Hackable ESC Badges Demonstrate the Power of Wireless Networking

One hundred electronic “Hello There!” badges were given away at UBM’s Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this week.
(Source: Design News)

Known as “Hello There!” badges, the devices served as a means for engineers to interact with one another, while also teaching them that programming of networked devices needn’t be difficult. “We wanted them to see that it can be fun and easy to program these types of devices,” said Jonathan Heath, solution architect for Synapse Wireless, which designed the badges’ printed circuit boards and provided the hardware modules with the microcontrollers and RF engines. “So we gave them the code and showed them that low-power, mesh-capable eight-bit micros can do some pretty powerful things.”

The badges, manufacturerd by Sunstone Circuits and assembled by Screaming Circuits, were programmed to “talk” to one another and to send messages about the wearers’ technical interests. “They could set their interests –- software, hardware, analog, IoT –- by pressing a DIP switch,” Heath said. “And when they saw someone else with the same interests, it was meant to be a digital icebreaker.”

The Arduino-compatible board also contained 64 discrete LEDs which could be programmed to display scrolling messages, such as A-N-A-L-O-G or I-O-T. The boards were programmed using Synapse’s SNAP platform, which is targeted mostly at the industrial market, but also at the home automation and “maker” spaces.

Heath said that SNAP helps address an issue that has slowed the migration of automation into homes, offices, and industrial settings. “We haven’t seen a real explosion of automated devices yet because it turns out that getting these devices to talk to one another in a way that’s easy and scalable has been hard,” he said. SNAP proved to ESC attendees that it needn’t be that way, he said.

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UBM gave away 75 badges to attendees who tweeted messages about a column written by editor Max Maxfield on Embedded.com. Twenty-five more badges were given away at the session. Attendees were able to control robots and play electronic games with the badges. At one point, users in the audience were able to make all their badges blink in sync, on cue (watch it happen in the video above).

Heath and Maxfield said they hatched the idea as a social/electronic networking scheme. “We asked each other, ‘How do we get engineers to interact?’” Heath explained. “The ‘Hello There!’ badge was the answer.”

Senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been writing about technology for 32 years. He joined Design News in 1987, and has covered electronics, automation, fluid power, and autos.