HardwareĪs mentioned above, our two primary features were the LEDs and the edge connectors. This allowed to us some nerd cred and a visual theme that permeated most of the other materials in the con. In case you’ve been under a rock for the last ten years, visually, we borrowed a bit from “Portal,” specifically the weighted storage cube/ companion cube.

Let’s make a badge that can connect to more than one peer at a time and has an expensive looking, vibrant RGB LED display. We had also toyed with the use of rotoconnect board-to-board connectors for a several years, but due to size and cost they’d never made it into a design.Ĭombining those two elements into a design, an idea was hatched. We had the LEDs from Blooper which were inexpensive, bright, and pretty easy on power. The original concept was to utilize parts already in the bin to minimize risk and development time. The “failsafe” design was meant to be exactly what we like to see at Queercon: lots of blinky LEDs with some cool connectivity and interoperability. Nothing worth doing is easy and in the end, we ended up with one of our best badges yet. Somehow, despite the urgency, we managed to change the processor, radio, and LED controller, argue about the design, and generally spend a lot of time we didn’t have on things we’d agreed to not argue about. The idea was we’d go with known hardware and controllers to reduce development time and risk. As a result, we decided to bail on the ambitious design and go to a “failsafe” design I’d been working on. As time wore on it started to look like a 2017 badge was in danger of not happening at all. We came up with a pretty neat concept, but by mid-January still hadn’t started on actual electrical design, pending conceptual design by the graphics team. After the success of Blooper in 2016 we weren’t quite sure where to go next. The QC2017 badge had a more difficult design year this year too. The fifth Queercon badge, the twenty-fifth DEFCON, zero official electronic badges and many, many “elite” electronic badges, as many as 5,000 total by some estimates. How have you been?Ģ017 was a year of significant numbers.

Thus, we brought all Defqon.It’s been a long time. Whilst the very first editions of Defqon.1 only have in official anthems, but nevertheless each anthem tells its own special story. Since the very beginning of festivals, each edition gets an own track dedicated. After an ongoing success, the Australian Premier Gladys Berejiklian prohibited upcoming editions due to security reasons as two attendees died during the 2018’s edition caused by drug abuse. 2009 the Defqon.1 Australia celebrated its debut. The growing success of Defqon.1 encouraged the organizers to start a Defqon.1 edition in Australia. The following year – 2012 – brought the next big change – by extending the Festival over the complete weekend with 3 days. So the organization moved to Biddinghuizen and up to the present day, this location is the place to be. At the beginning of 2011, Q-dance announced that the local authorities declined permission for the upcoming edition. Until the year 2011 Defqon.1 was only a 1-day festival. The festival itself is the prestige festival created by Q-dance and the very first edition took place in 2003 at the beach of Almere/Flyoland. We from Hardstyle Mag brought all anthems together and made a special mix out of it – to walk down memory lane with you. The history is long and besides tons of memories, there is a long list of epic anthems that shaped each edition in a very unique way. But Defqon.1 is not only worshiped by its visitors but also from the performing Artists. Several styles, multiple stages, an incomparable feeling of unity and for many the highlight of the year. We all know her and we all love her – its Defqon.1, the mother of all harddance festivals.

Defcon one 2017