This kind of "tinkering stuff" makes me want to buy it just because. Of course, once I have it, it will end up inside the drawer collecting dust along with my RPi, ESP32, etc...
I'm trying to channel my tinkering drive into software projects. Somehow these usually to get at least to the "hello world" level. Also, when left unfinished, they don't occupy the precious 3D space around me.
Also I need to sell an oscilloscope and a bench power supply :)
Well, if you don't buy it, then you won't build anything for sure. If you have a drawer full of little components, the time may come to actually use it.
Yep it starts being really fun when you can go directly from an idea to making it, because you already have the components on hand from previous projects/hoarding.
This applies to all different fixes and hobbies so well. Just this afternoon my old Miata had the power steering 'cooling lines' finally rust through. Once I got home, I rummaged in my toolbox for old car tubing, rummaged elsewhere to find some small hose clamps and spent at most an hour cutting off the rusty parts, reattaching with line and clamps, refilling, and cleaning things back up. (luckily the cooling loop is on the low pressure side of things, so if it moves fluid a -> b and is kinda sealed up, it's good to go)
Point is: Having the drawers of 'I'll save this just in case!' in all hobbies does in fact come in handy. I find this especially true when some sort of project requires 'yet another adapter' to convert thing a to thing b. Project either goes through or it doesn't, but later on when trying to attack something else, having that little drawer full of weird but useful cables and adapters within living room walking distance sure feels rewarding.
My Raspberry Pis have also gathered quite a lot of dust during the years but they're pretty nice to have around. I needed to start hosting a web service and instead of buying a VPS to run it on, I just dusted off the old Raspberry Pi 2 and set up my service there.
In a neat package/form factor and software. And for 2$. I don’t see a reason why you’d buy the components separate, it’ll probably cost you way more time and money. Or am I missing the point of your comment?
I recently researched USB connected information displays but I am interested in e-Ink. I want
- USB power + data
- Open interface so I can drive it from my own software on the host (but not like a traditional monitor, I imagine more uploading pre-rendered bitmaps)
- Image retention when powered off
- High resolution paper like appearance
- Between A5 and A4 in size
- At least black, red and yellow as colors
- Buttons or a way to connect buttons would be a bonus
Why is that expensive ? I’m genuinely asking. Considering the time / labor / troubleshooting etc to put something like this together yourself , plus cost of materials ?
In my mind , the labor rate for a professional is a minimum of 1.00 per minute. This package would be essentially one hour of billable time at the (lowest) rate a professional would bill themselves out at.
Presuming it’s FLO or at least some kind of simple AT command set and meets all the other requirements, I’m really struggling to understand how it’s expensive ?
I mean , sure if you need 10k of them or something.
The ones linked are nowhere near A4 or A5 in size. They didn't bother to even look up and suggested you realistic options. A4 sized e Ink panels at sample prices are, idk, $2k? Most engineers would be relatively price sensitive in those ranges.
It's not rare these days for people outside Asia to have completely broken mental math of engineering man-hours required for a product or how extremely subsidized the products in their hands are. iPhones can be bought for $499 not because they've figured out AI design and robotic mass production over in China, it's because they're leaving $2k-4k per unit on the table to be blown away in wind. And ultimately it's because that money is only nicety to them, not vital.
Which means, if you do the labor on your soil, your local economy will demand that amount to be on table plus some, counted, bound, and placed under a weight.
Color is the hardest thing on your list. I think something that meets most other requirements is the Inkplate 10, which I’ve been using as an apartment status display for a few years now. It’s ESP32 based and I have it grabbing an image from Home Assistant every minute, which it works great for. Black and white only though.
So a few years ago I hacked up this sort of thing.
I bought a generic epaper display from aliexpress, a 5.8 inch 648x480 one that could do white/black/red with an SPI interface, then I wired that to an RP2040 board, then wrote a bit of circuitpython firmware for that which could receive commands over USB and draw stuff on the display.
I got as far as being able to send images to it, and writing a little host program on my PC that would do a partial screen update on a clock display and CPU/GPU temperatures once a minute, and draw a Mandelbrot set in the remaining space, with a full screen refresh every 15 minutes because it needed it, and a several minute “exercise” routine that would take every pixel from white to black to red and back to white at midnight, to improve screen appearance longer term.
And then I got bored/annoyed with it as the refresh was so slow (~30s for a red update) and the rp2040 needed me to manually press its reset button after every windows boot or the usb device wasn’t recognised. I thought about rewriting the firmware in C in case it was circuitpython that was flakey … but lost the impetus.
For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.
When I grew up in the 90s and 00s, screens were definitely the most expensive part of any system they belonged to. And any gadget that came with its own screen attached to it was regarded as a delicacy only for the elite.
Living long enough to see "disposable" screens cheaper than literal candy getting attached everywhere makes me happy.
Can't wait to see Gemini-2.5 Pro-level LLMs embedded inside single post-it notes and thrown away like it's no big deal.
There were a few USB drives which had a display that showed how full they were, but they weren't popular, likely quite fragile to filesystem implementation details, and AFAIK have mostly disappeared now.
... I don't get why folks would want to use such ram sticks...
That said, I am very appreciative of my 'inline USB-C power draw monitor' from a standpoint of understanding what kind of draw a given device has (up to it's limit ofc)
Before I got them, I hadn’t ever considered that a variable amount of power could be drawn by a laptop while charging.
For example, right now my laptop is at 63% battery and currently charging. It’s drawing 36W at the moment. When the battery charge is lower, it’s drawing more power from the outlet, and the higher the battery charge is getting, the less power it’s drawing from the outlet.
> For example, right now my laptop is at 63% battery and currently charging. It’s drawing 36W at the moment. When the battery charge is lower, it’s drawing more power from the outlet, and the higher the battery charge is getting, the less power it’s drawing from the outlet.
This is because Li-Ion charging logic is known as "CC-CV", or constant current followed by constant voltage. You limit the charging current to some value (say 1A) until the cell attains the target voltage (almost always 4.2V, though some chargers limit it to 4.1V to prolong cell life), and then you hold it at that voltage until the current diminishes significantly (most chargers cut the cell off and indicate charge complete when the current draw drops to 10% of its max (during the CC phase) charge current, i.e. 100mA here).
Ages ago I measured how much power it took for the Start menu to open in Windows 7 on a Dell desktop that was fairly average at the time. In my somewhat crude measurement it was 20W for about 2 seconds.
Brilliant! Thanks for measuring this - I know it may be crude, but it’s also the best measurement I have ever heard of for this!
Assuming you like that kind of thing, maybe you can also test the power drain from displaying seconds in the taskbar in Windows 11. I know Raymond Chen posted an article about it, but I’d be interested whether you can spot a difference. If it really is on the order of 5 mW, then I assume you can’t detect it.
One of the downsides of only using a laptop is that you can’t see this level of detail because the battery acts as a buffer.
I like those monitors for finding weird, surprising (to me anyway) things - like when I charge my Framework laptop from a USB port on my work laptop (because I don’t have another power socket handy to plug them both into the wall) the Framework laptop draws twice as much power when it’s asleep as when it’s awake.
The opposite way around to what I need!
From memory, 5W when running (not enough to prevent the battery slowly draining), 10W when in standby.
I love my AMD framework, and I don't think my numbers are as terrible as yours (7-9 watts just chilling watts idle. However, the 'sleep' use is still, bad. I hunch it's a linux thing. I don't even bother, I just turn the thing off.
The analogy I always use is the filling a water bottle one. In the beginning when the bottle is empty you can go full power and fill it up with high pressure. At the end you need to reduce the pressure to not spill the water. I know it doesn’t work like this with batterie cells but close enough. I had the same aha moment when realizing this. It’s one of the things no one normally thinks about in a world where everything is a given.
At some point your thumbs wouldn't activate the pads so you had to use your thumbnails and then it was just a matter of time before the tester strip quit working.
It's interesting that he speaks of them as something very old, but such batteries were still widely available in Europe not too long ago. I have a pack of Duracell PowerCheck AAA batteries made in Belgium and labeled good until 03/2029, which suggests a manufacturing date of 2019.
Yeah, I hope they put displays on more things. The trends are weird though, since some things that used to have displays no longer have them; you have to use the app on your phone instead...
I wonder if the previous generation felt that way about the little unlit LCDs that used to be in everything (although, I bet they were more than $2 adjusted for inflation).
My first "job" between school and university was to assemble a bunch of keyboards for banking terminals. They used configurable key caps in that a printed sheet was snapped under a transparent keycap cover. I suppose I must have been working on a short production run for a small bank or a trial project, that didn't merit screen printing the keys.
As I worked through countless of those keyboards I mused that what it needed was a little screen on each keycap, so I could just do my job using software.
I think they’d be functionally useless for my daily driver, but a keyboard that shows contextual hot keys to an app I’m learning (photoshop, blender, etc) would be a game changer.
I want them in arcade buttons to show the mapping for the currently playing emulator / game. You can get circular 0.71 inch LCD screens for under $1.50 (160x160) - which will fit all sizes of arcade buttons, but for some reason no one built this yet... :)
There is a similar device from lilygo which has an ESP32S3 plus also a SDCard slot all in one USB stick. It is available all over Aliexpress for around $10.
You do have to code it yourself if you want to display information on it. However it has all the goodies of the ESP32S3 which is a very powerful MCU with wifi and bluetooth.
For fun I ported my railway station display [2] firmware which also runs on a ESP32S3 to it [3]. Cool little gadget.
Crypto hardware wallets have had little screens on them for ages now, for this same reason. Rather than trusting the app to tell you the truth about the tx it's presenting your key to sign, your key shows you the tx hash / amount to be transferred / etc, and asks you to make sure the details match before approving.
I think the paranoia stems from the HID inserting winflag+r, powershell curl https... which installs keylogging software. It can do that after a 10 minute or so countdown timer so it might not seem immediately obvious, or might seem like part of a auto-update with powershell postinstall.
> As for inserting keystrokes, that will be obvious if it enumerates as a keyboard.
This is true, but this also doesn't need to happen at insertion time. An HID keyboard can show up, say, 3 hours after you plug it in.
I miss grsecurity's patch set so much. It had an option to defeat this (deny all USB device enumeration post-boot, i.e. after the kernel executes init).
Those work by sitting between the real keyboard and the computer, often deliberately designed to appear as an innocuous adapter (say, a USB-A keyboard plugged into a PC's USB-C port or vice versa) or extension cable.
One thing I would like is a small portable hdmi display to use with my headless servers when they fail to boot. Even better would show screen over network.
I used one of these to make a teleprompter-style videoconference setup at home during the pandemic, so I could make eye contact with other meeting participants.
I scavenged an LCD screen from an old laptop and put it in a cheap case from AliExpress. It has a small driver board and a steel case. I use it as a small/portable TV. But it has USB-C for input and power, and HDMI input. It’s just about the size of an iPad and very nice.
I think that would work very well in a headless/data center scenario.
At a hacker conference in the early 2000s, I saw a maybe 5" cash register CRT screen on a tower server case. That was cool.
It inspired me much later to buy a 7" LCD for the same purpose. You can find them as Raspberry Pi accessories. Some of them have HDMI input, most use USB for power, and they are cheap - about 50€. The downside is that they tend to be almost bare circuit boards with a bit of plexiglass framing + stand.
There are also "DVD watching screens" for car headrests, which are more sturdy with a thick case. The downside there is that power supply (12, 1A or so) is more of a hassle, and good luck finding one without overscan. It's not in the specs if they have it or if it can be disabled.
Oh this reminds me, in 2008 I built a PC case where the (normally clear acrylic) side of the computer was a backlit LCD monitor, and it could remain working and pivot outward to access inside the PC.
Its for my closet so I wanted smaller - like < 10 inch. You inspired me to look again and you're right they're available in this size. thanks. Still would like a network solution as well btw. :)
I feel like the winning move here would be to put the screen on a ball joint or hinge to give more options than just “face forward” v. “face backward”.
That's more or less what you get when enabling MFA with Authenticator on your iPhone.
Banking used to have dedicated dongles with displays before but now also changed to apps. Yubikeys don't seem to be as popular as they deserve. People simply want to carry less things around that can be lost and it's hard to beat the security/convenience ratio of Face ID.
On personal computers (laptops) I would like to see a ambient info display and/or edge lighting / indicator option that can be customized and conrolled by software.
One of the use cases i like is a visible indicator of when the Video camera/ screenshare or microphone is on -- and if the user wishes to, display that status (busy/on air) to others around them (like some over-the-ear headphones currently do).
It will serve was a reminder to the user themselves to be mindful of the cam/screen/mic -- and also to nearby people not to disturb them to walk into camera frame unintentionally.
I am sure there are tons of other uses for those willing to experiment.
Anyone know if this or similar devices can display information sent from some code I write in, say, rust without drivers or libraries (eg should not be too complicated to write to) on macOS? Could be a lot of fun to be had!
I'd speculate those came first (kinda popular with streamers and such, I think) and they basically just added a usb port. In the product video you can even see that they arrive as individual sticks to be plugged in.
It is probably easier and cheaper to have 6x separate display & microcontroller and update each one independently
Really wish they'd include a real life image of the display though. Article author acknowledges this, but still...substantially detracts usefulness of write-up
>Not an actual photo, as I could not find any with the display connected to a host
Touch Bar. Given that it was removed in 2021 I'd say - No. However, the issue for me with it was that it replaced a functional key that I want to be tactile. While it's nice to slide a finger to control brightness and volume... I still want actual Esc and co to be physical keys.
I think a large part of the failure was around how terrible that generation of MacBook keyboards were. Had they use the previous (or subsequent) keyboard, and put the Touch Bar above actual physical function keys... I'd be down to still have it around
Agreed. The mistake was trying to make them replace function keys. If it was an additional info display/touch input, that would have potentially been interesting. But instead of getting something extra, we lost something in the process.
That was the last Mac I ever bought for both those reasons. Sure, I had my replacement keyboard, but it was doomed to fail just like the last one. The Touch Bar seemed cool but then it was discontinued, so goodbye ever seeing any more integrations.
I want to believe that a department at Apple, deep in the basement of some outbuilding, knows that there are people like me who feel so let down by them. Maybe if you can find them and you know the secret knock then they’ll slide open a hatch and say sorry before telling you to leave? Sorry.
Ten years later and I am of course much happier with my FOSS laptop.
This display is definitely programmable to show any output you'd want. A similar display is the Turing Smart Screen (linked in the article) which is a small image-over-usb display.
Alarm bells always go off for me when a vendor, as here, blatantly Photoshops an idealized perfectly black, flat, and non-reflective mockup image of what would be displayed onto the picture of the real display.
