Badge Mode

Crumb only.

Badge mode turns the Crumb into something you wear. You start it from the app, it disconnects, and from then on it watches the airwaves around you and tells you what it finds with its LED ring alone – no phone, no app, no notifications.

It is built to be worn and glanced at.

Before you start it

Read this part. Badge mode is a one-way door.

The Crumb disconnects and stays disconnected. Once it starts it stops announcing itself, so your phone cannot see it or reconnect to it.

The only way out is to remove power. The Crumb has no screen and no buttons. There is no gesture, no timeout, and no app command that ends badge mode. Power-cycling always returns it to normal, exactly as it was.

LED feedback must be turned on. The ring is the only way the Crumb can tell you anything in badge mode, so it refuses to start if LEDs are switched off. Turn them on under Settings → LED Effects first.

Check your battery. You cannot check the battery level once it is running. Top it up before a long session.

Nothing is saved. Badge mode does not record, store, or upload anything. There is no log to review afterwards and no session in your history. What you see on the ring is all there is.

Starting it

Connect to your Crumb as normal.
Go to Misc → Badge Mode.
Read the LED key so you know what the colours mean – once the Crumb is on its own, that key is your only reference.
Decide whether you want Low power or With binary counter on (see below).
Switch off any row in the key you do not want to be told about.
Tap Start Badge Mode and confirm.

The ring pulses green three times while still connected, so you get physical confirmation it took. Then the Crumb disconnects and gets to work.

What it watches for

What it finds	Ring shows
Someone running a deauthentication attack	Red comet chasing round the ring
An Axon body camera	Red and blue alternating, like a police light
A Flock camera	Purple pulsing in and out
A WiFi Pineapple	Four orange lights with two green at the top
A nyanBOX badge	Pink and purple swirling round the ring
A nyanBOX badge with its dangerous actions unlocked	Pink, red and purple swirling round the ring
Meta / Ray-Ban smart glasses	Solid teal
A Pwnagotchi	Orange comet
A Flipper Zero	Blue comet
Another Biscuit	White comet
Nothing	Your own idle effect

Red means something is being done to you – an attack in progress, or a body camera pointed your way. Everything else has its own colour so you can tell it apart at a glance.

When nothing is around, the ring shows whatever Idle effect you picked under Settings → LED Effects, in your own colours. If you set Idle to Off, the Crumb stays completely dark until it finds something.

When several things are around at once, the ring cycles between them every couple of seconds so you can see everything present. An attack cuts in the moment it starts, because that is the thing you need to know about, but it then takes its turn like everything else – a deauth that runs for an hour will not hide every other detection behind it. If an attack stops and starts again later, it cuts in again.

The attack pattern

This is the reason to wear it, so it is worth learning by sight.

Red comet – deauthentication. Somebody is knocking clients off a nearby network, either one specific device or everyone on it at once. This is the loudest and most common attack you will run into.

It never shows a count, even with the binary counter switched on. When something is actively being done to the network around you, what matters is that it is happening – not how many transmitters are doing it.

Low power

There’s a Low power switch next to the Start button. With it on:

The ring stays completely dark until something is detected – your Idle effect is ignored.
When something is found, it lights up and stays lit for 30 seconds, so you don’t have to catch a brief flash.
If several things are around, it cycles between them every 5 seconds instead of every couple of seconds.

Because the LEDs are the biggest continuous draw on a worn Crumb, leaving them off between detections is the single best thing you can do for battery life on a long session. Attacks still cut in immediately, exactly as they do normally.

With binary counter

The normal patterns tell you what is around. The With binary counter switch changes them so they also tell you how many.

With it on, each detection is drawn in that detection’s own colour:

The left three lights count, in binary. Top = 1, middle = 2, bottom = 4. Add up the lit ones: top alone is one, top and middle is three, bottom alone is four, all three is seven.
The right three lights tell you what it is, in that detection’s colours.

So three Flippers nearby shows the top two left lights in Flipper blue, with a blue dot bouncing on the right.

Three things keep their own look instead of becoming a counter:

The attack pattern stays exactly as described above – red comet, never a count.
WiFi Pineapple holds all three right-hand lights on – green at the top, orange below – and the count on the left uses those same colours by row. So one Pineapple is a green top-left; three is a green top-left plus an orange middle-left.
Axon body camera keeps flashing like a police light: the middle right light and the outer two trade red and blue, and the count on the left flashes along with them, lighting only the rows it needs.

A device drops out of the count one minute after it was last heard from, so the number tracks what is actually around you rather than everything you have walked past. Seven is the highest it can show – more than seven still reads as seven.

The count and the animation run on their own clocks, so it is normal for the ring to go quiet while a count is still being kept. The next time that detection turns up, it lights straight back up with the count already on it.

This switch works with Low power, and it does not change the colours – the key on the screen is still accurate.

Turning off things you don’t care about

Every row of the LED key has a switch. Turn one off and that detection is ignored for the whole session: no colour, no count, nothing on the ring.

This is worth doing when you are somewhere one thing is constantly present and drowning out the rest – a venue full of Axon body cameras, say, or a room full of other Biscuits. Switch that row off and the ring goes back to telling you about everything else.

A muted row is shown greyed out on the key, and that key stays on screen after the Crumb disconnects, so you keep a record of what you switched off. Muting only lasts for that session – power-cycle the Crumb and everything is watched again.

One thing worth knowing

It listens rather than announcing itself. Badge mode does not broadcast, which is what keeps a worn Crumb from being obvious, and it is also why a few things are recognised by hardware address alone rather than by name.

There is one exception. A nyanBOX badge only reveals whether its dangerous actions are unlocked when something asks it directly. So when a nyanBOX turns up that the Crumb cannot read, it speaks up for a few seconds to ask, then goes quiet again – and it will not ask again for at least half a minute, even in a room full of them. Nothing else in badge mode ever transmits. Switch the nyanBOX row off if you would rather it never spoke at all.

If the answer comes back yes, red joins that badge’s swirl – pink, red and purple – for as long as it is nearby. It keeps its own colours, so you can still tell at a glance that you are looking at a nyanBOX and not something else. One red swirl means at least one unlocked badge is in range; it does not tell you how many. Turn the binary counter on if you want that.

Ending a session

Remove power from the Crumb, then power it back on. It starts up normally, becomes discoverable again, and your app reconnects the way it always does. The LED ring returns to your configured idle effect.

Nothing carries over – badge mode is never remembered, so a Crumb that has been power-cycled is always a normal Crumb again.

Tips

Do a dry run indoors first. Trigger a detection you control (another Biscuit nearby will do it) so you learn what the ring looks like before you rely on it.
Movement is easier to read than colour alone in bright daylight. Comet, swirl, pulse, flash – the motion is the part that carries.
If you are wearing it under a jacket, turn the brightness up before starting.

See also: Counter-Surveillance for the connected, GPS-mapped version of “is someone following me”, and Biscuit Crumb for the device itself.