As you have seen, we will be holding KiCon this year at CERN in September.
And what would a KiCad Conference be without an awesome hardware design for the badge. It will be hard to top @orsonmmz 's design from last year but we’re going to try.
We have a hardware specification, outline and possible sponsors for this year’s badge that includes some very interesting FPGA and SoC designs. Whether we run with this badge idea will largely depend on our ability to collect a community of possible FPGA hackers to work on the software.
If you are familiar with FPGA toolchains and would like to work on this year’s KiCon badge, please contact me for details and to be added to the chatboard for coordination.
Note Thank you to everyone who responded! We currently have a number of enormously talented FGPA coders who have graciously volunteered their time.
We do still need to locate a badge artist who would be willing to take this from plain rectangular badge to something unique. If you are that person, send me a DM. This will be a single-person job, working with KiCad, single color silk, single color mask.
Tweeted it I’d be up for helping myself and I did give a tutorial on artistic PCBs with Inkscape and KiCad at FOSDEM 2019. Would I be able to put a Kitspace.org logo and link on there if I do? Some of my work:
I’d like to help. Right now the first badge prototypes for Make Zurich is in production. unfortunately my personal 36c3 badge was a ■■■■■■■■ too hasty, didn’t doublecheck footprints.
I’d love to support the badge with contributing a separate module maybe? Minimum requirement would be 1-2 analog comparator inputs (or at least regular interrupt pins). 1-2 ADC channels would be even better, increasing possible functionality a lot (from mere counting to energy spectra of particles). 48 kHz sample rate would be minimum in that case, better is 200 - 500 kHz. Fast stereo audio ADCs would work as well.
Having a clean enough power supply for the pre-amps is the tricky aspect. But I have some ideas for that…
