Last year's badge. This badge was a big departure for us - for the first time the badge had a theme! We conceptualized the badge as a space-faring exploration rover with environmental sensors for temperature, magnetic field, ambient light, and sound a-la KSP. Badge monsters made a strong return as well, with space themed monsters. Finally, a number of secrets were hidden encoded in silk-screen graphics for CTF. Completion of the sensor suite checklist, all CTF challenges, or collection of all badge monsters earned the holder a golden d-pad to show their badge prowess. This year we moved to a new screen sourced directly from a supplier. We also added an acceleromter, and an additional encoder. This allowed the badge to respond to reorientation. This resulted in the badge needing to support all four possible orientations of the screen - but also allowed for clearing the etch-a-sketch app by shaking the badge or turning it over.
This was also Peter's first year experimenting with using the solder mask and silk screen for design elements like the two tone logo. This was the first badge designed by Peter Maxwell Warasila. This badge changed the formula in two major ways.
First, the PCBs were not longer etched at HackRVA using a ferric chloride process. Instead, they were fabricated overseas in China. The primary benefit to this was the elimination of the largest class of hardware QC issues - defects in the boards themselves. There were often scratched traces or shorted traces. It also aided greatly in reducing issues with solder bridges and other solder reflow process issues. Of course, it also had the benefit of making the badges quite attractive.
Second, we changed the processor platform from a PIC32 to the brand new Raspberry Pi RP2040 on the Pico board. The RP2040 was a revolutionary and disruptive microcontroller with immense performance for a rock bottom price. The Pico also contained the USB interface, switchmode power supply, flash, and processor for less money than the individual parts at the time - right in the middle of COVID's parts shortages.
Smaller changes for this year included the ability to safely plug in USB while batteries were in and the new rotary encoder. In an attempt to arrive at a more attractive badge, this year sported a matte black PCB to contrast against the bare copper. However, this turned out to be a nightmare for etch QC. While the traditional FR-4 substrate allows for the bade to be placed up to the light to spot trace breaks and shorts, this was not possible using the opaque black.