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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

There's a lotta cool/interesting applications for a tiny display like that. Thanks for sharing. :).

I ordered a few by accident from AliExpress and they showed up yesterday. I don't know for the life of me what to do with them. I was thinking maybe as a temperature/humidity monitor thing, but it would have to be mains powered because I don't think there's a way to make a device like this diy'able (with arduino and dht22 level components) and make it run off a battery for more than a few months. So any suggestions are good.

Look into the low-power mode of whatever microcontroller you're using... I did an AT-Tiny85 project, and it burned through the battery. I then switched to low power for a while, and it draws micro-amps (!) when in low-power mode, so the battery would have lasted hundreds of times longer.

Oh... umm... the display, yeah. Maybe have an on-button for the display to power it up only when you want it?

As long as the microcontroller has a sleep mode, you can use a relay (for-real or solid-state) to toggle the power for the display.

Great idea, thanks!

Other than watch-like functions, can you give me some ideas?

Reminds me of the first atomic clock wristwatch:

http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/

> Batteries are included (they last about 45 minutes but are rechargeable)

Supposedly, that retails for about $30,000.

Depending on your tolerance for accuracy, rubidium standards are much cheaper and smaller. Obviously the second is defined in terms of cesium, so if you really want to be the reference clock for your entire country, you're going to need to shell out the cash for a cesium standard. But if you merely want to be within a nanosecond per day, rubidium is fine for that.

Originally I was just using it to display the IP addresses after reboot on a smaller 0.96" 80x160. Then a screen shot... then zoom. I'm thinking more about some QR code with basic sysinfo.

QR for status or info on anything is the winner here...

can you array these off a single PI?

Imagine this:

An installation where there is an array of these screens - they are associated with whatever you want info on - they cycle btwn a screenshot of the item, some basic text (like IP/UPC/Barcode/QR to a fully detailed product/item page, uptime/health status...) etc...

And you can just have a PI running a bunch of these on a 42" rack, or on shelves of retail items etc....

This is a good question. You should be able to control multiple SPI devices at the same time, but that requires the CSX/CS ("Chip Select") pin to be present. The model I bought doesn't seem to have this feature, but someone found a hack [1]. I will add this info to the readme as you're really better off buying displays with CS if you're planning to control multiple tiny screens. [1] https://www.instructables.com/Adding-CS-Pin-to-13-LCD/

You can probably do this off an esp32 without too much trouble.

Please educate me on where I should go for esp32?

I went to a local electronics store and got one. I then looked on AliExpress and found them for a fraction of the price.

I mainly use ESP8266, as it’s cheaper but it’s less powerful and doesn’t have 5v output, just 3.3v (or at least the ones I have were like this). I don’t have any real coding skill but between the Arduino IDE, ESPHome, MQTT and some mucking about, I got where I wanted to be.

The sensors are so inexpensive and there are so many (light, temperature, fire, smoke, moisture, humidity, distance, gasses, weight, open/close, current etc). It’s really impressive what is out there.

You can get those on banggood and aliexpress for incredibly cheap as well. You can look into nordic stuff as well for bluetooth related microboards to develop on.

If you're just starting out I can recommend looking at m5 which has nice little kits to get started. It's a bit pricier though. https://m5stack.com

The M5 kits caught my eye at MicroCenter a few weeks back when I was doing some holiday shopping, I couldn't tell if they were just toys or actually useful. Any pointers on them?

M5Stack is an AWS partner for a new “AWS IoT EduKit” so I imagine you will be seeing more projects using them in IoT roles. The getting started guide has some examples.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introduci...

watch lofi hip hop radio, of course. https://learn.adafruit.com/lofi-hip-hop-raspberry-pi-radio-b...

That's pretty cool. That joystick looking thing made me think it would be cool to have some old school knobs to change the (youtube) channel.

I used a similar screen to display the user interface for my DIY reflow oven. The raspberry Pi and Linux is overkill for this project, but it's so much easier building a GUI than on a microcontroller.

https://nabil.me/2020/12/01/diy-reflow-oven-w-exhaust-build-...

Same thing you’d use a blink (1) for. Long build jobs notifications. Slack notifications. Temperature display. Lots of use cases.

1: https://blink1.thingm.com/

Not sure why but the first thing that came to my mind was making HamsterTV set for your hamster.

I don't even own a hamster currently and haven't owned one in few decades.

I think I'm watching way too much random youtube makers.

I like where you're going with this.

The hamster will of course also need buttons to change the channel to other hamster-related programming if he or she so desires. :)

Eureka the next big thing is Peleton for Hampsters :-)

Edit for the BT labs injoke

In a mini server farm like the one we're running at work you could stick one on each box and run htop or something along those lines. Cool for a sys admin to have a status display of each physical box's htop graph at a glance.

How about embedding them in a split keyboard in the middle so I don't even need to move my hand off the keyboard? E.g. I can just touch and jump to any part of the open file? Won't be very accurate due to the small size but sometimes I just need to go to a specific section and then I can scroll.

I guess the line number and use the jump to line shortcut.

I have one in an IT little closet at home that displays a few stats. Temperatures, line speed, my public IP, a few PiHole stats, NAS storage space, etc. Another screen shows a few values from temp and humidity sensors that some esp chips are collecting.

it actually reminds me of the Logitech G15 that I had over a decade ago (or G19 as the later model). The screen can be used to show some stats like CPU and RAM usage, or for games some kind of extra information like your health, your ammo count etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_G19

A display for a pihole or a display for a pi based streamer

Maybe something like Stream Deck?

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