Protoboard Hexpansion

As an attendee of Electro Magnetic Field 2024, I did indeed get hold of a Tildagon, the latest EMF badge. It’s an interesting device that aims to be more future-proof than just a “one-off” conference badge. The large hexagonal main badge has on each face of the hexagon a port and screw mounts to add “Hexpansions” which are community contributed add on boards. I saw, traded and collected lots of Hexpansions at the event but wondered when I might see the first ones hitting Tindie! This morning I spotted the Protoboard Hexpansion. 

The Protoboard Hexpansion breaks out all the Tildagon Hexpansion pins to pin headers on a 2.54mm pitch and neatly creates power rails at the edges of the board with 10 on each side. The 20 specific Hexpansion pins including the GPIO are broken out into two rows of ten pins marked by a silkscreen border and then there are 110 free pin pads for your “hexperiments”, sorry couldn’t resist the pun! The board also features two M2 mount holes which align with the chunky M2 threaded posts on the Tildagon badge making for a really robust add-on firmly connected.

It’s great to see Hexpansions starting to appear outside of the EMF event and it’s exactly what the badge team wanted to achieve, a badge that doesn’t just sit in a drawer after an event – that it continues to be hacked on and tinkered with. As a bonus, here is my Tildagon badge as it was at the end of EMF 2024, the battery life did very well considering how much stuff I had attached!