BeagleBadge: An Open-Source Wearable Badge with ePaper Display and Sensors

The BeagleBadge is a new ePaper display that's designed to be worn like the paper badges you'd wear at a conference. But with a 4.2 inch ePaper display, a dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, support for WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, LoRa, and a variety of sensors and buttons, it can do a lot more than show your name and title to other folks. It's available for pre-order now for $99.

Since the BeagleBadge hardware is open source, you could theoretically build your own. But I doubt you'd save much money doing that. Still, it's nice to have the option of customizing the design or embarking on a DIY project. It's also designed to run open source software, allowing you to customize what the badge does.

At its heart, the badge is powered by a 1.25 GHz Texas Instruments AM62L23 dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with 256MB of LPDDR4 memory and 256MB of OSPI flash. There's a BeagleMod CC3301 module with support for WiFi 6 (2.4 GHz band only) and Bluetooth 5.2 and a Wio SX1262 module for LoRa radio.

Sensors include an accelerometer and gyroscope, temperature and humidity monitors, and an ambient light sensor. And with two QWIIC connectors, along with Grove and mikroBUS headers, you can also add sensors or other hardware if you want to give the badge support for things like GPS, audio, or fingerprint readers.

While there doesn't appear to be a built-in battery, the BeagleBadge has a connector for a BL-5C Li-Ion battery (the kind you often used to find in cheap Nokia cellphones), and support for battery level monitoring. There's also a USB 2.0 Type-C port with support for power input as well as data, as well as a microSD card reader for removable storage.

The board measures (4.3" x 3.6") and has two 7-segment LED lights, a single RGB status LED, and a passive buzzer plus two tactile buttons (for back and selection functions) plus a 4-day D-Pad for navigation.

Since the 4.2 inch ePaper display uses an FPC connector to communicate with the board, it should also be possible to replace the screen with another similarly-sized display.

Overall it's a pretty cool looking little gadget that can do a lot more than a typical conference badge. But with a $99 price tag, it's also a wearable electronics device that costs a lot more than printing and laminating pieces of paper.

So while I could imagine this being the sort of gadget that would be cool to use at some hacker/tech conferences, I suspect its broader appeal will be to developers and hobbyists looking to build wearables that could be used beyond the conference floor.

via LinuxGizmos and BeagleBoard.org