 512kb flash
        • 64kb rom
      • 15 x WS2812B LEDs
      • 5 buttons
      • Tilt switch
      • LED used for ambient light sensing
      • Standard SWD 10-pin mini header
      • Exposed GPIO
      • MicroSD w/ 2GB card included
      • 128×128 16-bit color display (ST7735)
    • SECRET COMPONENT
    • Has a Chip-8 emulator
    • Can run Tclish scripting code
    • Has built in games like Ski Free where Man Bear Pig chases you
    • BOM and Gerbers might be open after Defcon.
  • Bender has a 6502 as a brain/cpu
  • Hack defcon with beer – bring your own bottled corona, so you don’t have to spend $9 / bottle
    • Hacking aka counterfeiting?
  • The MacroFab Meetup in Houston is next week!
Figure 1: Zapp riding some kind of mechanical beast.

Figure 1: Zapp riding some kind of mechanical beast.

Figure 2: Hyr0n showing off the new badge!

Figure 2: Hyr0n showing off the new badge!

Figure 3: New DF25 badges being made.

Figure 3: New DF25 badges being made.

About the Hosts

Parker Dillmann
  Parker Dillmann

Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.

In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.

In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.

Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.

Stephen Kraig
  Stephen Kraig

Stephen Kraig is a component engineer working in the aerospace industry. He has applied his electrical engineering knowledge in a variety of contexts previously, including oil and gas, contract manufacturing, audio electronic repair, and synthesizer design. A graduate of Texas A&M, Stephen has lived his adult life in the Houston, TX, and Denver, CO, areas.

Stephen has never said no to a project. From building guitar amps (starting when he was 17) to designing and building his own CNC table to fine-tuning the mineral composition of the water he uses to brew beer, he thrives on testing, experimentation, and problem-solving. Tune into the podcast to learn more about the wacky stuff Stephen gets up to.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

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