How many colors? Why that hurricane tracker could display a glorious 16 colors at a time! And an astounding 64000 pixels! And if I borrowed my friend's modem, we could dial up the local Sears to get the latest storm info at a blazing 300baud! Truly, it was an amazing machine.

sure thing man

https://github.com/joevial/ESP32-4848S040-LVGL-LGFX

Old enough to remember when that was a good amount of RAM for a PC.

Is there a repo link to see how it was done?

With how many colors, what resolution, and how many features?

“Only” 8MB. Oh, you sweet summer child. I remember when 8MB seemed like so much of an upgrade from my previous computer, which had 256k. And the one with 256k had a full hurricane tracker running on it.

This is the way of the old magics

I make all my PCBs by pouring molten copper into hand-carved runes in stone

Been wondering about collecting my own clay to make something, tried making a pot before and wanted something new to try. Never considered PCB as an option!

Just don't expect your university course to accept you using it during exams.

They usually want you to use a standard model to make it easy for proctors to ensure all data is cleared from them before the exam starts.

That's too small for comfortable reading

Have a whole bunch of all of these laying about. For strange combinations of features, can't beat LilyGo. But you end up having to deal with outdated drivers (i.e. LoRa, GPS, LVGL 8 vs newer 9.x).

If it's just for a fun DIY project, the Xiao ones are fine, but if it's something you need for civilians to use, M5Stack Core2/3, Atoms, or CardPuters are worth looking into. They also play nice with ESPHome.

They're a bit pricier than the low-cost, commodity boards, since they have enclosures. But extra bonus that Espressif actually bought M5Stack, so it's likely they'll get the latest processors and still be around.

Disclosure: Have no relation with them other than happy user and using one of the Core2 variants in a project I'm currently working on.

Awesome post, I'm getting the XIAO ESP Sense.

I'm hoarding different 3rd party ESP32 devkits, the cheapest ones are ~€2.50-5, and for €10-15 you can get one with a nice display. the chips are faster than arduino or picos, and come with wifi and ble on board. espressif's C-series chips use risc-v architecture, and everything is compatible with Arduino IDE and the Arduino SDK. all in all a sweet companion for tinkerers

Absolutely.  Plus burn in will ruin the screen as well..

"Isn't that fun to watch"? What's with the negging on black and white screens??

The power consumption compared to a bog standard wall clock will be massive, surely?

This is the second time I've been "tricked" into launching a separate browser so I don't have to temp allow the Cloudflare challenge, just to view the Adafruit blog page which is really just a sentence linking me to watch a video on YouTube or (in this case) view the projects that are actually hosted on Tom's Hardware.

What is better about linking to Adafruit than just linking the actual content the users are ostensibly interested in?

Great article! I was just bemoaning having to hack my kindle, my next ebook reader will definitely be more open.

Very cool!

Interesting it only charges one cell at a time. Does this mean it takes longer if you add more batteries, or will it throttle charging anyway?

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 can run Linux. So you can run mail client on it of course.

Someone (not apple) made an iPhone in the 90s with a big lcd screen, it worked as an email reader (pop3/smtp)

My bad... But then... What's the point of having a dedicated piece of LLM hardware, isn't that like having a hardware client for email?

I guess it makes it a bit easier to access + it's a fun project to DIY, not much else.

Then, from my perspective, there's little to no value to have a dedicated piece of hardware for it. At least I'd guess that 99.999% the target audience for such a thing already has a smartphone with them. What - if not for the sake of privacy - is the added value of a special chatbot device?