Pendant Workshop for Devcon Bogota

At DEVCon6 I held a workshop at the design space to make a display using a round RP 2040 dev board and battery to show either your ZORB or POAP collection.

I started with this waveshare display and a small LiPo battery. Workshop attendees learned to solder a small 2-pin JST style connector for the display onto the LiPo battery learning soldering techniques and how the circuit works.

After the display was ready, I ran a script https://github.com/iainnash/devcon6-hardware-workshop that downloaded the user's ZORB svg (using the ZORA API) and converting it to the png bitmap format,  POAPs – badges collected at various crypto events (using the POAP API). POAPs and ZORBs are a great fit for this display because they natively are round NFTs. The script then resizes the images using imagemagick to the correct .bmp style bitmap format from the png format that the Adafruit Circuitpython libraries could use to display them cleanly. The RP2040 in the kit only has 4mb memory – and since we want to run this in python to allow for easy editing by workshop attendees we only had 1.5mb space left for the images to be displayed. About 10 images fit easily and for a simple slideshow of the user's latest POAPs that was pretty easy.

Overall, the workshop was successful in being not too long for attendees, having a great deliverable (a little customizable pendant that charged over USB) and showed creativity: one of the attendees crafted a smart display strap using velcro and hot glue that worked really well (though was slightly less strong in the asthetics department).