ShmooCon is an information security conference held in Washington DC, this past weekend. About 1300 people attended talks ranging from DIY UAV design to disk recovery methodology. It was an intensely fun time. HACDC the local DC hackerspace and close friends of NYCResistor hosted a pretty amazing party inside of a church down there. I remember grabbing rubens with Nick Farr and company at around 6 am the following morning, and thinking… goddamn I am glad I came. However, as of Friday around 1 pm I had still not left NYC. I was working and being a generally busy person. But I got a call from an unnamed person whom we will for the sake of time refer to as “Deep Throat”. Several hackerspace members had arrived at Shmoo to discover that this year’s badges were in fact made of acryllic.

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This was one of my first projects of the new DIY era. This is an LED array mounted on an old military jacket. The controller is a MAX6952. There’s an arduino ( boarduino ), as well as various other components driving it. I wore it during defcon 16 ( Las Vegas ), and nuit blanche ( Toronto ). It has been quoted to be, “fekkin wierd mate”, and asked of it by border patrol “does it have a detonator?”.

Good times.

This is the LED array card I designed for my brother’s wedding. It took me a lot longer than expected, and I highly endorse doing this in eagle. Doing it by hand is wrought with pain and suffering in debug hell. However I used the same driver chips from my LED array jacket project and it came out awesome. The laser cut faceplate really does make it all the more awesome. And the crest on the front is a variation of an old Joyce coat of arms. I thought it looked cool. 280 leds, 4 5×7 programmable characters.