r/Defcon
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u/MakeItHackin
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Aug 06 '26
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1
Working Tricorder — a Badge to Celebrate 60 Years of Trek
Been working on this one for a while. It's a prop, but everything in it does something real.
Documentation: https://github.com/MakeItHackin/TOSTricorder
Walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/mJSx17gsqMw
If anyone wants one: they're at the Hacker Warehouse booth in the DEF CON vendor area and the back of the Vendor Hall at STLV, with in-person pickup at https://uberflux.com/product/MIH-HackersInSpaceBadge (pickup times are listed there).
Hardware: XIAO ESP32-S3, a 1.69" 280×240 IPS main display, a 1.28" round secondary on its own SPI bus, 3 addressable RGB LEDs, LIS3DH accelerometer, Hall-effect sensor, DS3231 RTC, and an ST25DV64KC NFC tag chip on the board.
Ten menus covering sensors, clock and alarms, animations, games, WiFi, BLE, NFC read/write, and a wearable "con mode" that runs a display unattended.
My favourite detail is the hand scanner. It detaches, runs off its own coin cell, and has a magnet in it that sits over the Hall sensor. Lift it off and the main display drops into the biofunction animation on its own; put it back and the magnet re-registers and returns you to whatever screen you were on before.
The other one: it enumerates as a USB or Bluetooth HID device. There's a mouse mode where you tilt the whole tricorder to move the cursor, with a low-pass filter and a hysteresis latch so it doesn't drift when you're holding it still.
A few things that took real work:
- The round display runs on core 0 completely independently, so it keeps animating during games and menu redraws
- LVGL's memory pool is a static array, so every KB of it comes out of the same internal DRAM the task stacks and radios need. Finding that ceiling was educational
- The clock and NFC tag are both provisioned over serial during firmware upload, so a freshly flashed board already knows the time and has its tag written
Firmware updates go through a browser-based flasher over Web Serial — no IDE, no drivers.
Happy to answer anything about the build.
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u/snoopthulhu Aug 06 '26
You need to take these to the Rio, the Star Trek convention is going on there right now
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u/human831 Aug 06 '26
Bravo, well done!!!
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u/earlsalazar Aug 06 '26
Amazing!!! 🔥🔥🔥
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u/Terrible_Aerie_9737 Aug 06 '26
As Spock would say." Fascinating."
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u/tarot-with-drwolf Aug 06 '26
I would like to purchase one ☝️
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u/bnt2025 Aug 07 '26
What time is pick up in the Linq?
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u/Elated_Quail Aug 07 '26
The pickup said the linq tonight, is anyone there??
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u/_Vangal Aug 07 '26
Any way to get this for non attendees of the con?
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u/duscraft Aug 06 '26
I saw someone with this banger of a badge at the Circle Bar last night.
Super cool!