What does the idle power draw look like? I've always been super disappointed at the power draw of maker MCUs; just keeping the regulator on 24/7 depletes a moderately-sized battery in a matter of days.<p>It would be nice if they put something like a TPL5111 on board, which is an ultra low power device that can turn on at a set time interval, and then turn off on demand. So it will pull up the "enable" pin on your regulator, your microcontroller will boot, your program updates the display, and then you tell the TPL5111 to turn off, and you draw basically no power until the next refresh cycle. I actually use a RP2040 with one of these to drive an e-ink display that measures the humidity in my 3D printer filament dry box. It wakes up every couple hours to update the humidity (it doesn't change much), and I've been powering it from a 400mAh Lipo battery for several months that way. To me it was groundbreaking to bite the bullet and add another device to conserve power, the results are excellent. Would love to see a provision for one built into the next version. (And hey, dump a BME280 on there and I can replace my entire hacked-together device with one circuit board and a battery ;)<p>(Oh, and for people asking why I built my own humidity meter using complicated electronics and a computer program instead of a $2 jobbie powered from a coin cell that you can buy on Amazon, it's because I wanted to be pretty accurate with the measurements. 10% humidity is different than 9% humidity in this case. As for why an e-ink display instead of an ESP32 that writes the value to some database server and I get a text message when I need to recharge the dehumidifier... it's because I didn't feel like writing that particular computer program at the time. Wifi connection errors. Authentication tokens. I'll just look at the display when I walk past ;)
These tiny eInk screens are fun and it is nice to see them pop up in more places. They are a bit of a pain to work with if you want anything more than just "black and white, full flashing refresh" but with effort you can coax greyscale and partial updates out of them, despite them not officially supporting such features. I published some info here: <a href="http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29.%20eInk%20Price%20Tags" rel="nofollow">http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29.%20eInk%20Price%20Ta...</a>
To save someone else the trouble of checking; to ship to the USA:<p>- Badger 2040 Only: GBP £16.00 ($21.46)<p>- Gadget 2040 + Accessory Kit: GBP £24.25 ($32.53)<p>Maybe a couple of bucks more if you want the tracked international postage instead of the (cheapest) untracked.<p>Video about it:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDhw3BlBtig" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDhw3BlBtig</a><p>So if you use this as a name-badge with no batteries, the buttons and ports on the rear are very exposed; I wonder if there would be long term consequences of that? Might need to use e.g. glue-gun glue to protect them.<p>Also, the branding is a lot. If it is a toy then it isn't important, if you were serious about a name badge a little bit unprofessional looking. Particularly the bomb/weapon on the rear with a bunch of exposed circuit board, I'm sure going through TSA with this will be a hoot.<p>Just comes back to: Is this actually meant to be used as a name badge? Fun rainy afternoon toy though.
That's really cool!<p>It would be interesting to see it be more commercially-viable. It probably wouldn't really work with NFC (but I'd love to be wrong).<p>It would also be great for spy movies.
Cute I guess, though no idea why I'd want an e-ink name badge. I wish there were more affordable large e-ink screens. These tiny ones don't do much for me.<p>It does seem to me that the rpi pico is maybe the goto cheap MCU board these days. Not much reason to use a blue pill or arduino clone any more, unless I've missed something.
Very cool!<p>>Switch between images, pronouns or secret identities at the push of a button<p>Sincere question: is this poking fun at people using pronouns, or do some people change their pronouns throughout the day?
Given that this has no e-ink color display, it is an instant deal breaker and a no buy I'm afraid and nearly reminded me of the old obsolete black and white Pebble screens (until they got E-ink color).<p>So from me, No thanks and no deal.