The Supercon 2025 Badge is Built to be Customized
For anyone whoâs joined us for previous years, youâll know that badge hacking and modification are core to the Hackaday Supercon experience. While youâre of course free to leave the badge completely stock, we encourage attendees to tear it apart, learn how it works, and (hopefully) rebuild it into something unique. There are even prizes for the best hacks.
As such, every decision about the badgeâs hardware and software is made with hackability in mind. Itâs why we always try to add an expansion port to the badge and, in recent years, have leaned into MicroPython to make it easier for attendees to modify the code.
But one thing thatâs been largely missing in previous badges is aesthetic customization. Sure, you could strip out the firmware and write something entirely new, or hang some oddball peripheral off the side of the thing, but ultimately it still looked like the badge we gave you at the door. Thatâs because, at the end of the day, the badges are just PCBs. Short of designing your own enclosure (which has certainly been done), every badge looks the same. That is, until now.
This yearâs badge is unique among Supercon badges because it isnât just a PCB. Itâs actually a stack-up of two PCBs! That might not sound like much of a distinction, but in this case, the front board has no electrical function â its only purpose is to hold the keyboard membrane against the dome switches on the rear PCB. The only reason we made it out of a PCB in the first place is that it was convenient and cheap at the scale we needed. But if those werenât concerns, it could just as easily have been 3D-printed or cut out with a laser or a CNC router.
While the necessities of running two hacker cons on opposite sides of the planet within a couple of months of each other meant we needed to think at scale, attendees are free to do whatever they want between now and when they get their badges on Friday. Want to carve a front panel out of aluminum on your CNC? Awesome. Perhaps laser-cut some thin plywood and give it a nice stain for that old-school look? We love it. Want to see what that fancy multi-material 3D printer youâve got is capable of? So do we.
Hailing frequencies open, Captain.
Some Assembly Required
Want to make the 2025 Hackaday Supercon badge your own? Just head over to the âhardware/mechanicals_and_modelsâ directory in the badgeâs GitHub repository and youâll find STEP, DXF, and SVG versions of the front panel. Weâre eager to see some wild and wonderful front panels, but there are a few things to keep in mind:
Spacing between the rear and front boards should be approximately 2 mm.The area around the keyboard should be roughly PCB thickness (~1.7 mm) for optimal typing.Youâll need to provide hardware (M3 nuts/bolts work well) to attach the front panel to the badge.
If youâve got other questions or need some assistance, leave a comment below or check in on the #badge-hacking channel in the Hackaday Discord server. See you at Supercon!
hackaday.com/2025/10/27/the-suâŚ