Badger 2040 – Badger + Accessory Kit

Description

A hackable, programmable badge with E Ink® display, powered by Raspberry Pi RP2040.

In honour of Raspberry Pi’s 10th birthday, we’ve fused a RP2040 microcontroller with an EPD display to produce a stylishly monochrome, maker friendly, e-paper badge(r) to attach to your person, your office door or to prop up on your desk. With the support of the fun guys (and gals and non-binary pals) at Ineltek and Raspberry Pi we’ve been able to keep it as low cost as possible, hoorah!

We’ve equipped Badger 2040 with plenty of buttons so you can easily change what’s displayed on the screen, a slot so you can clip it onto a lanyard and a battery connector so you can keep things portable and refresh the screen whilst on the go. On the back, you’ll find some funky badgerpunk stylings plus our RP2040 accoutrements of choice: boot and reset buttons and a Qw/ST connector so it’s super easy to plug in Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts

Here are some things you could do with it!

• Switch between images, pronouns or secret identities at the push of a button
• Make yourself into a mobile weather station or air quality monitor (by adding a sensor breakout)
• Store important QR codes for getting into places (or to Rickroll people)
• Make a tiny to-do list and tick stuff off
• Display inspirational badger quotes or educational badger facts of the day

Want to show your Badger the world? We’ve put together a convenient Badger + Accessory Kit which contains batteries, a lanyard and everything else that’s needed to get portabello.

p.s. 🦡🦡🦡🦡🍄🍄🐍

RP2040 x e Ink®

We’re big fans of electronic paper at Pirate HQ – it makes for a lovely, crisp, high contrast display that’s readable even in bright sunlight and it doesn’t squirt unnecessary blue light into your environs like LCDs do. It’s also ultra low power (EPD displays only consume power while they’re refreshing), and the images on the display stick around for a really long time whilst the display is unpowered.

Using a RP2040 chip means we can drive the hardware in fun, experimental, low level ways. We’ve written custom drivers for the EPD display that prioritise low power consumption whilst enabling lightning fast refresh rates.

Features

• 2.9″ black and white E Ink® display (296 x 128 pixels)
  • Ultra wide viewing angles
  • Ultra low power consumption
  • Dot pitch – 0.227 x 0.226 mm
• Powered by RP2040 (Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM)
• 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
• Five front user buttons
• Reset and boot buttons (the boot button can also be used as a user button)
• White LED
• USB-C connector for power and programming
• JST-PH connector for attaching a battery (input range 2.7V – 6V)
• High-precision voltage reference for battery level monitoring
• Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connector
• Fully-assembled (no soldering required)
• Schematic
• Mechanical drawing
• C++/MicroPython libraries

Badger + Accessory Kit includes

• Badger 2040
• 2 x AAA battery holder
• 2 x AAA batteries
• Velcro square
• Black lanyard (made from recycled plastic bottles!)
• USB-C to USB-A cable

Software

Because it’s a RP2040 board, Badger 2040 is firmware agnostic! You can program it with C/C++, MicroPython or CircuitPython. We’d recommend using our batteries included MicroPython build for ease of getting started.

You can draw on the screen using our lightweight PicoGraphics library, which includes functions for displaying text, shapes and images (plus individual pixels of course), and we’ve provided some examples to get you started.

Badger ships pre-loaded with MicroPython and our BadgerOS suite of examples.

MicroPython

• (Learn) Getting Started with Badger 2040 (and W)
• (Readme) Installation instructions
• Download Badger flavoured MicroPython (with Badger OS examples)
• Badger 2040 function reference
• PicoGraphics function reference

C/C++

• C++ examples
• PicoGraphics function reference

You can also use CircuitPython on your Badger 2040. CircuitPython drivers are designed to work on a bunch of different microcontrollers so you won’t get the fancy RP2040-architecture specific tweaks that you’ll find in our library, but you will get access to all the nice conveniences of Adafruit’s ecosystem.

• Download CircuitPython for Badger 2040
• Getting Started with CircuitPython
• CircuitPython examples
• BadgerOS ported to CircuitPython by Stephane BeBoX