I love these concept of badges, but almost never are they well executed. Defcon has had TONS of problems with their badges of all types. OpenSauce has tried for the last two years with only middling results.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say "don't do it" or "These people are stupid". It's just that people underestimate the time and effort required. It's basically bringing a product to market, for 20 to 50k people (depending on the event), in a few months time. But it also needs to be "cool" and "unique" and often "beginner friendly" and extremely cheap. Crazy crazy hard.
Engineering is the first 80% of work. But productization is the second 80%. I find that the more nerdy a community or product audience, the more the latter suffers.
This is right. But this time that was not the primary reason. From earlier experiences, Badge.Team, started well ahead of time and were on schedule, but things went wrong after some drama with the WHY2025 organization.
It's worth noting that this kind of thing works great at a smaller scale. Adafruit has been marketing bare PCBs for sew-on applications for years.
On an even smaller scale: I contributed to a beginner soldering class by designing this simple board shaped like the high school's logo: https://postimg.cc/ftwtqHFn (for the record, shorts across the contacts in the exposed metal area are harmless. The transistor never saturates in this circuit)
The key to Adafruit's arduinos-but-for-cosplay, and my keychain photocell thingy is that neither demands two(!) 18650s worth of power. There just isn't a significant hazard in the first place.
A lot of people pay for pis when all they need is an esp32 at most.
A lot of people pay for ESP32s when all they need as a knockoff Arduino Nano!
we copy paste adafruit pcb to make our own badges
It's almost fitting, isn't it? Given what each of these conferences are all about.