Nick Brown created a fun PCB badge featuring a miniature railroad implemented with 0805-sized LEDs, which was inspired by the 2022 Supercon badge.
The badge includes 144 LEDs, 3 seven-segment displays, and over a dozen buttons, meant to be used as a built-in game.
Brown wanted to focus on the aesthetics of the design, creating an organic, winding railroad layout with crossings and stations throughout the board.
He used KiCad to design the board and Rust to create the driver for the seven-segment displays and tone library for the onboard buzzer.
One issue with the oscillator meant he couldn’t use the ATmega32U4, so he used a pogo pin jig to connect the clock during programming.
Brown shared his process and documented his experiences along the way, providing a detailed build log for others to learn from.
This project is one of many creative badges that Hackaday has featured, highlighting the versatility and innovation of creating interactive designs. Pogo pin jig to program the clock timings correctly`)!akamai_edge_cache_messages[1].
