Kernelcon Electronic Badges and Pogopin Hackery

April 14, 2020

I help organize Omaha’s hacker conference, Kernelcon, by sitting on the organizing committee. My major involvement the last two years has been the electronic badge. Last year, I primarily helped with concept and programming , while @diggeroflogs and @scotchsec handle other facets. However this year, I became the badge chair on the committee and had involvement in just about every step, along side my cohort @scotchsec. Together, and with no lack of unforeseen challenges on behalf of a global pandemic, we built the Hack-Master badge! This blog post briefly documents the 2019 & 2020 Kernelcon badges and how to make a DIY Pogopin clamp using a clothespin.

2019

The badge was in the shape of a “K” for Kernelcon and was controlled by an Atmel tiny85 (attiny85). The badge had three slots for cr2032 batteries for power and five addressable RGB LEDs (apa102). The badge had some built in CTF challenges in the form of binary blinking lights. There was a switch to toggle power and a momentary button to toggle mode.

Full documentation: https://github.com/ZonkSec/kernelcon-2019-badge

2020

This years conference theme was vision and an homage to one of my favorite childhood toys seemed to fit the bill. We built the “Hack-Master” which sported a backlit custom image reel. Powered by 3 AAA batteries with an Atmel Atmeg328 at the helm of the operation. With this mightier brain we were able to add more addressable RGB LEDs, serial communication for a mini game, and a soldering-skill based challenge for the CTF. Unfortunately, the mini game was scraped when the conference went virtual. And just like last years badge, there was a switch to toggle power and a momentary button to toggle mode.

If you are interested in more detail, here’s the talk @scotchsec and I gave at the conference on how we went about making the badge:

Full documentation: https://github.com/ZonkSec/kernelcon-2020-badge

Bonus Hack: Clothespin Pogopin Clamp

I built some ICSP programming clamps from clothspins and some prototype board so that I could multitask better. I could clamp a board, start to flash its bootloader/firmware, and then move to a different task (mostly snapping pcbs out of a panel) until the flashing was complete. Here is a PDF tutorial on how to make one: Clothespin Pogo Clamp Tutorial.

I’ve really enjoyed working on these badges over the last two years. Hardware and electronics have become a new frontier of things to explore and skills to learn!