I have now received all the necessary components and will start the build shortly.
(Turns out that the Arduino Yun that was shipped to me was a sealed official Arduino cardboard box with nothing inside it! I have contacted the B'lore office for replacement, awaiting reply.)
I was advised by mcb1 and vsluiter to use Nordic transceivers for wireless communication and have procured them. I could find only the Nordic ICs on the element14 store so I had to rely on a third party vendor for the complete transceiver chip. For the stationary base module I have not made up my mind between Arduino Yun and Raspberry Pi, I have procured both of them as the element14 voucher was one-time-use. I will start the build with Arduino Yun and probably replace it with the cheaper RPi if I find enough time to do it. While the BADGEr has an onboard MCU (it’s an Arduino Mini clone if I am not mistaken), I plan to sit down with the module and see the ATmega chip can handle both wireless communication and updating the display alone. If I discover that both tasks are indeed too much for the onboard chip I will delegate the task of wireless communication to a separate external Arduino Mini (or a clone build by me) and have it relay the information received by it to the ATmega on BADGEr via I2C. I have procured an Arduino Mini as well as a bare ATmega328 (if I decide to make a clone). I will upload the unboxing video and short reviews of all the components I have procured, shortly. For now I will hold off on producing a custom PCB for the Qi receiver board as PCB printing and subsequent shipping to India can be a pain and also because I have very limited experience with power electronics. I wish to proceed with this build following a rapid prototyping philosophy, so I will put all the components together with jumper wires and verify that my idea work and that I am not hitting any bottlenecks. I will then proceed to tidy up the project later after I have proof-of-concept.
Kevin Jose
PS: Any doubts I had about how long the image will stay on the E-Ink display without power was immediately dispelled by the the way it was shipped to me. The BADGEr came out of the box looking like this:
Yes! The picture has stayed on that screen without power for atleast over a week (a very conservative estimate)