“best way to start with a pico especially for kids cause you will find yourself being rewarded quite soon once you look into the first python scripts and try to tinker. Mine arrived on saturday so 8 days after ordering (shipped from UK to Germany) and I instantly fell in love with the whole experience cause the display is showing you the world of possibilities a connected pico can offer.
Simply start by adding your wlan credentials and then jump into the folder examples to tinker around with the weather.py to modify the location and then try to print your location into the headline which might also deserve a bit more hight.
And then consider to add a time stamp to show you when you had pressed the button the last time which is different from the data retrieved from the next weatherstation that usually updates every full hour. Finally it might be time to consider an update of the weather 5 minutes after every full hour.
And that is a complete different experience for kids and adults then just using the thonny ide connected to your PC. The display is big enough to add a lot of usefull informations and the buttons offer a navigation for example usefull to switch between different locations in 1 or multiple scripts.
Finally it might be time to add the code that sets the time of the Badger right once started cause if you unplug the badger from the computer it seems to reset to 1.1.2000 or 1.1.2020 which was nerve racking.
The 5th star got lost cause the OS is missing a bit of love and basics like the badger OS version which should be displayed in the launcher next to it so 'badgerOS V0.0.2' and on the right corner the week of its release (to remind everyone to check for an update) or even better a * in case there has been a new OS released cause this BADGER W is different an connected, so it's launcher should show its advantages from the beginning. I would also love to see a script or app next to WiFi that simply picks up the local internet time cause another show case of the advantages many forget cause once disconnected from the computer my time got lost.
And of cause I am not using it for a badge but for all the solar power and electrical data we have. That is the goal to show the new hourly rates we get every evening for the next day (similiar to octopus go and what not, but here by tibber from norway). Quite usefull to have a full fledged tiny system with button controls and the most usefull information of your home in a small spot.
Badger is a good starting point for everyone but I would also suggest to build a family around that idea for example a tft / colourfull display with easier and better update rates and also new possibilities.
The badger idea / software would improve such fully working displays a lot over the current offers you might come across and fall in a trap cause I was on the edge of buying a 5 colour waveshare 5 inch display and a pico w for just 2€ more, but I saw a video about what is the best display for a pico and the warnings that the nice cheap and impressive looking waveshares are missing driver support and were harder and weirder to program.
Yes, the badger deserves a fifth star, and for now it got the 4 I gave above and another half star for the lot of work that went into it from the first idea, sketches to the product at launch day during a pandemic and all its shortages and missing ressources. Go ahead and build a flotilla of badger boats cause what is better than a battleship: a grand fleet of battleships and I would buy one, I mean another kind of badger with a TFT / OLED information display and a pico W already attached to it that runs out of the box.”
“Excellent. The addition of Wifi has really opened up the possibilities. Bundled MicroPython BadgerOS is a great balance of getting you up-and-running quickly, while still enabling you to build something sophisticated on top.”
“I first got a Pico Inky pack, but the packaging was not optimal for me. Now that Wi-Fi is on board the Badger, it makes more sense. If only the battery charger circuit was included, I'd given it all 5 stars. I understand the cost impact, but I have to source one and place it in the casing.”
“A great addition. With the builtin RTC timer-based wakeup is now possible. But there are still a number of shortcomings: e.g. there are no longer solder-pads. You can solder connections directly to the PicoW, but that is a bit fiddly.
As a side note: the power-connector now is on the right side, so you also have to update the design of your cases.”
