I have a few ePaper picture frames that don't use any power, and when you tap your phone to them it uses the power-over-NFC to boot itself and update the photo you send to it. It's such a cool idea and something I always felt like could be used more for displays that don't need to update very often.
It was really satisfying to get everything working (especially the NFC because I've found RF to be a bit tricky), but the eink logic was actually a bit of gamble, because I broke my only eink while prototyping so the production batch was the first test of the driver. So always carry spare components when designing prototypes!
So the eink holds its state once it’s programmed so you do need an initial program of the badge through USB-C, and then the NFC uses passive RF harvesting.
How much did they end up costing? We do a similar PCB medallion every year for another event and haven't been able to get quite that fancy due to cost. We usually only manage to get some LEDs and a processor in our lower budget range.
The total ended up being about $10/badge for 60 (5 for badge, 5 for eink), and we made the mistake of not ordering enough, so we ordered a couple more that were about $1 more expensive each. We bought all the badges from JLC and the prod files are in the repo if you want to see how much they come to in higher order quantity!
That's very cool.
I have a few ePaper picture frames that don't use any power, and when you tap your phone to them it uses the power-over-NFC to boot itself and update the photo you send to it. It's such a cool idea and something I always felt like could be used more for displays that don't need to update very often.
This sounds really neat. Is it a commercial product or did you build them yourself?
Very cool! Quick question: did you use a plugin to generate the NFC antenna?
The routing and layout looks nice. The end result is great! I bet it was satisfying to get it working on the first try.
I used https://eds.st.com/antenna/#/ to get an antenna that fit with a target inductance of 4.7uH and then used https://github.com/nideri/nfc_antenna_generator to create the footprint which I slightly modified for the board! You can read a bit more about it in the journal (JOURNAL.md)!
It was really satisfying to get everything working (especially the NFC because I've found RF to be a bit tricky), but the eink logic was actually a bit of gamble, because I broke my only eink while prototyping so the production batch was the first test of the driver. So always carry spare components when designing prototypes!
how does "zero-power" work exactly? all power from NFC?
So the eink holds its state once it’s programmed so you do need an initial program of the badge through USB-C, and then the NFC uses passive RF harvesting.
yes NFC and with an e-ink display no battery needed from there
How much did they end up costing? We do a similar PCB medallion every year for another event and haven't been able to get quite that fancy due to cost. We usually only manage to get some LEDs and a processor in our lower budget range.
The total ended up being about $10/badge for 60 (5 for badge, 5 for eink), and we made the mistake of not ordering enough, so we ordered a couple more that were about $1 more expensive each. We bought all the badges from JLC and the prod files are in the repo if you want to see how much they come to in higher order quantity!