Monthly Archives: June 2016

Designing the X-CTF 2016 Badge

X-CTF 2016 badge with Lithium-ion battery attached

I had the opportunity to collaborate with some NUS students to design the electronic badge for their X-CTF event this year.

The purpose of the badge was to inspire more people to take an interest in hardware hacking, or to get them started on electronics. With so much hype on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) these days, what better idea than to let participants take home their very own IoT device. The super low cost WiFi chip, Expressif’s ESP8266, made this possible. We also wanted it to be shaped like a gaming device, with a D-pad and an LCD.

You can see the final badge design above: a ESP8266-based board with a backlit monochrome Nokia LCD, D-pad and a SELECT button. Powered by a lithium-ion battery, charged via the USB port, which also provides a serial connection to the ESP8266.

I was inspired by the SyScan 2015 badge. It was so simple and spartan: a monochrome LCD, an LED, a 5-way joystick switch and a 32-bit ARM processor (on the back). As the regulator was built-in and it runs all the way down to 2.4V, there was no need for an external regulator.

SyScan 2015 electronic badge

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Quick Update: Mailbag and WIP

Sorry I haven’t been updating the blog often enough.

I have been busy helping out with an electronics project, which will be in the hands of users very soon. There will be a detailed post on the project when that happens this coming weekend. For now, here’s a mysterious peek at its progress:

Ever since I made my first purchase on AliExpress, I have been buying random stuff and they’ve been arriving in batches. On a particular week, they might all combine to form a small pile, somewhat like this:

small pile of mailbag items

If you enjoy watching people buy stuff on AliExpress, eBay, or wherever else and taking them to bits, check out these YouTube channels I subscribe to:

I prefer bigclivedotcom because he shares a lot of insight from his previous job during the teardowns and draws the schematic for most of the items he takes apart.

A protip when buying on AliExpress is to read the reviews first. This may be obvious, but I didn’t do it for the first few items and managed to get away with it, until one incident when my luck apparently ran out. Now I prefer sellers with better reviews over those who offer the lowest price for a particular item. I also pay it forward by contributing to reviews with photos and technical details of the items, to help buyers like myself.

So what can you get on AliExpress?

  • Tools like spudgers, device openers, anti-static poking sticks
  • Soldering iron tips, to complement the soldering iron I just bought
  • Chinese components, like the popular ESP8266
  • Breakout boards
  • Alternative ARM boards, like the Orange Pi One that rivals the Raspberry Pi 2 in terms of price & performance

I bought quite a lot of stuff to work on and I’ll be writing about those projects in time.

A surprise package also came in last week. Unlike the other packages delivered via regular mail, this one was shipped via FedEx.

MPLAB Xpress on the FedEx Small Box it came in

Inside the FedEx Small Box was an even smaller box — the Microchip MPLAB Xpress Evaluation Board. I signed up shortly after I saw the announcement on Hackaday in February and heard nothing back. It took 4 months but I’m supposedly one of the lucky 2,000 sign-ups who received the board for free.

On the evaluation board there’s a PIC16F18855 microcontroller, together with a very under-utilized PIC18F25K50, which presents itself as a USB mass storage device when plugged in and serves to programs the PIC16F. MPLAB Xpress is a cloud-based IDE requiring no installation, and using this mass storage programming approach you don’t need any special USB drivers for the programmer. I’ll give that a go and report back here in a separate blog post.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the post on the mystery project this weekend!