One-off wearables: The Linux steampunk conference badge

Rob Reilly demonstrates how to combine Linux, physical computing, and practical application into an attention-grabbing, steampunk-themed, wearable conference badge. Rob walks you through the motivation, idea generation, research, prototyping, build, challenges, and use. And watch for it: he'll wear the badge into the session and then use it to run his tech-talk slide presentation.

Rob Reilly demonstrates how to combine Linux, physical computing, and practical application into an attention-grabbing, steampunk-themed, wearable conference badge. Rob walks you through the motivation, idea generation, research, prototyping, build, challenges, and use. You’ll learn the nuts and bolts of building an interesting, robust prototype embedded Linux gadget from off-the-shelf parts and discover the logistics and time and effort needed for version 1.0. The badge incorporates a recent microcontroller module, a 3.5-inch color TFT LCD showing videos, and a custom brass steampunk-themed frame to hold it all together. There’s also a secondary Arduino that handles analog and near-real-time sensor processing from its multiple light, temperature, distance, and other sensors that feed Python scripts and can be connected to the internet. mplayer handles the video playback in badge mode, and LibreOffice manages the slides in presentation mode. The device is WiFi-capable. And watch for it: Rob will wear the badge into the session and then use it to run his tech-talk slide presentation.