Badger 2040: tiny kit ereader

[rowe]

I’m not suggesting this is a product people should buy to read on. It’s an 2.9" e-ink dev kit by Pimoroni I thought I’d experiment with as an extremely basic reader. I was particularly interested in the Badger card as I prefer small pocket readers, and suspected I could make one that’s smaller and lighter than what’s currently available as an out of the box ereader.

https://preview.redd.it/aoj77rwunsja...abled&310373a8

PROS

• Good value (£49/$59 for the Badger card, charging adapter, 500mah battery and a 3D printed backplate)
• Possibly the most comfortable ereader to hold
• Possibly the lightest ereader at 42g
• Fits jeans watch pocket
• Customisable software (micropython, lots of examples provided)
• USB C
• Physical page turn controls
• No layers on top of eink

CONS

• Only txt files using example code, and it’s fussy about special characters
• Not grayscale, so pixel font
• Only one good pixel font preloaded on the card (I’m doubling it’s size so a pixel font designed to be larger would be better)
• No light
• OS battery indicator doesn’t work
• Battery needs to be disconnected to charge it with a special adapter
• Only 1MB of available storage - most novels in .txt format will fit, some will not (not sure how hard it is to add an sd card)

Some things I changed in the reader code to make it usable for me:

• Font (the defaults in the ereader code weren’t designed for non-grayscale screens)
• Removed constant UI graphics
• Increased refresh from fast to turbo as flashing the screen between every page was too distracting and slow (still a bit slow and with some ghosting)

Once it’s setup for a book it’s pretty nice to read on, so I’ll try it as my day reader for a while.