what happened right after we described
the first hat
was they started accusingly pointing at
each other finding out
who who was the one who just started all
the monstrosities
and they all pointed to this man right
here and what's your hand
uh i'm mr bell mr bill
i know mr bill oh yeah
man so okay so how did the whole thing
start um
so i saw jrwr's hat chan
which is the pith helmet with leds on it
and one day i was just sitting at my
desk and
i had an old hard hat that my son had
left behind and i had a raspberry pi
screen it was one of those little three
and a half inch
screens and i was like hey this one this
would look really cool on the front of a
hard hat
what can i do with it and the idea kind
of grew from that
and so then i built a hard hat that ran
kismet wireless had a much bigger screen
everything was on the outside
and i've run that for a couple years and
two years ago we had an unofficial
contest
for hard hats the hard hat or the
homebrew hardware packing uh contest
folks allowed us to share some stage
space
and we had quite a few entries and
you know kind of grew out of that have
you ever
published any of the information that
has come from your hard hat
like online just how many access points
how many connections
well so as far as the wi-fi goes not
every hard hat does wi-fi if you go to
our twitter account hard hat brigade
uh you'll see the entries from two years
ago um we had two categories one was
bling
which is anything flashy right uh and
then the other category was
where's which is it had to have some
sort of functionality
some of the hats were really artistic we
had like
a paper horse with a hand pulled fiber
optic
we had a hard hat that was you know
another fiber optic
hard hat that was painted lots of lights
and bling
and then the hard hat that we chose as
the overall winner was shelley which was
made by strath
which was an rc car with of course it
was bedazzled
and had leds all over it and if i
remember correctly it was sniffing
bluetooth
and also the logitech
keyboard keystrokes basically
and so that was the right combination of
both categories
oh that's so cool so how many years has
it been going on total
um so i've had my original hat for i
think this would be
my fourth year um like i said in
2019 we ran an unofficial defcon contest
just for fun
uh we had 16 entries so you know it's
been a couple years and it's kind of
growing in interest because
hard hats are cheap you know there's a
lot of fun things you can do with them
and it's a great conversation piece so
out of all the ones that you've seen up
to this point
can you tell me like maybe your top
three ones that come to mind it's just
something innovative
something that isn't just like blinky
leds but something that like goes beyond
like
beyond like what you would expect in a
hard hat system
um that's really difficult to say
because one of the reasons why
we kind of started hardhat brigade was
to encourage other people to
build things and try things out and
you know actually one of the most moving
stories was one of the contestants
uh from 2019 told us that he had not
touched a soldering iron in 20 years
and this encouraged him to actually
start building things again
and i mean that i'm getting the chills
thinking about it that's the type of
thing that
you know hardhat brigade's about it's
not about it's not about the best
when i mean obviously with the contest
we had to decide
but um you know each hat is unique
and everybody has a story and and it's
you know it's always a journey
so yeah it's very difficult yeah that
i mean that's what we love about def con
that's what we absolutely love about def
con
is both like challenging for the the
people have been doing it for a long
time but just
like inviting the community just to
participate
and just find joy in just the most
ridiculous obnoxious ways like this is
awesome like looking around the table
you see and i'll again i'll put some
b-roll in so you guys can see it
just so many cool hard hats that they've
thrown together with all this cool
functionality
with that man like thank you so much for
the work you do
uh keep doing what you're doing like
check it out on twitter and we will see
you
later