A slightly inebriated conversation in 2012 was all it took to spark the creation of the first Queercon Badge. I figured that I, a somewhat recently graduated Electrical Engineer with some board design under his belt, should be able to make an electronic badge on the scale and quality of the DEF CON badges of the past. Can someone be extremely wrong and extremely right at the same time? Signs point to yes.
Over the years, the Queercon badge has had its up and downs, from spending all night soldering on new radios and broken LEDs to hearing cheers from the hallway when participants complete that years game, the creation of the Queercon Badge has been a hell of a ride, and one that we're not ready to get off just yet.
At its core, every Queercon badge is designed to facilitate social interaction among badge holders. This is done through game design, hardware design, and generally just looking very cool. Funny enough this was not actually the intent going in, but an accidental byproduct of the first design. Users reported back they'd felt a greater sense of community and more included when all the first badge did was get "happy" when it saw a new badge ID for the first time. Afterwards it was pretty obvious this mechanism needed to be incorporated into all future badges as facilitating a sense of community and growing relationships is also one of the core pillars of Queercon itself.
However, if you've landed here you're probably not terribly interested in Queercon lore so much as in need of a bill of materials (BOM) or schematic for a past badge, which I am happy to note you can find in each of their respective folders. What you will not find (and I never intend to release) is the project files or production files for the badges. We've wrestled with this over the years, but have decided that exact recreation of the badges isn't something we want just anyone to be able to do. Know how they work, borrow circuity or parts from them, or hack them to do something else - hell yes, but not mindlessly recreate.