I have two small display projects on my desk right now, and I like both of them for slightly different reasons.
One is the TRMNL 7.5-inch ePaper screen driven by a XIAO ESP32-S3 Plus. The other is the smaller display already living inside my parallel Pip-Boy project. They look related because they are related: both are tiny excuses to make screens do charmingly unnecessary things.
The important part is that the bigger one is not locked into a single identity.
Right now it can be:
- a DietPi dashboard
- a simple TXT book reader
- an image viewer over Wi-Fi
Tomorrow it could be something else.
That is honestly the whole appeal.
I like projects that do not pretend they were born fully justified.
This screen does not need a grand mission statement. It is a very nice, very hackable object that can become whatever seems entertaining this week. If I suddenly decide that the reader should disappear and the device should become a weather board, a photo frame, a quote machine, or a glorified status screen for some other server in the house, that is not a failure of planning. That is the plan.
The smaller Pip-Boy display has the same spirit, just in a more themed and dramatic form. One screen wants to cosplay as a retro-futuristic wrist computer. The other is a larger monochrome slab that is happy to be useful, decorative, or completely unserious depending on what I ask from it.
The funny part is that the path to “useful” is never especially noble.
There were the usual tiny disasters:
- images deciding they preferred the wrong orientation
- the device hanging on a boot message while I wondered whether I had built a reader or a brick
- Cyrillic text turning into question marks
- the reader occasionally throwing a smug little “Reader ready” status over the actual page like it was helping
None of these were world-ending problems. They were the good kind: annoying enough to be memorable, small enough to become part of the fun.
That is maybe what I enjoy most about this kind of hardware toy. It is not a product roadmap. It is not a startup pitch. It is just a thing that currently exists in a certain shape because that shape feels fun right now.
And the nice thing about a screen project is that software lets you change its personality almost instantly. A few evenings ago it was mostly a Wi-Fi image panel. Then it became a reader. It can just as easily become a dashboard again. Or stop being either of those and turn into something stranger.
I am trying to leave space for that.
Not every side project needs to march toward a fixed definition of success. Some of them are better when they stay a little loose, a little playful, and a little reversible.
This one is exactly that.
At least for now.