Among Parallax’s most impressive manufacturing and design accomplishments is the DEFCON 22 Badge. The DEFCON 22 badge display is mounted outside the manufacturing room so the team who built 17,000 of these in a few short weeks can see their work, daily.
These badges communicate over infrared. In fact, they’ve been talking to each other for almost ten years now. The communication identifies the badge type (press, speaker, artist, security, human, vendors, etc) to other badges who take on the LED pattern of the sending badge. With all of them arranged in a pre-pandemic arc, it reminded me of how people used to talk at conferences. One purpose of the badge was to inspire people to network and meet others, which it did quite effectively!
