Badger 2040 W (Pico W Aboard)

The Badger 2040 W is a maker-friendly all-in-one badge wearable, designed for efficient identification of humans and other lifeforms. It’s great for powering by battery, as it can go into an ultra-low power sleep mode when the screen’s not being refreshed. And because it’s a handy microcontroller with a built-in screen that can fit right in your pocket, we bet you could use it for a bunch of other cool experimental projects too.

On the front, you’ll find the black and white 2.9′ e-paper screen, a selection of buttons to poke at and a slot to clip it onto a lanyard. On the back, there’s a battery connector, a reset button and a Qw/ST connector for plugging in Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts. And now that it’s got a Raspberry Pi Pico W Aboard it can communicate wirelessly with other devices and retrieve tasty data from the internet, hoorah!

Want to show your Badger W the world? We’ve put together a convenient Badger W + Accessory Kit which contains an AAA battery pack, a lanyard and everything else that’s needed to take Badger on the go. Alternatively, for a lightweight rechargeable option, you could power it with one of our LiPo batteries.

We’ve made a bunch of improvements to the OG Badger (in addition to the 2.4GHz wireless connectivity).

• Inspired by our other Pico W Aboard products we’ve added an onboard RTC (Real Time Clock) so that Badger W can keep track of the time whilst it’s asleep, which means it can wake up on a timer, as well as on a button press.
• Our C++/MicroPython software libraries for Badger W now use our in-house tiny graphics library, PicoGraphics. This means it’s much easier to get images onto your Badger and code is simple to port between different Pimoroni displays.
• All the pre-loaded MicroPython BadgerOS examples now show up properly on Badger W’s filesystem so you can tinker with them easily – great for figuring out how things work! We’ve added a few new examples to BadgerOS that do wireless stuff.

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
• Raspberry Pi Pico W Aboard
  • Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM
  • 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
  • Powered and programmable by USB micro-B
  • 2.4GHz wireless
• Five front-user buttons
• Reset button
• White LED
• JST-PH connector for attaching a battery (input range 2.7V – 5.5V)
• Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connector
• Dedicated RTC chip (PCF85063A) for deep sleep/wake *Fully assembled (no soldering required)
• Schematic
• Dimensional drawing
• C++/MicroPython libraries

Resources

Our C++/MicroPython libraries include support for the Badger W display. You’ll get the best performance using C++, but if you’re a beginner 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 W ships pre-loaded with MicroPython and our BadgerOS suite of examples. To enable Badger W to connect to the internet, you’ll need to edit WIFI_CONFIG.py using Thonny and add your Wi-Fi details. To return to the launcher from an example, hold down the A and C buttons at the same time.

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++

• Picographics function reference

Package Contents

Badger 2040 W

• 1x Badger 2040 W

Badger W + Accessory Kit

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

Notes

• Measurements: 85.6mm x 48.7mm x 10mm (L x W x H, including connectors). The mounting holes are M2.5 and 3.0mm in from each edge. The corner radius is 3mm.
• Badger W is fairly accommodating about input voltage (2.7V – 5.5V), so it’s possible to use a variety of different batteries and battery packs. A 2x AAA battery pack fits behind Badger W nicely (double/triple AA and AAA battery packs will also work though). If you’re using rechargeable (NiMH) batteries, we’d recommend using a 3x AAA battery pack.
• Alternatively, you can plug a LiPo/LiIon battery into the battery connector, with the following caveats. Please only consider this if the person wearing the badge is an adult and knows what they’re doing with LiPos!
  • A solid enclosure or backplate to protect the battery from damage whilst being worn is a very good idea (or you could use one of our Galleon hard case LiPo batteries).
  • There’s no battery protection included on Badger W, so you should only use it with LiPo batteries that include internal protection (all ours do).
  • Badger W doesn’t have battery charging circuitry onboard (this is so it’s safe to use with either alkaline or LiPo batteries). You’ll need an external LiPo charger to charge the battery (like a LiPo Amigo).
• Badger W’s onboard RTC (Real Time Clock) means it can go into a super deep sleep mode that only draws about 20uA of power, turning off the power that drives the Pico W and the display completely. It can be woken back up by the RTC or the front buttons. You can also read the RTC to keep track of the time and date, of course!