Pimoroni Badger 2040
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A hackable, programmable badge with an E Ink® display, powered by Raspberry Pi RP2040.
In honor of Raspberry Pi’s 10th birthday, we’ve fused an RP2040 microcontroller with an EPD display to make 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 badger-punk stylings plus our RP2040 accouterments 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®
Pimoroni are big fans of electronic paper at Pirate HQ – as they make 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 long time whilst the display is unpowered.
Using an RP2040 chip means we can drive the hardware in fun, experimental, and low-level ways. We’ve written custom drivers for the EPD display that prioritize low power consumption whilst enabling lightning-fast refresh rates.
Features
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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
