[jzwinck]

This seems gratuitous to me: Arduino is overdone and this particular implementation does nothing novel. In fact it seems worse than a traditional sticker and felt pen.

How about something new, like using the same hardware to effect an opening/closing hours sign for a small shop whose owner could update it remotely if running late? Or a dynamic version of the advertisement placards in casual restaurants? Why not an assistive device for mute people?

Making an excuse to literally pin Arduino to your body to show to other people like you is not very interesting.

[tehwebguy]

Of course a $50 electronic badge is more expensive & cumbersome than a sticker and pen. But worse?

This is a badge for a conference about open hardware. Having a badge that encourages attendees to go home and repurpose it is a great way to achieve some of those cool ideas you listed.

Hopefully some attendees will do just that!

[KaiserPro]

I would suggest that you might have misunderstood the level of complexity required to pull this off.

Its not a simple task to hook up an epaper display to an atmega328

also, PCB design is not trivial, especially with odd surfacemount connectors

[hingisundhorsa]

That's one of the poorest E-Paper panels I've seen. That first picture of Anool looks dithered. A regular E-Ink display is capable of 32 levels of gray, this seems to be much lower depth and lower res.

[KaiserPro]

Yup, but have you actually tried to use 32 levels of gray with only 4k of RAM total?