TL;DR
Surface Mounted Device (SMD) badge soldering workshop - screen printing solder paste, hotplate reflowing and various tricks, with a name badge to take home
Soldering SMDs
According to some Surface Mounted Devices (SMDs) are tiny (they blow away when you sneeze), hard to handle (you can barely see them) and hard to solder (the tip of a soldering iron is often larger than the component). In this workshop you will gain some experience working with SMD components in a way that is much faster than manual through-hole component soldering for small series production.
You will use screen printing to spread just the right amount of solder paste onto the PCB right where it is needed, use tweezers to place the components onto the primed PCB and finally a hotplate to solder all components in one go, and, while doing this, learn various tricks to make SMD soldering more enjoyable.
Success rate at this workshop is nearly 100%
The badge
You'll make an electronic badge to write your name on, containing (amongst others) a microcontroller and 24 RGB LEDs. The microcontroller comes pre-programmed with a program to display a blinkenfest of different patterns of blinking and running full-color lights.
The badge fully supports V2.0 of the badgenet™ protocol including mesh extensions, enabling two-way controller-less inter-badge communications, and is insensitive to the "anti-social badge" vulnerability that was present in badgenet™ protocol versions up to V1.9.2b.
The badge is open source hardware as well as open source software.
The design of this badge has been somewhat influenced by the hardware and software of last year's badge.
Costs
Component costs for the badge are approximately 2 euro each. I will not take money for it, but suggest you make a voluntary donation to Haxogreen instead.
History
Tradition dictates that every hacker event has a unique badge. These badges are usually elaborate pieces of electronics with everything-BUT-the-kitchen-sink functionality of actually being a badge - An expensive electronics designer orgasm with scant user value that commonly ends up populating bottoms of drawers.
Last year, for [TBD], The objective was to create a badge that doesn't break the bank and that would actually do it's namesake job well - being a badge - so "The Label" was created - a 1 euro piece of electronics that you can write your name on, wear around your neck with a lanyard, with 40 hypnotizing lights blinking in various patterns to draw attention.
To reflect the participatory nature of [TBD], participants to the soldering workshop each put together their own label, customizing it by choosing the colors of their LEDs.
After [TBD], the soldering workshop toured bornhack and several hackerspaces, and up until now nearly 200 labels have been produced.
This year's badge is a follow-up: instead of 40 single color LEDs it contains 72 LEDs (in the form of 24 RGB LEDs). To assure a harmonious label blinkenfest, like last year, each label contains a two-way communication system that will automatically "synchronize" it to neighboring labels.