One of the things we really wanted for QuahogCon was a full on Open Source hackable badge. Both an open board design and open development tools that would be useful for more than a month after the con. We were thinking of doing an Arduino based badge, but that was too easy. What we’ve ended up with is much cooler. The badge was designed by Mariano Alvira and is based on his Redbee Econotag design. Here is a summary of the specs:
* Freescale MC13224v ARM7 microcontroller with 802.15.4 radio
* On-board FT2232H access to JTAG and UART1
* Two general purpose push buttons
* 10 LEDs
* Flash erase jumpers (can also be erased using JTAG)
* PCB Antenna
* Debugging over USB JTAG using OpenOCD and GDB
* Open Development environment

We’ve put together a VirtualBox VM of the development environment for your hacking ease. At 3GB, it’s kind of big. You can grab a copy of it via BitTorrent. mc1322x-Dev-VM.torrent. Be sure to seed it back out so everyone can speed up their downloads. You’ll need to grab the non Open Source Edition of VirtualBox to use it, as you need the VirtualBox USB support to talk to the board.

If you’re already running Linux and would rather run the development tools on bare metal, you can check out the details at mc1322x.devl.org about how to get setup. If you’re running Ubuntu, there’s a very thorough guide for getting setup.

All the badge schematics and gerbers are available for your study and hacking pleasure. One big thing to note: all the I/O on this board is 3.3 volt, so leave your 5 volt stuff at home.

Br0wnd and Dragorn did the game firmware for the badge. They’ve released this tarball that has the framework they used for the game code, but not the game code itself.

If you’re going to flash the badge with your own code, you’ll need to clear the existing game firmware off first. You can do this the clean way, or the Br0wnd way.

For the clean way, you need to solder the 2×2 pins header you can get the HHL to the board as shown below. Then short the pins as shown and press the reset button to nuke NVRAM.

For the br0wnd way, just insert a paperclip as shown below and press the reset button

Compiled Firmware

Nuked your badge firmware while you were at QuahogCon? Can’t get enough of playing Zombie Invasion? Here are the compiled firmware images for you to play with while you wait for us to release the source code.

Here’s a set of firmware images with lower HP values so you can keep the fun going at home without having 200 other badges around to attack you.