BSides Cyprus PCB Badge
I was in two minds about whether or not to post this, but given it's a community event and the main art is already public I'm working on the basis that this is ok till I'm told otherwise, so I'll add my notes here.
I've been working on a PCB Badge for the people at BSides Cyprus this year. I haven't done them in a while because the double whammy of moving to a remote island and the fallout from Brexit just stopped it being really worthwhile for me. I've also had some existential crises over climate change and that's kind of put me off adding to the pollution problem. But BSides Cyprus asked, and I thought it wouldn't take up much of my free time (famous last words, although this is all my fault).
I'm using KiCad for the PCB. Initially I thought I'd get the art sorted and then look at fixing things up once I had some renders. I settled on using brightness levels to generate footprints with KiCad's Bitmap importer but ultimately I felt it didn't give me the control I wanted.
I took the original art (which is awesome but very not PCB friendly), trimmed it back a little and desaturated it so I could work with tone and contrast. I then split different sections into layers for the mask. It looks a little weird because some layers are meant to be inverted while others aren't, but it works for me.
Once I had working footprints I created a credit-card sized edge cut to act as a PCB boundary, then added the art in. I'll redo the edge cut once I have a physical PCB as often the thickness makes it harder to fit in a wallet than a real credit card.
After fiddling around with different elements and simplifying the design I managed to get an initial render I'm (mostly) happy with. PCB art is more like plotter or vector art than raster art. I'm not going to be able to capture anywhere near the detail of the original image or even this render. For example, I'm definitely going to have to increase the BSides Logo size, which is why so much of the chest is so dark. A lot of the time it's a balance between what people want and something close enough. Once I have something working then I can start looking at the electronics side. My Attiny1624 dev boards arrived today. I'll set them up later this week.