High tech wireless product developer, Shenzhen Holyiot Technology Co., Ltd., has announced a Bluetooth® LE-powered ‘e-ink’ smart badge, designed for a wide range of access control and identity verification use cases. The ‘Inkcard-A1’ smart badge employs Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF54L15 SoC that doubles the processing power and triples the processing efficiency of the previous generation of SoCs. This enables the smart badge to seamlessly perform a wide range of time critical tasks in offices or workplaces.

Powerful processing capabilities

The Inkcard-A1 card can show images, text, QR codes or barcodes on its 50.8 by 76.2 mm color display, programmed wirelessly via an iOS or Android companion app and uploaded to the smart badge in less than 6 seconds, thanks to the wireless connectivity and processing capability of the nRF54L15 SoC. The card can replace traditional RFID-based access control cards and is designed for identity verification, attendance checking, security management, as well as asset tracking use cases in retail, office, conference, logistics and healthcare settings.

“Integrating Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity into the Inkcard-A1 has allowed us to transform employee badges from static cards into intelligent wireless terminals,” says Spring Mao , Foreign Sales Manager, Holyiot. “This solves the pain points of traditional employee badges that are difficult to update, cumbersome to manage, and only have a single function. We selected Nordic’s nRF54L15 SoC because of its low cost, ultra-low power, large memory capacity and processing performance.”

The nRF54L15 SoC features an Arm® Cortex®-M33 processor clocked at 128 MHz, a RISC-V coprocessor for running software-defined peripherals while handling time-critical tasks, together with 1.5 MB non-volatile memory (NVM) and 256 KB RAM.

We selected Nordic’s nRF54L15 SoC because of its low cost, ultra-low power, large memory capacity and processing performance

Spring Mao , Foreign Sales Manager, Holyiot

Extended battery life

In addition to the Nordic nRF54L15 SoC’s efficient MCU, its ultra-low-power 2.4 GHz radio enables significantly lower power consumption for typical Bluetooth LE use cases, along with up to 8 dBm TX power and -96 dBm RX sensitivity. This enables the Inkcard-A1’s180 mAh lithium cell to maintain extended battery life between QI wireless recharge.

“During development Nordic’s nRF Connect SDK helped us a lot when we were developing our application code,” continues Mao. “That and its technical information and reference designs ensured we significantly accelerated our time to market.”