Supercon 2017 is coming up soon and I now have a ticket to attend. Part of the fun is the badge which, unlike SIGGRAPH or WestTec, is not a printed piece of paper. In the case of Supercon (and a few similar conferences) it is actually a circuit board with some functionality. The Supercon 2017 badge is a very minimal low resolution digital camera. Why would we want such a thing when most of us carry cell phones with far superior cameras? Because it is only the start: conference attendees are invited (expected?) to use it as a starting point and build something cool.

Which means I have only about 10 days to do my homework - what would I build with the badge? As a first-time attendee I'm not sure what to expect. Last year I saw brief glimpses of the badge under construction, but I didn't see any of the projects built by conference attendees.

Well, with any project, the first step is to look for documentation. The official source of information is, naturally, the camera badge's own project page on Hackaday.io. I felt intimidated on first look: my own adventures in electronics hardware hasn't covered anything to do with cameras, OLED panels, or the like. About the only thing I am vaguely familiar with is the microcontroller at the heart of the device. It is a Microchip PIC, though from their PIC32 series which is higher-end and more capable than the PIC16F chips I had been playing with.

Fortunately, it uses the same MPLAB X IDE for development. I had to download and install the XC32 compiler corresponding to the PIC32 chip, but that was relatively easy. After changing the path separators from the author's Windows machine ('\') to the Ubuntu I'm working on ('/') the project builds successfully.

That's a good start. The next step is to go digging through the code base and look for something interesting for me to do.

cambadgebuild