Decided to start early this year. And by early, we mean June 14th. A month and a half!

Total. Rush. Job. Insanity.

But it's happening! Somehow!

It begins.

So somewhere around June 7th let's say, the urge to make a badge this year grew strong and an idea showed up. Wanting to make something that combined form and function, we looked at our tool pile and saw the SPIdriver, a very cool open-source hardware crowdsupply (if we recall) dev tool that hooks USB to SPI and makes life easy. Somehow the Spy v Spy theme appeared, and it was perfect - metaphorical representation of our 1337 lives, and play on words (acronyms?). But could we pull it off in time??!

Feasibility Study

First thing to do was check out the design files for the SPIdriver. Turns out it was using a Silicon Labs EFM8 chip, which has an 8051 core. We've never used that chip or tools before, so we got one in on the bench asap to see if we could bring up a blinking LED - the Hello World of hardware. To our delight, it worked out and we had blinks! Maybe we could do this.

Chip: selected.

Concept Art

We started scribbling down some ideas for the badge art. Ended up through a few iterations, but we landed on the freehand pencil sketch you see here. Now, we can art a good bit but we're no cartoonists, so credit to the hordes of illustrators who have drawn these cute lil spies over the years that we drew inspiration from - thanks!

More updates and story time soon, promise!