Write the Bits

Solder Your Chip

Your Level 1 reward is an EEPROM chip for your minibadge. The minibadge build guide has step-by-step photos. The short version:

1. Orient it first

   With the chip's writing the right way up, pin 1 is the bottom-left leg; on the board it's the pad by the small white triangle. Double-check before you tack anything down — it's much easier to fix now than after everything's soldered.

2. Tack one corner, check, then finish

   Solder one corner pin, confirm the chip is sitting flat and square, then solder the rest.

3. Inspect for bridges

   The pins on these chips are close together. Before you do anything else, look closely for solder bridging two pins together — it's the single most common mistake.

Prove Your Tools Work

Level 2 uses a purpose-built programming station instead of a chip clip — plug your freshly-soldered minibadge straight in. It's the same CH341A and the same EEPROM Programmer as Level 1, just with a socket instead of a clip (the CH341A setup page covers drivers for your own machine). Before you attempt the real challenge, run through this quick rehearsal:

1. Read before you write

   A factory-fresh EEPROM reads back as one repeated byte. If you see that, your solder joints are good. If you see noise, stop and go recheck your soldering.

2. Flash the practice file

   Download the practice bin below and write it to your chip. It's not encoded or hidden — it's just there to prove your write path works.

   Download test_pattern.bin

   In the EEPROM Programmer you can skip the download: Load ▾ → Level 2 practice file puts it straight into the table, ready to Write.

3. Read it back

   A byte-for-byte match, message and all, means your whole read/write loop is solid. You're ready for the real thing.

How Do You Fit a Picture in a Box This Small?

A full-color image needs 3 bytes per pixel if you store color values directly — red, green, blue, one byte each. That's a completely valid way to do it, and plenty of hardware does exactly that.

But a lot of real images don't actually use that many different colors. If a picture only has a handful of distinct colors in it, you can build a small table of just those colors — a palette — and store one small number per pixel saying which table entry belongs there, instead of the full color. Here's a tiny example, just to show the idea, not the picture you're looking for:

Two colors, sixteen pixels, roughly half the space — and the fewer colors a picture uses relative to its size, the bigger that gap gets. Worth keeping in mind for a chip with 1024 bytes on it.

At the Booth

The Level 2 challenge is physical: there's a model on the table, and a set of reference colors next to it. What they mean, and exactly how to turn them into bytes on your chip, is yours to work out — nobody's handing you a spec sheet for this one.

Flash your best guess, plug your minibadge into the checker board, and see what lights up. Wrong attempts still tell you something — pay attention to what comes back, not just whether it's right.