BSides Vancouver 2026

Our last year's BSides Conference badge will be used in this workshop. Both this year's BSides ticket holders and those from BSides 2025 can attend this workshop for free.

Conference badges have become a staple of hacker culture. They’re part art piece, part engineering challenge, and part sleep-deprived miracles. In this workshop, we’ll walk through the complete journey of designing and building a custom electronic conference badge under the kind of timelines that normally produce regret instead of functioning hardware and software. Somehow, this one worked.

Participants will get an inside look at the hardware and software decisions behind the badge design, including component selection, PCB layout challenges, power considerations, embedded firmware architecture, cost minimization, and the compromises that happen when “the manufacturing deadline is only days away”.

Attendees will receive access to the base code repository and reference materials so they can follow along and begin experimenting immediately. We’ll share real design files, schematics, firmware, and lessons learned from building a badge intended to be functional, hackable, and fun.

Most importantly, this is a hands-on hacking session. After breaking down how the badge works internally, participants will spend the second half of the workshop designing and implementing their own features, modifications, or entirely unnecessary additions.

This workshop is about learning how hardware badges are built and how they become even better once the community starts hacking them.