Well, I just got back from DEFCON 18 late last night and I must say I had a blast.

First, I was able to write a little something for the Router Arduino project. I only had a couple hours to write it on the plane, so It isn’t very cool but at least I had something. Here is the sketch if you care to take a look. I will write up a full page on the project.

As always the badges were awesome. Here is a picture of them.

The Ninja Networks Party Badge was absolutely amazing. It totally dwarfed the official DEFCON badge. I was able to pick up a plus one ticket in the hardware hacking village. I started helping to help a girl (leah) get the bonus item in the Ninja Badge game. Apparently you could solder the Tx and GND from the DEFCON badge to the Rx and GND on the Ninja badge and it would send the string “NINJA”, which would give you an unlocked Item. After finding out it wasn’t working we tried to pull out my Arduino and send the string to it trough TTL that way. After a whipping up a little sketch, cstone (developed the badge software) came over and tried to help us get that working. We didn’t have any luck and came to the conclusion there might be a bug in the software. We wern’t able to get real badges, but Mark and I we able to score some “Plus One” cards so that we could attend the party.

I got a chance to talk to both woz and cstone about developing the badge and they told me they would be releasing the Gerber/Eagle files along with the source for the program. I have some plans to modify it a bit and create another badge that plays or interacts with the the 2010 Ninja Party Badge. That is going to be my new project for the coming months. Luckily, Volty scored a Ninja badge for being a goon and agreed to let me test the badge I develop with the official one.

Here is a pic of the Ninja Badge.

The Ninja Party was off the hook. The event was sponsored but Lookout and Facebook. The rented out a small hotel (the entire thing) and had free drinks for all the attendees. I met a lot of cool people and it was definitely one of the highlights of the trip.