This is the first badge we made under the DC Punks group. The design ethos was simple hardware, ease of manufacturing, and low cost. DC Punks badges are for people who go to DEF CON for the first time, who may feel intimidated by more complicated projects. Badges get complicated and have tons of crazy puzzles, they can make you feel really dumb if you’re not in to the infosec scene already

One of the earliest badges I was able to tear down and understand was one by a Chinese hacker group (that I have since forgotten the name of, sorry). There was no software on it at all! just a simple circuit that blinked LEDs by measuring the charge of a couple capacitors. I took inspiration from this design and made something that was hardware only, but had a bit more of a digital component.

The DC Punks 1 badge is just a couple of binary counters and an oscillator. That’s it. The oscillator makes the counter count up, and each bit in the counter is an LED. It makes a cool pattern, it’s simple to build, requires no programming, and can be reverse engineered by anyone. It uses a huge 9V battery because that made the power supply design easy. Just what a 7805 five volt regulator on it and you’re done! This is low powered enough to where the losses due to a linear regulator don’t really matter.

See? Keep your stuff simple. You will be able to cut corners later when you need to.