Maritime Hacking Village at DEF CON 33 · United States · 2025

Maritime Hacking Village DC33 Differential Destroyer

Pico 2 maritime bus and voltage-glitching badge

The Differential Destroyer was Maritime Hacking Village's official DEF CON 33 badge, published as an OSHWA-certified open hardware platform for maritime bus work, scripting, signal interaction, and experimental voltage glitching.

Maritime Hacking Village DEF CON United States Pico 2 Rust Embassy Rhai CAN NMEA Modbus Voltage Glitching SAO OSHWA North America

EventMaritime Hacking Village at DEF CON 33

SeriesMaritime Hacking Village

LocationLas Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada

CountryUnited States

People

Authors & Credits

development lead, hardware QA, firmware development, and silkscreen design

Nicholas Haltmeyer

Named in the repository CONTRIBUTORS file with development, QA, firmware, and silkscreen roles.

Source

graphic design and PCB/silkscreen layout

@vrllrv

Named in the repository CONTRIBUTORS file for graphic design and PCB/silkscreen layout.

Source

hardware development and PCB routing

@blenster

Named in the repository CONTRIBUTORS file for hardware development and PCB routing.

Source

hardware development, hardware QA, and firmware development

Marco Casaroli

Named in the repository CONTRIBUTORS file for hardware, QA, and firmware roles.

Source

official village badge publisher

Maritime Hacking Village

OSHWA identifies Differential Destroyer as Maritime Hacking Village's official badge for DEF CON 33.

Source

project design

@mothball

Named in the repository CONTRIBUTORS file for project design.

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project management and logistics

Duncan Woodbury

Named in the repository CONTRIBUTORS file for project-management and logistics roles.

Source

Why It Mattered

It adds a DEF CON village badge whose public documentation is unusually strong: OSHWA certification, a public hardware and firmware repository, explicit CERN-OHL-W hardware/documentation licensing, Rust firmware notes, scripting interfaces, and real safety warnings around maritime and fault-injection use.

Hardware

The repository documents Pico 2-compatible headers with village-sold boards bundled with a flashed Pico 2, a 1.9-inch 320x170 TFT display, 5-bit joystick, two buttons, nine WS2812B NeoPixels plus single-color status LEDs, accelerometer, SAO connector bridged to Pico 2 and I2C, SD card slot, battery charging with 2-pin JST-PH, two three-pin differential-modulated protocol ports, controlled termination, Trx-Rx tie switching, EMI protection, MCP2518FD CAN-FD transceiver, differential receiver, and a differential injector operating up to 5 MHz with switched 0 V to 4 V references.

Software & Apps

The public README describes Rust firmware under Apache 2.0 and MIT licensing, the Embassy async runtime, display console drivers, USB serial log and scripting pass-through, a Rhai embedded scripting engine, bindings for inputs, SAO GPIO, display, LEDs, accelerometer, battery, differential Trx/Rx controls, and CAN 2.0B frame encoding.

Lore

The badge sits inside DEF CON 33's Maritime Hacking Village as an applied maritime-infrastructure hacking artifact. Its documentation repeatedly frames the voltage-glitching features as experimental and potentially damaging, and explicitly warns against direct boat connection or uninformed injector use.

Lifecycle

Add-ons & Upgrades

badge interaction surface source-backed

SAO, display, and sensor surface

The badge combines a TFT display, joystick, buttons, NeoPixels, accelerometer, SAO connector, SD card, battery charging, and status LEDs around the maritime protocol circuitry.