The RSA Sandbox Badge

The Idea

I was asked by the RSA Conference if I can make a badge for their renowned Sandbox program which features multiple villages and play areas. The starting point was their logo for this year with the theme Stronger Together.

The Sandbox area is set to feature 7-8 unique villages this year. So I wanted to represent each of them in a fun way. Each village would get a doodle based on its theme and the entire design put together in a coherent design flow.

After playing around with the design for an eternity, we finally arrived at the artwork that looked suitable to our unusual form factor.

Putting it all properly on the badge colours and we have the design ready.

Manufacturing

Our initial prototypes on routine PCB printing were barely okay. One of the early problems it had was improper colour shades. The violet Blue became light blue and pink became red.

Doing some experiments with ink dilution and mixing with white ink bought a closer shade to the original logo but then the artwork lost its crispness and clarity in printing.

In both experiments, the yellow design was indistinguishable from the white artwork printed on it. And thus it didn't take long for us to realise traditional printing methods would not do the justice.

Holy Grail Of UV Printing

One of my friends overheard at a trade show "UV printing......can print on pretty much everything". And the light bulb went on in our heads to experiment with it.

As seen in almost all of our designs, putting all the components on the backside gave us the advantage of a clean flat surface on the front side. But combining two different processes meant conflicts at some point. Which appeared in 2 main issues.

A. The PCB turned Yellowish after the reflow oven process (UV print couldn't handle high temperature)

B. Artwork misaligned with LED spots due to casual shifts in the process

We were able to play around extensively with the reflow profiles and adjust the temperature as well as speed to achieve a sweet spot where all components get soldered without turning the PCB Yellowish.

For the misalignments, we created our own jigs to properly fit the badge.

Reverse Mounted LEDs

Each badge featured 23 LEDs which meant we were going to be handling close to 36, 000 LEDs for the entire project. But the fact that those were all standard 1206 LEDs soldered upside down meant we were looking at a mammoth task that machines couldn't do and all LEDs would then need to be hand soldered.

So we started finding out alternatives. Ordering actual reverse mount LEDs would not only skyrocket the budget but disturb the timeline with imports. Eventually, we were able to find a vendor who had the standard 1206 LEDs but was packed upside down in the roll. Which meant the machine would be able to pick and place and solder it. However, it seemed tricky for the machine to solder these properly due to the distance between the LED leads and the pads. So we came up with an ingenious solution of drilling holes on the PCB halfway - enough to make a cavity for the LED head and align LED leads on the pad easily.

The Final Form

And with that, prototyping was successful.

The Remotes

Each village represented on the badge needed a way to imprint its mark on the badge for every attendee. And so this idea from our uber-popular TCP Packet Badge came back with an aesthetics and ergonomics upgrade.

To maintain coherency in the design, each village remote came with an extended doodle artwork in the respective colour scheme and a couple of push-button keys to tag or untag the badge.

Because the remotes would be handled throughout the conference day, we wanted to put padding for better ergonomics. So we added an acrylic sheet on the backside.

Rounding Up

BadgeCTF Mode

Apart from encouraging social interaction and collaboration, the badge comes with a CTF mode to unlock 2 of the exclusive doodles on the badge. The CTF comes with 2 challenges mainly based on Cryptography and Steganography.

The badge comes with Tx, Rx, Vcc, And Gnd pins on the backside. Simply wire in your CP2102 USB to TTL adapter and open the serial monitor of your choice to send *** and start CTF mode. To reset the badge, send +++.

Uploaded here is the hex file to glow all the LEDs in case you missed out on some village activities in the Sandbox area. Simply wire in your AVR programmer and upload the hex to put your badge in this special edition glow.

Happy Hacking!