March 13, 2026
From pixels to pallets
Shipping Grayscale Photos at Small Scale
Tiny e‑paper badges spark big shipping drama
TLDR: Sweden’s Goatmire Elixir made open‑source e‑paper name badges that display grayscale photos via a phone‑to‑web upload. Comments hijacked the “shipping photos” theme with real freight warnings, sparking laughs and debate over whether tiny conference hardware can survive big‑price logistics shocks.
Goatmire Elixir, a quirky beachside meetup in Sweden, shipped something delightfully odd: open‑source e‑paper name badges that run Linux and Elixir, pull the schedule, and even display a grayscale photo gallery via a LiveView web app. Attendees loved the tiny gadget, built on the Allwinner T113 chip and the Wisteria design, with props to sponsor Tigris for funding the hardware gamble. Then the comments went off the rails: a long post about real‑world freight prices, warning that container costs can explode, instantly hijacked the “shipping photos” headline with “shipping goods” reality checks.
Fans cheered the ridiculous‑in‑the‑best‑way choice to run a full Linux stack and the BEAM virtual machine (the engine behind Erlang/Elixir) on a name badge, while skeptics asked if that’s overkill for a conference trinket. Memes flew: “from grayscale to great freight,” “BEAM me up, but not at $20k a box,” and “it’s not IoT, it’s Io‑eInk.” Pragmatists chimed in that hardware meetups live or die by logistics, and small batches still face big‑boy supply chain risks. Meanwhile, organizers pointed to open‑source plans, Nerves, and gallery links (video, YouTube)—proof that the weird little badge actually shipped, both code and pixels. Even the jokes had supply-chain spreadsheets energy. Today.
Key Points
- •Tigris sponsored and helped deliver open-source hardware devices used at the Goatmire Elixir conference in Varberg, Sweden.
- •The conference deployed a Linux-capable eInk name badge built on an Allwinner T113-S4 1.2 GHz dual-core ARM SoC.
- •Hardware designs Wisteria and Trellis are open source, with the device engineered by Gus Workman.
- •The badge leveraged Nerves on a Buildroot-based Linux OS, booting the BEAM VM for Erlang/Elixir applications.
- •Firmware updates and interactive features used NervesHub/NervesCloud (with Tigris) and a Phoenix LiveView app for moderated photo uploads.