I made a tiny Nintendo Switch Christmas ornament

I designed and made a Nintendo Switch ornament with a 1.14” 240x135 LCD display [0] that plays videos (actually animated gifs) off an SD card. It’s based on a small ESP32 module (Lilygo T-Micro32 Plus [1], which is pretty much just a ESP32-PICO-V3-02 SiP + chip antenna as a hobbyist-friendly module), and programmed with the Arduino framework and PlatformIO. I'm using the bitbank2/AnimatedGIF and Bodmer/TFT_eSPI Arduino libraries for the video playback [2].

I made the body of the Switch in Fusion 360 and had it SLA printed online (was $1 for the body, $1 for 25 thumbsticks, and about $16 for fast shipping), then hand-painted it. PCB was designed in KiCad and I ordered it along with a solder stencil so I could reflow solder it on a hotplate.

Since the ESP32 has wifi (credentials configured via a json file on the SD card), it syncs time using NTP so it can automatically play different gifs on Christmas day! I also set it up so firmware updates can be done either by dropping a firmware.bin file on the SD card, or using ArduinoOTA over wifi (in the video you'll see me using a programming jig, but that got tedious after a while, so the OTA is much nicer whenever I don't need to look at the serial log).

Let me know if you have any questions!

[0]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33007316981.html [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002308952882.html [2]: https://github.com/scottbez1/SwitchOrnamentReference

Excellent work, really love this. I shared this in my Switch newsletter yesterday.