THOTCON
The May 3-4, 2019 Chicago THOTCON edition whose DePaul Newsline coverage, InfoconDB schedule, badge-hacking workshop record, and public Poplicola repository preserve the 0xA / Infinity electronic badge.
Undisclosed location, Chicago, Illinois · United States · 2019
The THOTCON 0xA / Infinity badge was a Chicago electronic conference badge produced with DePaul's Idea Realization Lab for the May 3-4, 2019 event. DePaul Newsline reported a six-month, 1,700-unit custom circuit-board badge build; the public Poplicola repository documents a SparkFun ESP32 Thing Dev base, five capacitive touch pads, six LEDs, speaker output, microphone input, stock-firmware restore commands, and Arduino examples.
Lifecycle
The public archive includes a SoundBoard example mapping sounds to three capacitive touch pads through the XT_DAC_AUDIO library.
The README documents the badge microphone, special microphone driver, and AudioStreaming example with netcat/aplay receiver notes.
The README maps six LED outputs to left ear, left eye, left mustache, right ear, right eye, and right mustache positions.
The README maps five capacitive touch pads to right, up, left, down, and select controls.
The repository preserves esptool.py commands for restoring stock firmware plus a workshop PDF used for THOTCON 0xA badge hacking.
The repository README identifies the THOTCON 0xA badge base as a SparkFun ESP32 Thing Dev board.
Operational history
The catalogue cites the original source URL and corroborates event and technical details through InfoconDB and GitHub while leaving full article archive recovery for a later pass.
The United States record remains source-backed and image-free rather than copying source-page media, documentation screenshots, event photos, social media, placeholders, or generated approximations.
The catalogue treats the repository as evidence and a user-facing technical reference, not as a blanket permission source for republishing media, firmware, or hardware assets.