Over the years, we’ve brought you many stories of the creative artwork behind electronic event badges, but today we may have a first for you. [Spencer] thinks nobody before him has made a badge powered by a Z80, and we believe he may be right. He’s the originator of the RC2014 Z80-based retrocomputer, and the badge in question comes from the recent RC2014 Assembly.

Fulfilling the function of something you can write your name on is a PCB shaped like an RC2014 module, with LEDs on all the signal lines. It could almost function as a crude logic analyser for the system, were the clock speed not far too high to see anything. To fix this, [Spencer]’s badge packs a single-board RC2014 Micro with a specially slow clock, and Z80 code to step through all memory addresses, resulting in a fine set of blinkenlights.

Thus was created the first Z80-based event badge, and we’re wondering whether or not it will be the last. If you’re curious what this RC2014 thing is about, we reviewed the RC2014 Micro when it came out.