Matt Nichols completed the design and came up with the vision for these badges. Additionally, the Electronics Club officers were instrumental in adding additional features and giving feedback on the design and look. Special thanks to Eddy Lui, Max Fojtik, Siddharth Venkatesan, Jason Jiang, Jonah Mikesell, and Zach Kittleson.

Ohio State University’s OHI/O club coordinates numerous marathon hacking and making events over the semester. Autumn 2022 was the 10th anniversary of their hackathon event, HackOHI/O. In commemoration of this milestone, the Electronics Club elected to fund and design PCB badges for the event staff to wear during the event. These were inspired by the DEFCON badges.

The design of these badges was intended to be very simplistic. Many ideas were discussed, but due to time constraints, a simple LED circuit with an on-off switch was decided upon. Most of the “cool factor” for these badges comes from the PCB itself so less emphasis was placed on the circuitry. KiCad 5 was used for the design. The HackOHI/O and Electronics Club logos and an image of the state of Ohio were imported so they could be traced out with copper fills. To create the artwork a combination of the black solder mask, white silkscreen, bare copper, and bare FR4 material was used. Areas that are visibly silver on the badge are bare copper that has had hot air solder leveling (HASL) applied with lead-free solder.

Electrically, the badges consist of an LED, CR2032 battery, SPST slide switch, and a 100 Ω resistor. The LED is reverse mounted so that it shines through the FR4 material and illuminates the X on the front of the badge. The solder mask and copper were removed from both the X and where the LED mounts to enable this. A fun bonus feature is that the word “hack” is connected to the negative terminal of the battery and the word “OHI/O” is positive (connected to the 100 Ω resistor). This allows the wearer to use the badge as a LED tester. No current limiting resistor is required since it is already built into the back of the badge. The battery life is calculated to power the LED for a minimum of 12 hours. Preliminary testing is showing the practical life to be higher than that which is excellent. A minimum requirement is that it lasts for one full event day which is roughly 12 hours.