The design's view from within Inkscape/PCBmodE

The good folk of Open Bidouille Camp reached out to me a few months ago and asked if I could design a small badge for their workshops, as a tool for teaching people how to solder. As I usually do, I asked for a logo or some other material that I could use for inspiration as a starting point for a concept.

The OBC logo

This is a two-tone design (white and light-blue above) on a dark background. That could be easily translated to a circuit-board. The OBC people preferred black soldermask, so that was a given design choice.

I decided to leave as much as I can as it is and to use the hexagons as a common theme: the outline (of course), LED pads, and battery holder pads.

Back of the badge -- the three large pads are for a battery holder

But there's a more ominous way to assemble the board!

You might have been wondering why I created the crossbones gap in soldermask on the bottom side of the board. Scroll down. Carefully ;)

Now, with the battery holder facing down, we solder the LEDs and resistors on the bottom of the board.

Soldering the components on the bottom side of the board

Here's what it looks like from the front. Pretty tame.

WHOA. He's out to get you! HAR HAR.

This was a fun project, and shows what can be achieved with just a few components and a bit of thought into the design.

All our boards are designed using PCBmodE, an open source software we developed to create 'beautifully functional circuits' such as this OBC badge. The design itself is open source hardware, and can be found at Boldport's Github repository.

If you need a beautifully functional circuit designed, that's our speciality, so get in touch!

Open Bidouille Camp badge