We Built 2,000 Custom Electronic Badges for Our Developer Conference, Replay (Here's How)
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A Temporal engineer recounts building 2,000+ custom hackable electronic badges for the Replay developer conference. The badges feature a monochrome screen, joystick, infrared communication, LED customization, games (Tetris, Flappy Asteroids, Doom, Conway's Game of Life), a synthesizer, contact-sharing via 'booping', and a full conference schedule. The firmware is written in C and MicroPython on an ESP32 chip. The project involved flying to China to oversee manufacturing, navigating customs challenges, translating QA firmware into Chinese to speed up production, and assembling the final units on-site with company-wide help. The entire project — KiCad files, firmware, and Python code — is being open sourced at badge.temporal.io. Future plans include running Temporal workflows natively on the badge and connecting 2,000 devices as workers during a keynote.