— Work in Progress —
06 January 2026
Thank you very much for attending the 2026 IEEE Rising Stars Conference! Your enthusiasm, energy, and participation made this event a successful endeavor. The shared documentation of the 2026 IEEE Rising Stars Conference badge will be posted here and updated in the following days. Addition of information will be made available progressively due to limited time constrains. We appreciate your patience and understanding on the matter. For any inquiries, comments, questions, or concerns, reach out accordingly.
Best Regards,
Alberto Tam Yong
[email protected]
2026 IEEE Rising Stars Conference. Badge Design Lead
First, special thank you to one of our sponsors, PCBWay. PCBWay sponsored the PCBs for the conference badges.
https://www.pcbway.com/
The conference badge project started from the first prototype featured in 2025. Thanks to the sponsorship commitment from PCBWay and the conference’s priority to offer attendees a unique and engaging experience, the 2026 IEEE Rising Stars Conference featured a conference badge project.
Special thanks to PCBWay, the sponsor that supported us both in 2025 and 2026 with the printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the badges.
During the 2025 IEEE Rising Stars Conference, we offered all attendees an electronic badge with blinking LEDs. This was a simple and low cost design. In a prototype and concept effort to demonstrate what else we could do, we made a limited number of more advanced electronic badges and handed them to the conference organizers and volunteers to advertise the conference. The advanced conference badge featured a display, a microcontroller, and some simple inputs and outputs. Both the basic and advanced badges were hand-assembled; with over 400 basic badges and over 30 advanced badges, this was a major effort during the end-of-the-year holidays.
For the 2026 IEEE Rising Stars Conference, we sought to take it a step further with a design aimed for automated assembly for mass production of a new advanced badge. Regrettably, we were not able to offer a fully assembled electronic badge to every attendee, but will aim again to strike for that goal for the 2027 IEEE Rising Stars Conference. We were only able to provide bare PCBs with no components to all attendees, and only were able to hand prototype about 5 manually assembled advanced badges. The following details offer information about the design.
Schematic: PDF
Warning, this design was optimized for automated assembly, so it was not easy to manually assemble. I would consider this an intermediate/advanced level soldering skill required to assemble.
Many of the challenges include surface mount components, SMD components with e-pads, and fine-pitched components (0.5mm). Surface mount components in general should be relatively easy to learn for beginners. Nonetheless, components with e-pads may require more specialized equipment, such as a hot-air rework station, hot plate, or reflow oven. For the fine-pitched components, flux may be needed to clean up any unintended shorts, and good soldering irons with good soldering tips are recommended.
For the badges that I hand-assembled with displays and all components on them, I used solder paste, a stencil, a reflow oven, and still had to do a lot of post-assembly reworks to correct shorts. Pick-and-placement of the components was done manually. But overall, I had access to equipment, and it still took a significant amount of effort.
With that said, I’m not trying to deter you from trying to assemble your own PCBA. I encourage you to do it. But I want you to be fully aware that it can be very challenging, and there is a high chance that you may not get this design to work depending on your skill level and the tools you have at your disposal.
Bill of Materials (BOM): Google Sheet
<TODO: insert description of design, including assembly considerations>
<TODO: insert photos of examples of manual assembly cautions>
<TODO: insert code. Circuitpython used for prototype>
<TODO: insert more details on circuits and design>
<TODO: insert photos and links to attendee photos with their badges>
Check out the 2025 badge page.