The problem Attendee Hardware Badge solves

This project was designed to enhance the conference experience and motivate the ETHDenver community into exploring and creating hardware based attendee badges. This opens up a ton of possibilities for network connectivity, voluntary tracking, heat mapping, games, scavenger hunts, daily announcements, interaction with vendors (POAP/scanning QR codes), FIO address display, local and regional maps, and business advertisement.

This badge was also designed with the ColoradoJam CDA "map/beer/wine offline listing" bounty in mind.

Challenges we ran into

Hardware is tough! The device was suffering from under-voltage, which caused a button press to register as two. This caused some time wasted troubleshooting the code until a new powersource was tried. In trying to keep the system profile lightweight, X and GTK were not used at all (instead opting for framebuffer direct communication). This caused some issues with graphical capabilities, but was an interesting challenge to try and tackle. We also did not have enough time to fabricate a physical copy of the silkscreen proof of concept, but we have another year to build and prepare for 2022!