AfricaHackOn
The fourth AfricaHackOn conference edition in Kenya, where a limited-run ESP8266 electronic badge tested local badge culture for speakers and selected attendees.
Nairobi · Kenya · 2017
A limited-run AfricaHackOn 2017 electronic conference badge built around an ESP8266-01, 0.96-inch 128x64 I2C OLED display, LEDs, resistors, hand-built mounting-board construction, Arduino firmware, WiFi scanning, and MQTT schedule updates.
Lifecycle
After WiFi connection, the badge connected to an MQTT server, subscribed to an event topic, and displayed current talk details on the OLED.
The badge boot flow displayed the conference title, scanned wireless networks, waited for a programmed network, connected, and displayed IP and network details.
Badge owners could modify firmware through the ESP8266 serial pins, programming switch, Arduino IDE, ESP8266 board support, SSD1306 OLED library, and PubSubClient MQTT library.
The writeup explicitly planned to make badges a mainstay at future AfricaHackOn conferences, move from about 20 selected units to all attendees, and transition to a professional PCB.
Operational history
The Kenyan entry remains source-backed and image-free rather than copying blog photography without a full provenance record.
The record does not imply universal attendee distribution or a polished PCB production batch.