Show HN: I made open source, zero power PCB hackathon badges (github.com)

by kaipereira 18 comments 158 points
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18 comments

[−] sen 41d ago
That's very cool.

I have a few ePaper picture frames that don't use any power, and when you tap your phone to them it uses the power-over-NFC to boot itself and update the photo you send to it. It's such a cool idea and something I always felt like could be used more for displays that don't need to update very often.

[−] larelli 41d ago
This sounds really neat. Is it a commercial product or did you build them yourself?
[−] nbbaier 40d ago
This is so cool. Could you share more about where I could find them?
[−] robertclaus 41d ago
How much did they end up costing? We do a similar PCB medallion every year for another event and haven't been able to get quite that fancy due to cost. We usually only manage to get some LEDs and a processor in our lower budget range.
[−] kaipereira 41d ago
The total ended up being about $10/badge for 60 (5 for badge, 5 for eink), and we made the mistake of not ordering enough, so we ordered a couple more that were about $1 more expensive each. We bought all the badges from JLC and the prod files are in the repo if you want to see how much they come to in higher order quantity!
[−] smcameron 40d ago
Interesting... RP2040 seems like maybe a bit overkill for a zero power badge. I've participated in writing some software for an RP2040 powered badge for the RVASEC conference in Richmond, VA, for several years, and the RP2040 is really nice to program for, and is quite powerful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5ZrHAXCFLA
[−] NooneAtAll3 41d ago
how does "zero-power" work exactly? all power from NFC?
[−] bschwindHN 41d ago
Very cool! Quick question: did you use a plugin to generate the NFC antenna?

The routing and layout looks nice. The end result is great! I bet it was satisfying to get it working on the first try.

[−] aditmag 39d ago
Went to Treehacks at Stanford this Feb and they had PCB badges too! Gotta say these ones are much cooler tho :D
[−] moezd 40d ago
Do you ship internationally, also with complete setup of the hardware?
[−] metaPushkin 40d ago
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[−] wiether 40d ago
Not directly related to the submission content, but trying to monitor trends: I understand there's the "no capitalization" one at the start of sentences and for the "I".

Apparently OP is not following this one, but I see that _some_ proper nouns are not capitalized (like github, singapore, overglade...) while others are.

Should I update my userscript to handle an incoming new trend?