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The E-Ink Badge
- xenon7 4y agoI honestly wasn't expecting the device to use coin cells, but I'm glad that it does. Not everything needs to be rechargeable.
- oneearedrabbit 4y agoI built/assembled them. I carried out some informal experiments and found that it requires roughly one million full screen refreshes on two coin cells to completely drain them. Furthermore, given that Badger operates on an RP2040 and a battery holder comes with a toggle, it is astonishingly durable device. It is like a smoke detector, which can operate for a decade straight on a single battery.
- nickthegreek 4y agoThat has to cut down on the thickness as well since the Badger 2040 is designed to take AAA. Wish there was a side shot to see your total thickness.
- dragontamer 4y agoAAAA is popular and as cost-effective as CR2032 (aka: bad value, but less-bad value than most other batteries of this size). Note that CR2032 is toxic, so AAAA is somewhat preferred. AAA and AA have much more energy-per-dollar. I mean, so does lead-acid but I guess that's too big lol. --------- Specialty batteries, like CR123A, seem to fit the bill for this size much better. But those are so, so much more expensive. I feel like the only two cells worth really considering are AAAA and CR2032, despite their deficiencies.
- oneearedrabbit 4y agoExactly! The device is approximately 12mm thick. I will upload a side shot shortly. I appreciate you bringing this up, it's an excellent point! To be honest, it is still a bit thicker than I had initially hoped for; however, when I weighed my options - solder 26 devices by hand vs use pre-made components -- the decision was much more clear.
- outworlder 4y ago> That has to cut down on the thickness as well since the Badger 2040 is designed to take AAA. Would it be ok with the lower voltage of NIMH rechargeables? I really dislike primary batteries. Edit: found the answer. > 2x AAA rechargeable (NiMH) batteries only puts out 2.4V which is, strictly speaking, not enough for Badger. However, in our tests it keeps on truckin' down to an input voltage of 2.05V (without the LED), so if you want to use rechargeable batteries that should be fine.
- dragontamer 4y agoNote: CR2032 is awesome and all, but be careful about extrapolating like this out to decade+ timeframes. CR2032 only has 235mA-hrs of life down to 2V. x2 and that's only 470mA-hrs and 2V probably browns-out the circuit (so... 470mA is already a stretch. You'll probably get less than that on practice). Over 10 Years, that's 5uA of power usage on the average. ---------- IIRC, an aluminum capacitor has ~15 uA of leakage current, and Tantalum is ~1uA of leakage current. So Aluminum caps are already disqualified, and Tantalum capacitor leakage-current already uses 20% of your power budget. Given the "Burstiness" of this workload, I know that these capacitors need to exist somewhere. You probably can get a year out of this in practice. To get better than that, you'll need to spend an incredible amount of energy on finding every 1uA "leak" and plugging the leak. And its crazy how many things leak 1uA. Not only capacitors leak 1uA, but so do MOSFETs, diodes (reverse bias currents, especially in schottky diodes)... diode-protected MOSFETs (oh no, twice the leakage!).
- oneearedrabbit 4y agoAfter I completed the project, I made a somewhat lighthearted personal vow to try to design a custom PCB next time I fall down the rabbit hole of hardware tinkering. I suspect, these days it is a commodity skills, and curious if you happen to have any suggestions or articles that could serve as a starting point?
- dragontamer 4y agoPCBs are a dark art, and I focus on lower-speed (below 30 MHz) to try and avoid any issues. I know that the faster the PCB is, the more issues you get. Above a certain frequency, inductors look like capacitors, capacitors look like inductors, and PCB-traces look like transmission lines with reflections and other such nonsense. Staying at a slower speed helps negate these issues. Most application notes, be it from STMicro (for STM32) or Microchip, or really any other microcontroller manufacturerer, will have recommended hardware designs + their thought process fully documented. Start there. Here's Microchip's ATMega328 hardware design notes: https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/AN2519-AVR-Microcontroller-Hardware-Design-Considerations-00002519B.pdf https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/AN2519-AVR-M... STM32F4: https://www.st.com/resource/en/application_note/an4488-getting-started-with-stm32f4xxxx-mcu-hardware-development-stmicroelectronics.pdf https://www.st.com/resource/en/application_note/an4488-getti... --------------- Study up on the "reference designs". For ATMega328p, that's Arduino Uno. For more recent AVR chips (such as AVR DD), that's "AVR DD Curiosity Nano". (See schematics here: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/EV72Y42A https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/EV72Y42A)
- brk 4y agoNot sure if they're still available, but I have a handful of "Badgy's" along the same lines: https://www.tindie.com/products/sqfmi/badgy-iot-badge/ https://www.tindie.com/products/sqfmi/badgy-iot-badge/
- masklinn 4y agoApparently out of stock. The linked badger 2040 (https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/badger-2040 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/badger-2040) is half the price and apparently in stock. TFA is a 3D printed case around that, and custom software for the badge. It's also powered by a more capable dual-core M0+, however wifi is lost.
- iwebdevfromhome 4y agoAnyone else using this for cool ideas ? Please share!
- niutech 4y agoI've ported the Dino Game to Badger 2040: https://github.com/niutech/dino-badger2040 https://github.com/niutech/dino-badger2040 and I am working on a chess game.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoE-ink in general? I did a desk calendar that looks like an old Mac: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SystemSix https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SystemSix
- sho_hn 4y agoVery cool! I linked my framed e-ink newspaper build elsewhere in the thread, here's to e-ink hacking :)
- sokoloff 4y agoI love the "it's trash day" being represented as a full trash can on the desktop!
- samizdis 4y agoMy favourite e-ink application was in the Yotaphone II [1] some years ago, but sadly discontinued. I had one sent from the UK to Australia, where I was working for a few years. Reading books, docs or emails via the e-ink screen was a joy (no probs with bright sunshine), as was calling up your airline pass on the screen and turning off the phone, because the image on the back was retained. Even writing emails/docs was fine for me, despite the e-ink lag. I needed to charge it only every other day, and that still left plenty of margin. Best phone I ever had. [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/yota_yotaphone_2-6959.php https://www.gsmarena.com/yota_yotaphone_2-6959.php
- gambiting 4y agoYes, I just got my Badger W few days ago and I'm pairing it with a temperature/humidity/CO2 sensor - I designed and 3D printed a bracket for it, I'm going to mount it on a wall in my kitchen. It's also going to show brief weather forecast and the current price of my energy tariff(it changes daily). That's what it looks like(just assembled it today so I haven't written code for it yet): https://photos.app.goo.gl/NjdisB8PbfFiGgkk9 https://photos.app.goo.gl/NjdisB8PbfFiGgkk9
- dragontamer 4y agoSome notes about my E-Ink studies. 1. E-ink requires a number of external components, even with their "chip on glass". In particular, E-ink requires a high voltage to change and charge the ink. I've seen inductors on most of these reference designs (ie: suggesting a boost converters of some kind). 2. E-Ink is very slow especially at this price range. Static images are fine, but don't expect animations. 3. E-ink protocols take a "temperature". In my cases, I've just been hard coding it to 25C / Room temperature, but this suggests that low-temperatures or high-temperatures may change the behavior of the screen. 4. E-ink is very "bursty" with power, using more power than LCD when changing images, but then zero power for most of its life. Be sure to think carefully about the current associated with this burst, especially if you're using small CR2032 coin cells (which have ~10 to ~100 ohms of internal resistance). A ~100mA draw on the charge inductor isn't out of the question (at 10-ohms, that's a voltage drop of 1V, which probably browns-out the RP2040). A slow-start circuit could solve this but you'd need to consider the longer charge times. Another method is to have 2x CR2032 cells in parallel, which lowers IR (parallel resistors lower resitance). I'd be most interested in studying the power-network of this design, I bet there's some interesting things going on here. 5. Most E-ink screens seem to be some kind of SPI protocol (4 wire). This is very similar to mini-LCD screens. --------- LCD screens use more power, but get you color, more resolution, animation and seem to be cheaper still. Furthermore, LCD requires fewer external components (maybe a charge-pump set of capacitors, but some LCD screens don't even need that). Note that color/resolution/animation all costs processor power / storage / RAM, so be careful what you wish for. LCD might be more suitable for beginners. But e-ink is very cool and awesome.
- niutech 4y ago> 2. E-Ink is very slow especially at this price range. Static images are fine, but don't expect animations. It's not so slow, you can even play Dino Game on Badger 2040: https://twitter.com/niu_tech/status/1598804559270486033 https://twitter.com/niu_tech/status/1598804559270486033
- sho_hn 4y agoI've recently built a little "automatic newspaper" home deco piece using a 13.3" e-ink display, mainly as an excuse to try out Rust on an ESP32: https://imgur.com/a/PqkhdGd https://imgur.com/a/PqkhdGd (edit: corrected link to album with finished pics) This is using an IT8951 EPD controller I wrote a little Rust driver for, which indeed talks SPI, although its SPI frontend is really a quirky/leaky abstraction over an I80 interface so you have to e.g. do chip select using I80 semantics and send preambles and such. Still, pretty breezy overall. Can confirm the power draw is of course "bursty" during the update. Also, yes, e-ink refresh times get slower in colder temps. e-ink refresh also works poorly in direct sunlight. The displays can also "dry out" from it and it can cause artifacts. But the envelope for normal operation is overall fairly good, certainly for home/indoor use. There's a fair amount of manufacturing tolerance and during testing manufacturers will usually record preferred drive voltages for the individual unit, etc. It's quite important to configure software to make use this information for optimal performance. I'm hoping it will run for about a year without recharging from that little 1100 mAh LiPo pouch at one update a day (the newspaper is rendered on a common home server RasPi using LuaLaTeX+Ghostscript and then retrieved over Wifi), having taken self-discharge into account. For more du-jour hype points I'm considering using OpenAI on the backend to summarize articles down to size to fit the layout! Or make it do style transfer to "1870 newspaper".
- sxp 4y agoAnother good starting point for an e-ink badge is https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-kit-v1-1-960x540-4-7-eink-display-235-ppi?variant=39966887903404 https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-... It won't work as a badge out of the box, but if you know how to program an ESP32, it's easy to get it to use the demo libraries to load a JPG. It also has a touchscreen and 3 physical buttons for basic interactivity. It's $85, so it's pricy for being used just as a badge, but it's a cool gadget that I use for a desktop display.
- VLM 4y agoReally the "hidden story" is the pimoroni board is like "ten bucks" whereas two years ago the exact same application was available from Adafruit for "fifty bucks". I have two of the adafruit variety and it works fine with circuitpython and all that. Someday the "wifi connected eink screen" will drop to maybe five dollars and that will be interesting in the market, open up some product ideas. The adafruit product uses most of its power sleeping and occasionally waking up to check the wifi in the apps I played with, the screen itself doesn't use much power. I suppose it depends how often you want to refresh. An example of interesting/weird apps for this technology is we're already at the point where its probably cheaper if you want a remote thermometer displaying on your wall to skip owning an actual thermometer and just display some web API of the current airport temperature or whatever. I wouldn't invest in consumer grade high resolution temperature sensors, you can replace all of that with a little wifi traffic right now and it's only going to get 'worse'.
- niutech 4y agoYou can reuse a cheap old Kindle for "wifi connected eink screen", see e.g. my Kindle Dashboard (https://github.com/niutech/kindle-dashboard https://github.com/niutech/kindle-dashboard) or Kindle VNC (https://github.com/niutech/kindle-vnc https://github.com/niutech/kindle-vnc).
- karmanyaahm 4y agoTangent: My gas station replaced grade-selection buttons and rate/volume/price LCDs with one huge (20") touchscreen. Unfortunately because of the distance, it's brighter than the overhead lights at night. No one thought to add a little brightness sensor to the several thousand dollar machine.
- aembleton 4y agoTangent off your tangent: Do you have one hose at each pump at your gas station and you just select which grade of fuel you want? I've never seen that before. In the UK they have multiple hoses, and you choose which one by picking up the right hose.
- crote 4y agoThe only thing which would make this even cooler would be RP2040-controlled NFC. I wonder how hard that would be to add?
- oneearedrabbit 4y agoBadger comes with a built-in Qwiic / STEMMA QC connector. I believe it should work out of the box with Adafruit ST25DV16K I2C RFID: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4701 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4701
- schwartzworld 4y agoI bought a badger2040 recently. I mainly wanted it for the ebook feature. A pocket-sized eInk device could make reading throughout the day so easy. I used to always have a paper book in my back pocket before phones. Anyway, it's a great device with one small caveat. None of the GPIO pins are exposed, the only IO is buttons, usbc or a QT/Stemma connector. This would all be fine by me, except that there is only about 1mg of free space on the device. Doing any serious reading would require me to use external memory and without GPIO I can't do that. Making a few pins accessible would make attaching an SD card completely trivial.
- niutech 4y agoYou can use an I2C SD Card Module: http://www.technoblogy.com/show?3Y2L http://www.technoblogy.com/show?3Y2L or use zlib to compress text data: https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/library/zlib.html https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/library/zlib.html
- adolph 4y agoYou might be interested in the Serial Wombat which can expose gpio as as I2C, for which it has pads on the back. https://www.serialwombat.com/
- karmanyaahm 4y agoBecause the RP2040 is so dynamic, the QT/Stemma connector is two GPIO pins, even thought it can do I2C or SPI.
- schwartzworld 4y agoAre you saying interfacing with an SD card should be possible using only 2 pins? https://content.instructables.com/FJT/PT8T/KROXES4A/FJTPT8TKROXES4A.jpg https://content.instructables.com/FJT/PT8T/KROXES4A/FJTPT8TK...
- karmanyaahm 4y agoNo, I was simply replying to: > none of the GPIO pins are exposed, the only IO is buttons, usbc or a QT/Stemma connector. Sorry for losing context.
- GrumpyNl 4y agoAm i as a visitor, supposed to push the buttons on your badge?
- nielsbot 4y agoCool... but I really wish it didn't have bezels!
- IronWolve 4y agoI thought e-ink was fad, but finally broke down and bought an e-ink ebook reader, the battery life that lasts a month is amazing.
- stronglikedan 4y agoI will always take the opportunity to read without a backlight. It's a hugely noticeable difference on the eyes for me. I'm just glad I don't have to print out thousands of sheets of paper just to read documents comfortably any more.
- IronWolve 4y agoI was reading on a normal android tablet. When I saw a sale on a kids bundle for 99 bux, decided to pull the trigger. Been my night time reader for months when going to sleep. It's amazing how easy on the eyes it is. I just read until I start to nod off.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- knodi123 4y agoAnd I try to convince my family about it, but just cannot get it through to them that "kindle the tablet" and "kindle the ebook reader" are entirely unrelated products. What a terrible bit of branding.
- alwayslikethis 4y agoWell don't buy a Kindle then. Amazon is horribly with regards to user rights anyways. https://stallman.org/ebooks.pdf https://stallman.org/ebooks.pdf
- knodi123 4y agoAmazon has nothing to do with my user rights. I mostly read drm-free ebooks. But their reader hardware is second to none.
- sadpolishdev 4y agoIsnt badger an old news by now? I had mine for quite time: https://twitter.com/piropro/status/1505054493305671681 https://twitter.com/piropro/status/1505054493305671681
- metahost 4y agothey launched a new wireless one sometime last week named the Badger 2040 W.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoHey! What's wrong with csv files?!
- mrinfinite 4y agoI love my Dasung 253 paperlike!
- maximus-decimus 4y agoDo you code on it? Is the lack of color a serious impediment when using an IDE?
- krobelus 4y agoall the time. I use a terminal text editor (Kakoune) which works great. For some tools I needed to disable colors to improve contrast
- abraxas 4y agoThis century's pocket protector!
- Tagbert 4y agoHow similar is this to the e-ink price tags used in Best Buy, Kohl's, and other retail stores?
- password4321 4y agoIs it worth trying to re-use an old Kindle with a dead battery, maybe just for the screen?
- fennecfoxy 4y agoMiP aka Memory in Pixel is a great alternative to eink as well, well epaper, since to buy eink you'll be paying £££. MiP supports animations/fast screen changes as well, but consumes a small amount of idle power vs epaper/eink none. For a badge I think this is acceptable, but it's also so, so hard to find displays as I think only Sharp makes them. Looked into it a lot after owning a Pebble Time Round. I hate Apple for making consumers want a bright oled screen on a watch as the only option; sure, I charge my phone overnight & watch while I shower (bc I want the sleep tracking) but if I'm out and about/on holiday and my phone dies, I'd appreciate my watch still functioning as a fucking watch past the end of the day. Plus smart watches look so much nicer when the screen is on all the time. To get my galaxy watch to last into the next day I run with the screen off, only wake on button press.
- rchaud 4y agoCool little project, great gift for in-person team meetings! Don't have much more to say except it's nice to see this kind of creativity still around in a world where everything has to sit on our phone and be served remotely from some megacorp's cloud.
- mvkel 4y agoI absolutely love this. I love the aesthetic and functionality. I might build a couple of these for my daughters to put whatever they want on them.