DC16 Web-badge

Motiviation
Def Con is a wonderful thing. Perhaps the most interesting group of people I've ever meet. After a 16 hour drive to reach Def Con, my friends and I got into the badge line and waited. Once we all had our badges it was off to staples to get memory cards.

The default functionality of the badge is cool and it was fun playing with it. When I found out what the badge did, I agreed it was a file transferring device, but not over IR. The IR is cool and its fun to screw with TV's but I wanted something more interesting. The idea for the Dc16 Web-badge was born.

Our good friend Joe Grand was kind enough to drag TX/RX pins onto the 6 pin connector (SCI2), and connected to LED's 3 and 4 (SCI1). This small act is what makes the web badge possible as a completely stand alone solution. The original attempt made to create the web badge used the USB port. The main problem with with this solution is it tighed the web badge to a computer to work, or writing complex USB drivers. SCI is an exteremly simple interface that just about everything talks.

I attempted to create a working version of the webserver while at Def Con, but it proved to have too many pitfalls. Being silent while the awards were giving out I decided that I'd carry on and make the web badge a reality. Digging through my box of random electronics, I found some Digi ConnectMe from my old job. Now I had all the pieces I needed to make a completely stand alone solution. The work begain

The first limitation I set on myself was to require any def con'er with a working badge to duplicate this solution at some level for less than $10 bucks. Although its not possible to create a fully stand alone version for that much money, it is very possible to use your computer as the serial-to-ip converter.

Since you have to pay for the full version of code warrior if you use more than 2^15 bytes, I required my code to be smaller than that. This proved to be very difficult. Most of the dc16 code had to be removed and the amount of logic that could be put into its place was limiting. Even so, the trimming process was completed and the whole web server solution was implemented in less than 500 lines.

Pit Falls