Next time just call them pieces of flare. 🤣

I've had a ton of fun with conference badges. I've been hacking on them since defcon 16, and I always learn something. Often times a new chip or toolchain, sometimes a new bit of tech. Like defcon 17, I would have never bothered with a freescale DSP before that or had reason to bodge on so many wires. Supercon 17: would have never touched a pic 32 or learned about the horrible things microchip is doing to open source, or mess around with a ray casting engine.

IDK about the flood of SAO badges, and perhaps there is just as much garbage as there is education and art.

Sometimes it's just a status symbol, meh.

I hear you about the ewaste. I can't imagine throwing away a badge, but I imagine many folks toss them just as fast as a pair of 3d movie glasses. Maybe conferences should put up collection bins, and the badges get donated to educational programs or even just sold refurbished to folks that are interested.

But hopefully for every 100 badges made, it inspires someone, or gives them some lasting skill. Or maybe you get to hang out and chat with some cool people. If nothing else, they are good for some awesome memories 😀

I do have some excellent memories from the HaD badge hacking table! 

I view the whole SAO phenomenon much more positively. This badge stuff is hard, crossing numerous disciplines, and involving actual money to boot. Lowering that hurdle lets more people take their first baby steps, and who knows how many of them are going to walk/run/fly later on. 

And so for someone who's just interested in testing the waters, taking a pop-culture shortcut on the artistic front probably isn't a bad idea either, if they would better spend their time learning how to use PCB layout tools.

I don't disagree that PCB art is worthwhile, and learning new tools is a good thing. I feel electronic badges generally are wasteful and not worth mass producing, and for me copying work is the icing on a cake I already don't favor. It's not black and white, I just wish more people would do something else to learn PCBA. 

thanks for the comment!

Re: "mass" production. If you add up all the conference badges ever made and stack them up against any given consumer cell phone model, the badges are small potatoes.  

When I go to the recycling, the e-waste container stacked to the top with dead printers, crappy monitors, and Dell laptops. Munich has eight or ten such recycling centers, and they're emptied at least weekly. Would all the hacker conference badges ever made fill one recycling container truck even once?  Maybe, but not twice. Badges are a drop in a bucket in a pool in an ocean. 

But still, I'm sensitive to the waste, and I _do_ have a box in my closet with dev boards and conference badges that I feel guilty about not having integrated into working projects. There is only one that I use from time to time, and that's a shame.

And we (Hackaday) worry about the afterlife of the Supercon badges, too.  But in all honesty, that's a secondary design goal, and it comes after the enjoyability / hackability during the conference itself.  It's very hard to say what will have staying power, but we _do_ think about it.

-- 

But back to SAOs. I think the art is the end goal of only a very few -- most are in it for the PCB-design-101 hands-on lab, and for the chance to make something amusing along the way without having to learn to draw first. For the people building the boards, it's a small waste for a potentially large gain in experience.  Learning by doing.

I don't complain about the wasted paper when my 4-yr-old son scribbles his 458th Ninjago whirlwind, and I won't complain when he designs his first PCB either, even if it's a coaster or a meme.  

SAO badges are a stepping stone, a gateway drug, sketching class, a finger study, or some other metaphor for people working to get into a very challenging and rewarding world.  Cut 'em some slack if the art's derivative -- they haven't achieved mastery yet.  

(Some badges, OTOH, are like "wow!".  I exclude them from this discussion because they're self-justifingly cool, and that's not what you were talking about anyway. And those folks clearly know what they're doing.)

Thanks for making me think more about this.  :)

Ehhhh, it's not that simple.

First, the are (healthier, in my opinion) cultures out there that embrace fan art — the Japanese Doujin phenomenon is one fine example — instead of persecuting it with extreme prejudice, like the american culture does. And however you look at it, Futurama has become a big part of the geek culture, and disallowing referencing it hurts all of us. 

Second, even if you want to strictly obey the latter of the law, copyright infringements are pursued at the request of the copyright holder. If they don't object, it's fine, even if you personally don't like it. You can't do it in their name.

Third, manufacturing a couple hundred units of something is definitely not mass production. It's barely enough to give one to every participant of a small niche conference, and maybe a few extras for their friends. Mass production starts when you start shipping your own containers.

Fourth, it is widely recognized in the music community, that arrangement of a piece of music often takes as much — or even more — effort as composing it from scratch. I would argue that transforming a frame from a TV show into a blinking electronic contraption, however primitive, still involves considerable work and skill. You can tell this, because some add-ons are truly shittier than others, so there must be some depth of skill in there. So no, it's not lazy.

Fifth, however annoying the flood of new add-ons is, they are still a gateway for the world of manufacturing and logistics, and I think that once you go through all this dance, you will find it easier to produce actually useful projects. Yes, right now you get the Eternal September, which is always annoying to entrenched veterans, but I assure you that this will result in a thousand flowers blooming in the near future.

Sixth, plagiarism is the highest form of worship. There is no disrespect there, on the contrary, the people who do it do it because they love those characters (okay, or the hope the people who will buy the badges love those characters). 

Seventh, no, open source is not based on intellectual property laws. Open source was there before there was intellectual property. Today it needs to be protected by the law only because of the encroaching of proprietary laws. And the law doesn't really do a very good work protecting it, it's more like an excuse.

Eight, as Ted has noted, the discussion about what is art is a muddy one. Was Salvadore Dali lazy and disrespectful when he sold his own excrement as art? Was @Benchoff lazy when he made #The Official Hackaday DEFCON 25 Badge? Or is that an artistic statement? Who knows?

Ninth, yes, I agree about programming the badges and e-waste. Making badges with no useful code on them and hoping that someone will come and write the code for you is hopeless. It simply doesn't work that way. That's why I'm trying to make a badge design that is actually useful and comes with code and examples, and doesn't require specialized hardware to program.

Phew, got it out of my system. Thanks for bringing it up.

Quite a lot of Doujin are ero mangas portrayed in explicit sometimes deviant sex.

It might work for Japan, but I feel that example outline the tight control that their creators would want to have for their characters.  This is a weak example for your point OUTSIDE of Japan.  Thankfully PCB arts are mostly not ero.

Doujin is also *mostly* not erotic. Sure, there is a lot of that, and that's probably what people from outside of Japan focus on, but a lot of Doujin are just alternate stories with the characters in them, and a lot of crossovers.

I don't think it makes it a weak example. On the contrary, it shows that the authors tolerate their characters being used in a very diverse ways, even those that the authors themselves could never get away with in official publications. It is also not uncommon that elements of the fan works actually leak into the official canon, and even that the authors of especially popular works get hired to work on official works. It really makes the whole community so much more lively and ultimately better off.

Good points. I suppose getting in a huff about a few hundred PCBs sold at break-even prices is a bit silly. And you're definitely right about other cultures treating fan art differently than us 'muricans. But Futurama memes get a bit boring after awhile.

Open source is enforced by copyright laws.  So can't be pro-''Open source'' when one is making unauthorized use of other's copyright/trademarks. The quotes are intentional.

As for original PCB arts etc., do whatever you want. Its your money.  I'll never want to pay for more board space at expensive board houses than I need.  :P

For me, a good layout with engineering in mind IS art.  Clean beautiful signals, and sound designs FTW.  No need to cover up beautiful traces with silk screens or colours.

I guess I'm kind of neutral on the whole thing too.  But the discussion of what constitutes PCB "art" makes me want to make a Wharholian Campbell's Tomato Soup can badge :-)

+1

Being neutral or just "don't care" is something that seems to get less important nowadays. Everyone thinks he needs to make his point and convince all the others. Let people do WHAT THEY LIKE, as long as they're not hurting anybody/the planet/your snowflake-feelings. 

I am proud of my snowflakiness <3 {insert snowflake emoji}

@zakqwy theres an html symbol! ❄ Feel free to copy and paste, it's free ;)

❄❄❄❄❄❄

:_)

You are a special case with your 3d graphics wizardry. 

I just steal from all the right people :-)

I feel like it's low-effort dilution of what could be a promising medium.

Not trying to shit on it, I am also sometimes guilty of the same, but when I spend twenty hours drawing something myself, intentionally highlighting the strengths of the PCB fab process, and someone walks up and goes, "Cool, where'd you get the image?" it can be a little deflating.

I feel slightly guilty of doing the same, but on the other hand am also annoyed by the many SAO badges 

No guilt inducement intended, plz keep making excellent pcbs

ah it keeps me from not pushing out too much garbage :) I think your edit needs an edit though? Reads like io and blog comments are the same quality?

Was an interesting conversation starter and I liked everyones input :)