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.
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 ;)
(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 ;)
You can shut down power almost entirely with circuitry to trigger a wake from sleep when pressing a button. It's no RTC but a compromise we made to hit the price point and allow for a very long battery life!
Customized board ESP32 could have deep sleep mode with wifi, I couldn't see the reason of choosing rp2040 not ESP32. Prob just due to rp2040 is cooler than ESP32?>
And possibly also because rp2040 is readily available these days. Are esp32 stocks - and therefore prices - currently in the same good shape (honest question)?
ESP32 has been pretty good whenever I have checked them. An right now 10k stock on Digikey for esp32-wrover, at standard prices, and manufacturer lead times still listed as 8 weeks.
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: http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29.%20eInk%20Price%20Ta...
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.
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.
Just comes back to: Is this actually meant to be used as a name badge? Fun rainy afternoon toy though.
I mean it's aimed at makers, so it's expected that you'll use it for some sort of "interesting project" rather than take it out of your bag, program it to display your name, and use it instead of a sticker.
I've traveled with a lot of ham radio gear over the years, and sometimes the TSA wants to take a look. The worst case is that they swab it for explosive residue. Adds a minute to the transit time through the checkpoint, worst case.
>Simpson, who is a sophomore in electrical engineering at MIT, wore a circuit board with nine lights over a hoodie and was inexplicably grasping a hand full of Play-Doh.
With the STEMMA QT port you can attach something like this $4 RFID breakout[1] and have a badge that people can scan at a conference to get your details. No soldering needed, you can connect it directly to the board with a $1 cable and it's probably easy to program with MicroPython, although I'm not sure how extensible their "Badge OS" is.
edit: there's no MicroPython library for it apparently, but the datasheet[2] is pretty detailed. I've written Python libraries from such protocol definitions before, it's not too difficult.
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.
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.
Yeah I know about the inkplate, I might get the 10", or maybe they will do a 10+ analogously to the 6+, but I'd like an even bigger one. The ipad pro that everyone wants is 12.9" and a letter sized sheet of paper is 14" so I'd want to start up in that range, for reading stuff like arxiv pdf's.
I do know about epaper shelf tags but that is pretty niche imho. Not that many of us are involved in stocking store shelves.
At base clocks the mega will use half the power. Though unsure what gains you would recoup with the pico by reducing the clock, so maybe pico could match and surpase at a lower clock speed.
That would eat through the batteries. Which means you likely need a different battery, which means more bulk, which ultimately changes the entire value proposition, and now you may have well buy a cheap android phone.
This thing, while worn requires zero power. You only require power to rotate the image.
Not really, provided the duty cycle is low enough. Espressif chips can be set up so that they boot, run some code and then shut down with a timer (deepsleep). You can stretch the battery quite far that way. I did this to monitor temperature in an outdoor pool.
Omega sell plenty of WiFi connected industrial sensors (with small batteries) that are specced to run for a year or so before a recharge. Usually they report measurements on the order of minutes.
I also have a Bluetooth HRM which I've used for years (probably days of use, cumulatively). I've maybe changed the battery once.
I know trans people that use different pronouns with people they haven't come out to and/or know are transphobic, but can't cut out of their life for whatever reason (ex: close family members). I've never heard of it happening at work, but say for example one of these people saw you in your work uniform.
Sounds like the easiest thing is to just...not include any pronoun? This has been a very old practice by now. Then there's nothing to switch, and you can use ordinary paper, which is much cheaper.
Some people do prefer different pronouns throughout the day. It's not common because it's difficult to communicate, but if it becomes easy to do then it may become more common and noticeable.
Well, it is, since "identities" of things (which from the language point of view are just designations of a referent, really) are significantly less fixed than a grammatical category. So changing it tends to be much weirder.
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).
Along with White, Black and shade of black (greys), the technology is becoming mainstream with Red and Yellow color. We are using these for retail customers.
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 ;)
(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 ;)