What?

An electronic conference badge, of course! (That makes this a wearable right?)

If you're interested in keeping up to date with new versions, you can add your email here: https://goo.gl/forms/xGFPdRpdT4x1kmzG3 I'll send out (few) updates as I make progress towards whatever the next version is.

Yes, but what does it do?

By default the device does pleasant RGB fades across its 48 RGB LEDs. It also sends a beacon in infrared every 30 seconds. They use any beacons received to synchronize a clock from which an animation is derived. The effect is that if one is alone, it plays random colors. If a group of them are together, they play the same rainbow water drop animation together.

For a little more information, last year's was written up by Hackaday here.

This is a partial rewrite of the work done for DEFCON 25 (here).

Why is it a dragonfly?

If you haven't read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, do that first. I'll wait.

If you have, there's a sequence around page 300 in which Miranda is first introduced to the possibility of using the drummers to find Nell. In this scene she attends a party in which the revellers wear colorful cloisonné dragonfly pins. As the party progresses they transition from random colorful flickering to some sort of synchrony, and Miranda notices the participants do the same. This is what I built.

A Sympetrum is a genus of Dragonfly.

Addons

Assembly instructions here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MZ-Gf56ivJ_pZaOBdA2XsJtWuKzQMPqqDXrGzq-pdRY/edit?usp=sharing