Episode: 4156
Title: HPR4156: Badger 2040
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4156/hpr4156.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:29:04

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4156 from Monday 8 July 2024.
Today's show is entitled Badger 2040.
It is hosted by Kevin and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Kevin discusses his experience with the Badger 2040 from Pi More Eye.
Hello, hello, this is Kevin from the TuxJump podcast,
and I'm here to bring you another episode of HPR based around a Pi project.
I do feel this is a wee bit of a cheat today,
because rather than using a traditional Pi and building something up around it,
I actually want to talk about the Badger 2040, which I bought from Pi Moreoni.
Now, this is an e-ink display essentially,
and but it's a wee bit more advanced than that.
This thing is clearly designed as the name suggests, Badger, to be a Badger.
It's clear to get it on its own, which I decided to go for,
or you can spend a wee bit more money and it comes with a battery pack and a lanyard
and a few other wee accessories.
However, I'm going to say from the outset, I don't think it's worth it.
Don't bother with the accessories, and I'll tell you why in a minute.
Just go purely to bind the Badger itself.
There are two options, there's the Badger 2040,
and it's all built in, the Pi is all part of it,
or if you go for the Badger 2040 W, it comes with a Pico attached to it, a Pi Pico.
It's a wee bit more bulky, but it does come with Wi-Fi if you want it.
Now, you may think, what in the world does a Badger come with Wi-Fi for?
Well, this is actually interactive.
Now, let's get this straight out.
By default, this is primarily used as a Badger neink display.
However, they've added some bells and whistles onto it.
To power it, you need to connect it with a USB-C.
If you buy the accessory packet, it comes with a double A battery connection, you need two of them.
Now, that's quite bulky.
You can use a V, there's various different types of them.
Oddly enough, Pi Maroni themselves don't seem to sell a lot of them.
If you actually want, in the UK, certainly, to get the different varieties of batteries,
then you're going to need to go to the Pi Hut.
When you load it up, you've got a bar across the top,
it's Badger OS, and it shows the amount of space that you've used up.
It appears I've currently using about, I don't know, 25% of the quarter of the space.
I believe it's actually two meg, the space, so this is not designed to hold an awful lot.
The first thing you'll get is badge, and then you've got clock, and then you've got e-book.
Now, you may think, oh, clock, quite handy, wait a minute.
If you're not going to keep this connected, that clock will not keep time.
So, if you do really want it as a clock for some unbeknown reason, I mean the clock, click on it.
It's very nice.
Now, I do wish to point out this is not a touchscreen interactive.
It comes with three buttons along the bottom, A, B, and C, and that lets you choose the options.
You can scroll up and down the screen by two arrow keys over on the right hand side.
If you select something and you want to go back, you press a combination of A and C together.
So, badge is primarily whatever you want it to be.
You can upload it, they've got their own template, and you can just edit it to suit yourself,
or you can choose a totally different badge.
That's entirely up to you.
So, as I said, you've got a clock, and if you're going to click on it, very nice.
Quite, actually, quite like the font, it's quite different.
It's a yearly English style of font.
That does look quite smart.
It's got an average minute seconds, and it's got the date.
Now, to come back at it, we have got an e-book reader.
Yes, you heard me right, an e-book reader, and it actually comes with an e-book.
And it's the Wind and the Willows.
And it gives you the whole waffle about this public domain,
and it's been released, and there's a source, and then you go through everything.
Any time there's a picture, it just gives you the square brackets with the words illustration.
I'm going through, I've placed about 16 times on this, and this is still on the contents page.
That's it, finally, go to the first bits of writing.
Obviously, you're not going to read it as a whole book appearing.
Instead, you've got six lines.
And is it readable?
Yes, the fonts aren't fantastic.
It can be a wee bit difficult to decipher, unless you're looking at it very closely,
like, so between an o and an a, or even an e and an o as well.
But it is readable.
It certainly is readable.
I personally think that's a bit of a gimmick if I'm being entirely honest.
So if we go down to three rows, and if we go down to the second row, you've got fonts,
which I have changed several times, but it doesn't change very much of it.
It seems to only be certain things, it changes.
Because I was hoping to get a slightly clearer font to try that e-book reader,
and unfortunately, I wasn't able to.
There's the image, which you can use, and again, obviously, with this being e-ink,
it's only monochrome.
So black and white, but it comes with the tone image of the badger,
holding, I think, is a pair of skis and willing black glasses.
And in fact, it's the same image as actually on the back of the 2040.
There's a help option, which just essentially says,
up and down, changes page, a, b or c, launch an app, a and c, exit an app.
And that's it.
No more.
So there's your extensive help menu.
And we go down to the bottom.
And I get the option of info.
And this is just a wee bit about, you know, made by Pymarolmi,
powered by MicroPython, Jewelcore, RP2040.
I'm not going to read this whole thing.
There's a whole page of it for more information, visit Pymarolmi.com,
forward slash badger2040.
So yeah, go and check that out if you want to find it a bit more.
There is a QR Gen, which doesn't mean you put, you type in
what you want and it creates a zone QR code.
I haven't really played a bout for this from what I see is you,
you edit the code and it'll generate and show a QR code
based on what you've entered, the URL you've entered.
And there's also a to-do list.
And the to-do list does actually allow you to tick as you go along.
You press a middle button to tick, you press up and down to move up and down
and ANC to move left and right.
This is actually quite smart to right now.
The default is badger badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom sneak.
So make of that what you will.
That's a handy wee shopping list.
But I think we have to look at this.
What is this Pymarolmi?
This is a badge.
You know, I don't care what other things they put on it.
This is a badge.
And when I'm waiting a badge, I do not want to be attaching a battery onto it.
So now if you do want to wear a badge, word of warning,
it's kind of a daft thing that I would do.
Make sure you load up the badge again before you unplug it
because whatever you unplug it with, it will remain.
Now you may think, why in the world did I get this?
Well, plain simply, I am going to my very first dog camp all been well in October
because it never works out.
I'm a teacher to three and it never works out in time for the school holidays.
It's certainly not the Scottish school holidays.
So when I saw I could make it this year, I decided I'm going to get this.
And I thought, I'm not showing up with a sticky label basically stuck on a pin badge with a kevy on it instead.
I thought, come on now, this is a geeks place.
Definitely I will not be the only one with any ink display.
So I looked up and I decided to go for this one purely because it is designed as a badge
and it's actually got the slot and everything for the lanyard.
The badge, it's nice and clear.
You can play about with it if you want, but one thing I would like to point out is
it won't, you connect this to your PC via USB, it doesn't read anything,
because essentially it's a separate computer, so it's not like plugging in a thumb drive.
So to connect with it, you need to install what you call thorny.
There's loads of different things online telling you how to do this.
But essentially to change anything on the ink display,
you pretty much need to install thorny and connect to the badge
and then edit the code.
Now, a word of warning, and this took me a week while I was editing the templates
and putting them on and it was thorny was throwing up an error message.
Not that it wasn't connecting, not that it wasn't saving,
but the problem was that it was saying that there was an error in my code.
It didn't like something I'd written and I was like, oh, how can I get around this?
And then I realized it's because the part that was looking at was just some text I had typed in
that was actually the display on the badge and it was trying to read this as code.
So just be really, it's not that it's an actual error, it's just saying that it's the north code.
Yeah, so I must admit, I do love this.
It's a great wee badge. I do think that the W's pointless personally
because it's really not that usable.
Plus at the end of the day, most people have phones with them.
I do have an ebook reader as well.
I don't like reading ebooks on my phones, I find them too wee.
This is much smaller.
So I find this the additional part a bit of a pointless,
a little bit of an entirely honest.
Yes, it's quite smart and it's good that you can enter one part,
you can interact with a Zatalyst, you can check off stuff and you're to-do list.
But even that, with to-do list, I like to edit them quite quickly.
I would actually need to bring from its users,
bring a computer with thorny and a connecting cable.
Then I'd have to edit the to-do list through thorny using the Python script.
You know, it's just to be honest.
We have a far for something that there are so many open-source,
localized to-do lists available on F-throid for your phone or whichever,
whatever you like to get your applications.
So I don't know if I would use any other features.
Purely though, as an e-ink display, it's nice.
It's a good size, very light.
And it seems like it's made from good quality material.
I don't fear that this is actually going to break any time soon.
It's going very often up in which you plan your holders.
If you want to check this out, and as I said,
go pop along, pymarony.com at the time of recording
that appears to be both available.
And this is another episode in the Py series.
I feel a wee bit about sheet.
But I've got another few episodes in the series coming up.
So don't worry, I'm not quite finished yet.
For those of you who are maybe getting a bit bored of the game,
and I do have one more retro gaming device that I made up to review.
And then I'm going to go on with a few more things that are considerably more practical.
So if you're not actually a fan of the game, then there's only one more to go.
So please bear with me.
So thank you for listening, and please, if you have time,
please think about recording one of these.
If you're saying you don't know how to,
it's as simple as getting a sound recording app on your phone,
recording it, and then sending it in.
It really that is it.
You don't have to be a specialist DJ.
You don't have your professional podcast.
As you can clearly hear from my voice.
So this is a community based once, but as the warning always exists,
when HPR runs out of episodes, that is it finished.
So please do consider uploading something.
So yeah, on that note, I will bid you farewell.
Until next time, bye.
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