Disclaimer

While I am kinda hard on the team in this rant and all the fixes I had to do to get it working. I still find that the team delivered something pretty cool with all the stress they had, but for more use it shows its flaws pretty quickely

My thoughts

Most of the thoughts I have on the WHY2025 badge are simple. WHY!
The biggest reason are most of the features that do not work, are not thought of or are just weird.
Some of those are simple. Like the following:

1. A lot of the internal pins are routed to the top.

• These are interrupt lines for the keyboard driver and the environment sensor
• Also the lines for the CSI cam

2. Dual function pins.

• IO3 being for the top bar, but also the vibrator motor
• IO4 being for the not mounted neopixels on the badge, non-mounted neopixels(Not daisy chained) to the front plate and also to the top bar
• IO1 being for the top bar and straingely for the backlight and with a change also for the keyboard backlight

3. Weird pin decisions

• Why do the C6 enable and keyboard reset line share a connection
• Why are the backlights controlled from the C6, that just makes it hard to use other software without adding backlight control

4. WHY THE CH340
   This one pisses me off quite a lot. They added a USB-Serial while they could have used the native JTAG-UART bus on the P4, however, that would have required to also route the boot pin
5. The MUX chip
   They could have put in a hub chip, but its not that much of a issue, just a nitpick thing
6. Messup on the CSI connector
   I2C SCL and SDA are swapped, so no auto detect and very likely not working camera's, I am not super sure of this so don't quote me on this
7. Dumb battery charger
   Not that I am joining team fire on the badge. 18650's are not evil, the issue with that is just exposed contacts. But the thing more is that the battery IC seems to be one you normally see in a powerbank
8. Wrong pullups/pulldowns

• For some reason there is a pullup or at least not a pulldown on the vibrator circuit. This means that the vibrator is just running during flashing
• The display got a pulldown. While this makes a bit of sense, you don't want the screen to be blasting at full brightness. This means that without the controll the screen is dark. So if a C6 upgrade is botched you have no backlight
• The keyboard got a pulldown on the backlight. Bit nitpicky. Way less of a problem then the display
• And likely more to be discovered

9. Nitpicky again but no pre soldered speaker connector and no small speaker
10. A major one. Meshcore/Meshtastic is not working out of the box.
    There are just pin connections missing to make it work. Mods are a must for that
11. SD Slot.
    Why the heck is it in that position. There is no way to get a card in or out without unscrewing the M2 card

There are some positives as well

For all the shit I give it. Again, there are positives to it

1. I love the front cover art. It really gives a hacker feeling
2. The screen.
   While not widescreen, it still is a very impressive and bright screen
3. The keyboard.
   I mean, you tell me, a full qwerty keyboard on a hacker device. Thats awesome and has SO MANY potential
4. The M2 design.
   While it has some weirdness to it. It also gives it a sort of way to be upgradable. Not happy with some of the choices, well, with time and money you can have a different M2 card
5. Ergonomics
   Due to the position of the batteries and the fact they bulge out a bit it makes for a nice grip and it feels nice in the hand.

So yeah, with all the flaws also comes nice things
But I hear you asking.

What about the firmware?

Well... It has some nice things going for it with the elf loading and a SDK, but other then that. It has been a year since the last commit. I get why, the team has had so much shit thrown to them that its likely they have burnout and won't touch it anymore.
For me, I am at the time of writing porting the Badge.Team code to the badge. This started due to me hearing about radio firmware that could do both wifi and lora at Bornhack. That caused me to get into contact with Renze, one of the team members of Badge.Team
With his approval and some guidance I got the radio to work. And then slowly started to get into the idea to port the BSP and the Launcher. And while it kinda works at the moment its not finished. Or at least. I have no idea if there are some things that I have to get working besides OTA.
I will post more here while I am porting the code and doing some mods. The first ones are already done and I will post some pictures and give explanation why I did them.
For now I'm going back hacking(Or going to bed)

• Starlight out