Bornhack 2026 badge

Introduction

The BornHack 2026 badge is the Cyber Ægg: an egg-shaped, low-power hacker badge inspired by the 90’s Tamagotchi. It is designed to run for the entire duration of the BornHack camp on a single battery charge, while keeping you connected to everyone else on the field over a long-range LoRa mesh.

Under the playful shell it is a serious little radio computer. A Nordic nRF52840 drives a 1.54 inch black/red/white e-paper display, talks Bluetooth Low Energy to your phone, emulates an NFC tag on its back, and reaches the wider MeshCore network through a dedicated SX1262 LoRa radio. To keep you entertained between messages there is BornPets, a virtual pet with a handful of mini-games.

Front (display and buttons) and back (nRF52840, QWIIC and USB-C connectors, NFC coil).

Features

• Egg-shaped badge inspired by the classic Tamagotchi
• Nordic nRF52840 microcontroller (BLE + USB + NFC)
• 1.54" 152 × 152 black/red/white e-paper display
• SX1262 LoRa radio, part of the MeshCore mesh network
• Bluetooth Low Energy companion connection to the MeshCore app
• NFC tag on the back for location-based games and station taps
• 5-way joystick, Select / Execute / Cancel buttons, RGB LED and a piezo buzzer
• QWIIC (I²C) expansion connector
• USB-C for charging and drag-and-drop file transfer

New to the badge? Start with the Getting started guide. Curious about the virtual pet? See Games. Want to know what is inside? See the Hardware page.

Source code

The Cyber Ægg is open source. Both the hardware design and the firmware live on Codeberg:

• Hardware (KiCad) — Ranzbak/bornhack2026-hardware
• Firmware (Rust / Embassy) — Ranzbak/bornhack-firmware-2026

Hardware sponsors

• Nordic Semiconductor sponsored their low power yet very capable and fast NRF52840 microcontroller with Bluetooth Low Energy and NFC, making it possible for us to build a device that runs on one battery charge, the whole camp long!
• ALLNET China is our production partner, they take care of sourcing most components and oversee the production process in China, saving us a lot of work and potential headaches and allowing us to focus on the product!
• Procolix sponsored the SX1262 LoRa radio chips, converting the badge into a capable LoRa communications device. Check out their managed hosting solutions for a truely sovereign cloud built on European open source solutions!
• deFEEST sponsored part of the badge hardware, helping us get the components we needed to build it. Find out more at defeest.nl!
• Mollerup Automation sponsored the 3D printed housing for the badge. They are automation, robotics and PLC specialists from Odense, Denmark — see mollerup.info!