Bunnie Huang's Baochip is the $50 badge that proves open hardware isn't dead

The Def Con 34 badge — the little PCB every hacker wears — was designed by Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, a pioneer of open-source hardware who grew up in the Coachella Valley and built the Chumby. The Baochip costs about $50. It's built on a RISC-V chip, the same architecture that powers a lot of the world's chips now, and it can be programmed with free tooling.

What makes it interesting is that it's not a prototype. It's a real product — open schematics, open firmware, 3D-printed case — and it runs a full Linux distro. You can flash it, hack it, write code for it on a Tuesday morning with nothing but a USB cable and a laptop. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary bootloader, no surprise fees.

Bunnie has been making this argument for years: if you can't open the firmware and the schematics, you don't own the thing you bought. The Baochip is the counterexample. It's the kind of hardware that feels like it was made for people who actually use it, not for people who buy it to display it.

Why this matters for us: the open-hardware movement is quietly winning — and it gives the comunidad a way to build tools that are truly theirs, not just borrowed from Silicon Valley.