Pimoroni makes the kind of hardware people get attached to. A Badger 2350 is not a devkit, it is a badge: an e-paper screen with your name on it, five buttons on the front, a battery on the back, and firmware that ships with a to-do list, a pomodoro timer and a raycaster game. When we talked with Pimoroni about bringing their boards to Velxio, the goal was easy to state and hard to earn: the badge in the browser should feel like the badge on your lanyard, buttons included.
This is the third post in our series about the hardware companies that support Velxio, after Seeed Studio and M5Stack. Pimoroni’s entry is the first one built around e-paper, and e-paper changes how a simulation feels: nothing animates at 60 frames per second, the screen refreshes the way real ink does, and what you see stays there.
A to-do list you can actually tick
Open velxio.dev/example/badger-2350-list and press the play button. After the sketch compiles, the e-paper draws a checklist, the same idea as the “list” app in the badge’s official firmware. Then use the board like you would use the real one:
- UP / DOWN (the right edge of the badge) move the cursor.
- A ticks the highlighted task. Ticked tasks get a filled checkbox and a strike-through.
- B clears everything, C ticks everything.
- The lights on the rear case fill up as you make progress.
The buttons are the point of this example. It is one thing to watch a simulation draw a screen; it is another to click a physical-looking button and see the ink respond. Every interaction goes through the same GPIO reads a real Badger performs, pull-ups and active-low behaviour included, so when this sketch later runs on a physical badge the buttons behave identically.
The factory firmware, unmodified
The example above is an Arduino C++ sketch, written the way you would write it after reading the schematic. But the Badger 2350 in Velxio can go one step further: velxio.dev/example/badger-2350-badgeos boots BadgeOS v2.0.2, the same firmware Pimoroni flashes at the factory. That is ARM MicroPython plus Pimoroni’s C modules, the full source tree from github.com/pimoroni/badger2350, running in the browser: the factory menu appears on the e-paper and you can navigate to the badge app, the clock, the gallery, the hydration counter and the rest with the five buttons.
We like this test because nobody wrote it for a simulator. BadgeOS was written for the badge, and the badge happens to also exist in a tab now.
If MicroPython is how you work, the
MicroPython REPL example
gives you a live prompt: the board boots vanilla RP2350 MicroPython,
runs main.py from its little filesystem, and drops you into a REPL in
the serial monitor where you can poke at pins interactively.
Three boards, one chip family
All three Pimoroni boards in Velxio are built on the Raspberry Pi RP2350:
Badger 2350 — the e-paper badge. A 264 x 176 SSD1680 e-paper panel, five front buttons, four case lights, I2C on the side connector. Runs Arduino C++, MicroPython and BadgeOS, as above.
Pico Plus 2 W — Pimoroni’s take on the Pico 2 form factor. In Velxio it runs its RP2350 code on the RISC-V cores, which is a nice detail: the same chip, the other instruction set, and the blink example proves GPIO, timing and the UART all behave.
Galactic Unicorn — the 53 x 11 LED matrix. Being upfront about where this one stands: today Velxio boots the board and runs your code (the heartbeat example toggles GPIO and counts loops over serial), but the LED matrix itself is not emulated yet. It is on the roadmap, and it is exactly the kind of work the partnership exists for: the matrix has to look right, not approximately right.
Working with Pimoroni
Pimoroni supported this work and provided the hardware, and their way of publishing things made the rest possible. The Badger’s firmware is open source, the schematics are public, and when the simulated badge answers a question differently from the physical badge on the desk, that is a bug report with a reproduction attached. The BadgeOS boot above is the result: it works because the emulated board matches what the firmware expects to find, pin by pin.
We want to thank the Pimoroni team for backing a simulator as a serious place for their hardware to live. If you teach with Badgers, your whole class can now try one before the box arrives; if you own one, you can sketch an app idea on the bus and flash it at home.
The physical boards are at shop.pimoroni.com: the Badger 2350, the Pico Plus 2 W and the Galactic Unicorn, alongside documentation at pimoroni.com.
Everything Pimoroni in Velxio runs on the free plan. Open the component picker, choose Boards, and the three of them are in the list.
Every Pimoroni example in the gallery
Each link opens the project ready to run.
Badger 2350
- Badger 2350: to-do list (buttons + case lights)
- Badger 2350: BadgeOS factory firmware, full boot
- Badger 2350: e-paper name badge
- Badger 2350: RTC alarm clock
- Badger 2350: hydration counter (partial refresh)
- Badger 2350: I2C scanner on e-paper
- Badger 2350: MicroPython REPL
Pico Plus 2 W and Galactic Unicorn
The board reference pages carry the full pinouts: Badger 2350, Pico Plus 2 W and Galactic Unicorn.
