We've made some progress lately on the badges. Until today only one badge existed on a breadboard, we now have two badges. One on a breadboard and one on a perfboard. The prototype is taking a little bit longer to route and finish off than we expected so these two will have to do for now. Until this point we used a Moteino from LowPowerLab to simulate other badges.

With two badges in hand we did some range testing today. To be useful at DEF CON the badges will need to be able to exchange packets over very wide areas. Fortunately the conference spaces are open and we shouldn't get much interference from walls, just other transmitters in our band.

Without any tuning of the RFM69 parameters, we were able to receive packets from up to 300 feet away through multiple walls and houses. Not bad. The Paris Ballroom is advertised to be 358 x 238 ft which is split amongst several talks. Our users should be able to exchange data throughout this area with no issue. Similarly, Ballys advertises their Event Center to be 177 x 226 ft, no problem.

Next step is to test with a saturated network and make sure the badges handle it well. Also we will be tweaking the bitrate and bandwidth to further improve range.