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

• 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