Pimoroni Unveils the Raspberry Pi RP2350-Powered Badgeware Family of Wearable Displays
Building on the Badger's success, the new Badgeware boards are a big upgrade over earlier designs.
Sheffield-based hobbyist electronics specialist Pimoroni has announced a new family of expandable electronic badges, all based around the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller and featuring Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity: Badgeware.
"Introducing Badgeware — the next generation of wearable, hackable badges from your friends in Sheffield-on-sea," the company writes of its latest launch, building on its earlier smart displays and wearables. "Now with tough colorful exteriors, built in batteries, and much, much more."
The initial Badgeware line-up is comprised of three designs: the Badger, which has a 2.7" 264×176 grayscale ePaper display; the Tufty, which swaps this out for a 2.8" 320×240 color IPS display; and the Blinky, which has instead a 3.6" matrix of 872 brilliant-white LEDs. The core design of each is identical: a series of front-facing user-definable buttons, four-zone rear lighting, a protective plastic chassis to the rear, and connection points for a bundled lanyard.
Inside the plastic housing is a Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller, expanded with 16MB of flash storage and 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) on top of its on-chip 520kB of SRAM. An unspecified but suspiciously-Espressif ESP32-looking module adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, while there's a USB Type-C connector for programming and to recharge an integrated 1,000mAh battery. There's also an integrated real-time clock module, plus Qwiic/STEMMA QT compatible expansion headers and Serial Wire Debug (SWD) support.
The badges themselves aren't alone, though: Pimoroni has also announced a pair of add-ons, dubbed the Badgeware STEM kit: a Multi-Sensor Stick that adds temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, light, proximity, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor; and a Gamepad that adds buttons for a four-way direction pad, four fire buttons, two system buttons, and four front-facing white LED indicators. "We've added cuttable traces on the back to change the I2C address of each Qw/ST Pad," the company notes, "so you can have up to four Qw/ST Pads connected at the same time - perfect for multiplayer shenanigans!"
The badges come pre-flashed with an MIT-licensed firmware featuring a range of graphical apps, including an app launcher, Flappy Bird clone, Etch-A-Sketch, Snake game, a virtual pet, ISS tracker, and more. Pimoroni pledges to allow users to share their own apps for download by other Badgeware owners, too, once hardware is in developers' hands.
More information on the Badgeware line-up is available on the dedicated product site; pre-orders have opened at £49.50 (around $66) badge-only or £67.50 (around $90) with a bundled STEM kit.