The pandemic has left my own calendar of occasions in ruins this year. Where I hoped to have spent a vital component of my summer mingling with our glorious and varied network around the world, I am instead sitting at home opening a solitary Club-Mate and listening to suffocated techno music as I seek to believe in a box. somewhere over several thousand hackers.
Due to cancellations of occasions, something more missing this summer: the explosion of creativity in the world of electronic convention badges has faltered. Badges are scarce in the box this year, so the few who have come to production will have to be valuable to remember that life continues and that there will be another golden summer of hacker camps in the future. This year, the CampZone 2020 badge has gained its own voice and is doing interesting things like presenting a programming interface through WebUSB.
CampZone is a European event aimed primarily at the player network, but that integrates the HackZone event inside. The face-to-face convention was canceled this year and went online like so many others, but that didn’t stop badge author Tom Clement and his team from dropping the CampZone 2020 badge anyway.
The result is the AerPane, pronounced “Ear-pain” in reference to i-Pane 2019, and a design that continues with the theme of CampZone badges by providing direct multimedia delight to music experimenters with built-in speakers and a bright 16-key silicone keyboard illuminated by LED. Run the well-established badge.team firmware under the skin, so when I ordered my badge, I was interested to see how they had been controlled to integrate such minimal UI hardware into a UI hardware.
In my package from the Netherlands was the plate kit, which contained two PCBs, a bag of appliances and the overlay of the silicone keyboard. The board can be ordered with one of the two versions of the keyboard, one with keys 12 mm high and the other that I delivered with shorter keys of about 8 mm. The main circuit board measures between 111 mm and one hundred mm and has a row of touch buttons, keyboard button contacts and LEDs in maximum sensitivity with the rest of the factors at the bottom. The smaller PCB measures between 40 mm and one hundred mm, holds the speakers and connects via a short flat cable. The meeting was quite simple, with the silicone held in position through the plastics that also serve as a plate, and the speaker panel constant through a pair of plastic corner brackets to hold to forty-five degrees. The speakers themselves are joined with a self-adhesive ring and have small PCB connectors. The most confusing component of the meeting is to configure the flat cable, anything in which I discovered a pair of very useful smart pliers.
Looking at the hardware below the map, there is an ESP32-WROVER-2 module that does maximum work, and an Apex Microelectronics APM32F103C8 microcontroller is in fact not an STM32 that handles the USB interface. The ESP has a microSD card holder, one of the type with folding lid instead of a drawer. Next, there are a couple of LED power chips and a Shenzhen Titan TM8211 i2s DAC with a pair of audiopid chips. Finally, there is an unpopulated doleading for a battery charger and a LiPo circuit. Connectivity is done via a USB-C port on the back of the main card. Mentioning the non-repeated doleading battery circuit takes us to a vital point related to the badge, strictly speaking, is not a badge if you take a badge as a portable device. Instead, it is a self-contained unit of maximum productivity placed on a flat surface.
When you connect the board for the first time to the USB-C power source, it is sent in an exclusive start sequence, with flashing LEDs and stunning sounds, then we get our first experience with the board interface while a synthesized voice tells us that a long press of an illuminated button shows the application that starts, and a brief push of the spear. It comes with five pre-installed apps: an undeniable polyphonic sine wave synthesizer, a four-row set, a MIDI controller app, a Dutch radio app and an app that acts as a USB-HID keyboard and “Cyber” types for the host. Computer. The latter refers to a meme “CYBER” among European hackerspaces, and yes, of course, its appearance in the previous sentence was written in the application on my board.
The physical characteristics of the badge now described, it’s time to connect it to the PC and investigate its other features. This is where this badge pushes barriers in terms of ease of use, because instead of requiring a tool chain or terminal, it is directly available for progression through WebUSB. Simply point a WebUSB-enabled browser to webusb.hackz.one, and there will be a quick list of apps available. Like all other badges on badge.team, they are hosted in your app store called breeding, and when using MicroPython, they are very simple to write without knowing the low point of the hardware itself. Better yet, AerPane brings progression to the browser via WebUSB with a code editor and a MicroPython indicator, allowing instant code hacking. I downloaded and borrowed the code from one of the existing clock programs to mix it with a task I wrote years ago, and in about an hour, my resistance color code gave the impression at the incubation plant.
This badge was designed for a player occasion where many participants are not programmers and are more likely to have a Windows device than one running Linux or some other operating system. Therefore, the WebUSB technique has a just meaning as a way to have it coded, however, we can see that this is something that would possibly be less welcome in some circles because WebUSB is not compatible with all browsers. In particular, Firefox users will have to locate a Chrome-based browser, and I had to stick to some commands so that everything would paint with Chromium in my Ubuntu box. Its design is completely new and new, it is a fun and horny device to play with, and its ease of coding takes to new heights with the WebUSB interface. Everything is open source, and we’re actually looking ahead to see some of their concepts influence the harvest of badges from the next global community #BadgeLife.
This is the case where you can say that he speaks practically.
Interesting use of WebUSB for Micropython interface.
It would be attractive to upload it to the ESP32-S2 natively or rely on an external MCU to manage USB.
And today I discovered Bluetooth web, which would be even bigger and could be implemented in the original ESP32.
The badge is a laugh to play with; I have a lot of esp32 things, but this one makes the progression laugh with the webusb uPython combo
Very wonderful review Jenny. Developers have outdone themselves by making this gaming platform available and incredibly simple to use for an amateur. All programs published on the incubation plant are also open source, allowing you to see how others have created your programs. This allows young people to learn, play and produce deaf, flickering noises fairly quickly. It’s wonderful to see what two very enthusiastic people can paint together.