Gentlemen, start your badge-hacking engines!

Last week, I asked Joe Grand if he'd be willing to give HiR Readers a sneak peek of the DefCon 17 Badges, kind of like Wired covered last year. Concerns of counterfeiting and unfair advantages for would-be badge hackers were cited as reasons why he couldn't disclose any info to me (orders actually coming from Dark Tangent himself).

He promised that as soon as he got clearance to do so, he'd be posting info to the DefCon forums. This way, badge hackers could at least get their IDEs installed and bring the supplies needed to interface with the microcontroller.

That day has come.

Attendees from both HiR and i-Hacked had a blast hacking the DefCon 16 badges together last year. Go read up and get prepared.

Abbreviated from Kingpin's post... highlights for the new badge:

• The processor this year is a Freescale MC56F8006 Digital Signal Controller.
• The development environment is Freescale CodeWarrior for DSCs. It's a similar IDE to previous badges (sorry, still Windows only AFAIK, but works fine in a VM) (Free Download)
• There will a serial bootloader on-board to enable you to easily load your own firmware onto the badge (simply requiring a terminal program, like HyperTerminal, and the hex file). You need something like this to interface the board.

Still no photos yet. I'm looking forward to seeing what the new badge does and what it can be made to do!