The SINCON Dragon Park Badge

The Design

After the great successes of the 2023 Khong Guan Building Badge and the 2024 Iced Gems Biscuit Badge, the SINCON crew presented me with their 2025 design inspiration - the iconic Toa Payoh Dragon Playground.

Constructed in 1979, it is one of the oldest playgrounds in Singapore. The playground stands on top of a sand pit and consists of multicoloured steel rings along the dragon's body for children to climb through, with a slide inside its head.

So the artwork was made with the SINCON logo in it.

The badge is precisely shaped to match the iconic outline of the Toa Payoh Dragon Playground, featuring full-colour artwork printed using our proprietary UV printing process.

Reverse-mounted LEDs illuminate the SINCON logo, along with eight grid blocks at the bottom, purpose-built for CTF challenges.

All the components would be on the back side with a USB-C port for easy and quick badge CTF interfacing using your favourite serial monitor.

Finalising the design and pushing the PCB to fabrication...

UV Printing The Artwork

The Assembly

Badges were soldered with all the components, except CTF LEDs.

The Working

Flip the slide switch, and the Dragon's eye lights up with a glowing RGB LED - its first sign of life. If you’ve taken the time to solder on all eight CTF LEDs and solved the challenges, you’re in for a treat: they fire up together, glowing brightly for three seconds before slipping into a smooth, looping animation.

The CTF

Connect your badge to the Serial Monitor of your choice and send *** to start the CTF.

Users are free to play the CTF in any order they want for a challenge pool of a variety of Crypto and Stegano challenges. At the conference, we hosted a soldering village to help attendees solder their own LEDs in the colours they want and personalise their badges.

Instructions on how to solder the badge as well as play at CTF are here.

The badge remembers the flags even if the cable is disconnected.

Happy Hacking!