A hackable, programmable badge with 2.4" (320 x 240) TFT LCD colour display, powered by Raspberry Pi RP2040.
In a nutshell, we've combined a RP2040 microcontroller with a nice, crisp LCD screen to make asnazzy, colourful programmable badge- perfect for identifying/expressing yourself at cybernetic conferences,illicit undersea research facilitiesor dodgy space station bars. Don't limit yourself to hanging it round your neck (or tail) though, use it as a sleek display/control panel for sensor readouts, a photo frame for digitally generated art or for making/playing small games. Perhaps you could even have a crack at making it play Doom?
Tufty comes fully loaded with a quintet ofbuttonsso you can easily change what's displayed on the screen, a slot so you can clip it onto a lanyard and alight sensing phototransistor, which can be used to adjust the brightness of the screen automatically. On the back, you'll find a ✨majestic cyberpunk squirrel✨,abattery connector(with a nice wide input voltage) and the usual RP2040 old chestnuts - boot and power on/off buttons and a Qw/ST connector for attaching breakouts.
You can pick up a Tufty on its own, or for a bit more cashew can get a handyTufty + Accessory Kitwith a lanyard, AAA battery pack and USB cable.
Features
- 2.4" colour IPS LCD display (320 x 240 pixels)
- Driver IC: ST7789v
- Connected via parallel
- Dimmable backlight (adjustable via PWM)
- Powered by RP2040 (Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM)
- 8MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
- Phototransistor for light sensing
- Five front user buttons
- Power and boot buttons (the boot button can also be used as a user button)
- White LED
- USB-C connector for power and programming
- JST-PH connector for attaching a battery (input range 3V - 5.5V)
- High-precision voltage reference for battery level monitoring.
- Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connector
- Fully-assembled (no soldering required)
- Schematic
- Dimensional drawing
- C++/MicroPython libraries
Tufty + Accessory Kit includes
- Tufty 2040
- 3 x AAA battery holder
- 3 x AAA batteries
- Velcro square
- Black lanyard (made from recycled plastic bottles!)
- USB-C to USB-A cable
Software
You can program Tufty withC/C++orMicroPython. You'll get best performance using C++, but if you're a beginner we'd recommend using our batteries included MicroPython build for ease of getting started. We've preloaded Tufty with a demo reel of fun examples to show you what it can do!
- (Learn) Getting Started with Tufty 2040
- Download Pirate brand MicroPython (you'll need the special Tufty .uf2)
- C++ examples
- MicroPython examples
- PicoGraphics function reference
The display functions in our new improved PicoGraphics library have been given a glow up - be sure to check them out! You can now:
- Render JPEGs
- Display QR codes
- Draw weird polygonal shapes
- Import sprites from a spritesheet
- Use custom colour palettes (saving valuable RAM)
Connecting Breakouts
The Qw/ST connector on Tufty 2040 makes it super easy to connect upQwiicorSTEMMA QTbreakouts. If your breakout has a QW/ST connector on board, you can plug it straight in with aJST-SH to JST-SH cable.
- List of breakoutscurrently compatible with our C++/MicroPython build.
Notes
- Measurements: 65.2mm x 52.7mm x 9.6mm (L x W x H, including connectors). The mounting holes are M2 and 2.9mm in from each edge. The corner radius is 3mm.
- We've designed Tufty 2040 to be accommodating about input voltage (3V - 5.5V), so it's possible to use a variety of different batteries and battery packs. We'd recommend using a3x AAA battery packwhich should give you maximum juice whilst still fitting behind Tufty nicely.
- A 2x AAA battery pack will only work well if you use non-rechargeable batteries - the voltage from 2 rechargeable (NiMH) batteries (2.4V) is just not enough for the screen.
- Tuftys consume slightly higher current rates than comperable digital badges! Power consumption is around 80mA for the screen (at full brightness) and 20mA for the RP2040 - so 100 mA total. Tufty has a togglepower on / off button(instead of a reset button) to make it easy to turn it off to preserve power, and setting the backlight to dim/turn off automatically will also make your batteries last much longer.
- Alternatively, you can plug aLiPo/LiIon batteryinto the battery connector, with the following caveats. Please only consider this if the person wearing the badge is an adult and knows what they're doing with LiPos!
- There's no battery protection included on Tufty 2040, so you should only use it with LiPo batteries that include internal protection (like this one).
About RP2040
Raspberry Pi's RP2040 microcontroller is a dual core ARM Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz. It bundles in 264kB of SRAM, 30 multifunction GPIO pins (including a four channel 12-bit ADC), a heap of standard peripherals (I2C, SPI, UART, PWM, clocks, etc), and USB support.
One very exciting feature of RP2040 is the programmable IOs which allow you to execute custom programs that can manipulate GPIO pins and transfer data between peripherals - they can offload tasks that require high data transfer rates or precise timing that traditionally would have required a lot of heavy lifting from the CPU.
