Badge details

We acquired parts for about 550 attendee badges, and parts for about 30 organizer badges. At this quantities, the attendee badges parts cost about $1.3 each, and the volunteer badges cost about $26 each.

Moreover, there’s some alternate suppliers and variations that help optimize for cost. I’ll share some of those once I figure out how to best format the spreadsheets to reflect that.

For example, for the volunteer badges, the TFT Display is the most expensive single part. Acquiring them from AliExpress offers a lower cost solution, the displays can be acquired at about $10 cheaper. Additional capabilities were also discovered using the newest Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2W, which cost $5 and $7 respectively. These microcontroller solutions increase the parts cost by $1 to $3 respectively. So the volunteer badge parts cost can be obtained at around $20 each.

Note that bare PCBs and assembly are not being factored into this calculation costs. PCBWay sponsored the PCBs, so they had no cost for the conference. Assembly was done manually by volunteers. At high quantities (500 pieces), bare PCB cost is about $2 each. At lower quantities (i.e. 50 pieces), bare PCB cost is about $5 each.