IceFinder is a wearable LED pendant I’m building for Burning Man 2027. Its ring of lights points toward your friends, helping you find each other anywhere on the playa.
Each pendant knows its own position and orientation using an onboard GPS receiver, compass, and motion sensor. Friends’ pendants share their positions directly over a radio mesh, without relying on phones, cellular coverage, or the internet. Your pendant calculates the direction of each friend relative to your own position and illuminates the corresponding part of the ring. The top of the ring represents straight ahead.
Since the pendant shares your location, security is just as important as the lights themselves. Friends establish trust by exchanging keys through their phones, and every location update is encrypted so that only its intended recipients can read it. Only the owner can change a pendant’s settings, and firmware updates are accepted only when signed.
I’m currently rewriting the firmware in C using ESP-IDF, ahead of the final PCB design. Development is happening on a board equipped with the same GPS receiver as the planned hardware. The firmware already supports owner pairing, encrypted Bluetooth sessions, persistent settings, LED control, and signed firmware updates over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The mesh radio and directional display are next.
A device people wear for a week in the desert needs to be exceptionally reliable. That’s why I’m putting considerable effort into testing the firmware. Every parser that handles external input has a dedicated fuzzing target. Mutation testing checks whether the test suite actually catches bugs, while independent QA agents derive their own tests from the design documents rather than the implementation.
The code is private for now, so there’s no public repository to link.