The Badge

Lone Starr flew a Winnebago. Yours fits in a badge clip.

Hardware at a glance

Component	Part	Notes
MCU	Nordic nRF52840	ARM Cortex-M4F @ 64 MHz, 1 MB flash, 256 KB RAM. Runs the firmware.
LoRa radio	Semtech SX1262	915 MHz US ISM band. Ships at SF9 / 125 kHz. TX +10 dBm on battery, +22 dBm on USB.
LEDs	RGB wing LEDs + status	Cockpit nav lights + alert flashers. Boot pulse, mesh activity, Schwartz mode, etc.
Controls	1× user button + power slide switch	User button is the boot-window DFU trigger. Power switch hard-cuts.
Antenna	Helix copper + U.FL	Stock helical coil routes through the PE4259 selector. U.FL takes over when an external whip is detected.
Power	USB-C VBUS + 2× AAA	VCC_SYS 3.3 V. Cells take over off-USB. Sized for active mesh use, not weeks-long beacon.
Storage	nRF52840 internal flash	8 KB reserved for bling/lock state. UICR holds the per-badge transponder seal key.
Bootloader	Adafruit UF2 nRF52	USB mass-storage drag-and-drop OR WebSerial Nordic DFU. See flash.

Power budget

USB is the comfortable case: no current ceiling. AAAs give a few hours of active mesh depending on TX duty cycle and how hard you spin the LEDs. Plug in for sustained duty; cells are for roaming.

Watch the AAAs under sustained TX. Off-USB the radio backs down to +10 dBm to protect the rail. Alkalines sag under load and brown out before a tester calls them dead. NiMH hold up better. USB unlocks the full +22 dBm: from suck to blow.

The button + the boot window

The power slide switch is the true hard reset: flip OFF, flip ON.

USR does two things: a short tap cycles light modes, and a double-press within 3 seconds of USB power-on (or hold while plugging in) drops into UF2 DFU for browser flashing. The blue wing pulse during the boot window means ready to receive.

Antenna options

Stock (helix copper coil): always present, a few hundred meters line-of-sight.
U.FL + external whip: RF selector switches over automatically when a whip is plugged in. Range jumps to multi-kilometer line-of-sight. Whips at the badge table for the price of a sticker.
U.FL + Yagi: if you brought a directional antenna and an SWR meter, you already know what you're doing. Go nuts.

What runs on it

Firmware fork of RNode_Firmware ↗ with Eagle-5-specific extensions:

EAGLE-5 console (CLI over USB-CDC) for status, configuration, and bling lock-state inspection
Boot-window DFU trigger (the double-press described above)
Wing LED animations: boot fade, RX/TX flashes, Schwartz mode, alert flashers
A read-only lock-state probe (ctf, alias ops) reporting LOCKED or UNLOCKED. The badge never submits or stores flags; those go to the scoreboard.
A per-badge seal key the finale uses to unlock victory blings over-air (transponder prints the badge's squawk + seal)
Victory blings, earned by beating the finale, lit via lights mode <m> or an over-the-air Bling frame

Source & build instructions are pinned in the manual.

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