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.
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...
“The project” - your creative drive to “do a project with this device” is completely fulfilled by purchasing.
It’s a strange thing but there’s a direct line from creative desire to buying then not doing.
This is why I have so much electronics junk it’s all projects that I “completed” when I hit the buy button on Aliexpress.
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 :)
Heh. And here I’m being tempted to purchase a soldering iron again…
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.
I hate it when I buy some microcontroller doodad and then open my electronics drawer and see that I had one already!
Ha, I also have an RPi, Pinephone box. Sad that these Linux phones were basically a hope-scam.
The hope is still alive
This is just an ESP32 with a display
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
If anyone has a tip, I'd be grateful.
>>Between A5 and A4 in size
Very expensive.
For $59 you can get M5PaperS3 ESP32S3 Development Kit (960x540, 4.7" eInk Display, 235 ppi)
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5papers3-esp32s3-developm...
Or you can get:
https://lilygo.cc/products/t5-e-paper-s3-pro
But these have 4.7 inch display.
You can probably hack and repurpose old e-readers if you can be bothered with the technical pain.
Soldered.com makes some really nice eInk dev boards, including one with a 5.8" 7-color display: https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/color-e-paper/
+1! I love their Inkplate 2 - quite affordable, color eink, wifi (via esp32). Absolutely super fun and affordable.
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.
Are people really this price sensitive ?
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.
It used to be just simple scale. Kindle didn’t use them, so nobody made them. A chicken and egg problem.
This is great! Thanks!
Seeed Studio is pumping out somewhat smaller sized e-ink with relatively open hardware for Trminal use
https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/09/06/reterminal-e1001-e10...
I’ve been super happy with the black and white version although I do wish the display was a little higher res. Great piece of tech though overall.
Did you load up the TRMNL software or something else?
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.
This is the one you want https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-E1002-p-6533.html?srs...
Spectra color so high res and beautiful with built in esp32.
People have had this dream for probably close to 20 years (since Kindle v1).
And yet it still seems out of reach beyond going with a full hdmi eink display.
The closest I have found is the M5Stack 4.7” eink display with built in esp32 and lipo battery.
A single company controls the patents for eInk displays, so that’s why it hasn’t happened. China could probably pump them out for cheap.
Aand it's gone https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009941797169.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009976304564.html
Saw it too late but thanks, gonna keep an eye on them
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.
> For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.
Like this?
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/new-ddr5-modu...
On an SSD or HDD, it would occasionally be useful to have an eink display that indicates faults, wear, and thousands of hours operated.
Maybe also show the drive label and something about the partition table, although that requires inspecting the storage contents.
I wouldn't pay much more for that, though, and I don't know how many people would pay any premium at all.
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)
> inline USB-C power draw monitor
I have a couple of those and I love them!
Mine support up to 100W power draw.
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.
Imagine what the draw is for opening some bloated electron monstrosity like Teams or Discord these days.
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.
Or the opposite function of an audio potentiometer (logarithmic potentiometer).
I want one of these but with some kind of color grid showing what's going on in memory in real time
Innovation at any cost.
Remember when the future was each AA battery having its own thumb destroying built-in tester?
Imagine AA batteries with little LCD screens.
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.
Technology Connections did a video about those very batteries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsA3X40nz9w
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.
you'll probably enjoy this tiny screen embedded in a LEGO brick
https://youtu.be/6wBrOV2FJM8
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...
That's so they can charge a subscription
Nah to get you to give the “share location” permission while pairing, so they sell that telemetry to data brokers.
Some things should never have had a display. Eg touch screen for car controls.
Controls are different from displays.
You're probably shaking your fist at touch controls ? Would you be mad if it was a button or knob with some display ?
I recently drove a Mazda with a knob in the center console that controlled the Android Auto display. It was surprisingly usable!
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).
Side-lit multi-segment displays were so futuristic.
Reminds me of the short-lived Windows SideShow display on a few laptops (~2003):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow
It was only on Vista, so some time after 2007.
I remember working on the host software for a thing similar to the display we're discussing around ... 2012.
It never went into manufacturing though. Some combination of Win 7 dropping sideshow and ... some widget feature we also mirrored.
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.
This was in 1982. Seems like we're nearly there.
That's actually been done in a few different products, I think the only enduring product though is the StreamDeck.
The most impressive was the Optimus Maximus someone else mentioned in a comment.
[oops, double post]
>For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.
Yo, dawg:
https://epomaker.com/products/epomaker-rt82
Unfortunately these are still a bit too expensive to e.g. have one on every key of a standard 101-key keyboard.
Takes me back. https://store.artlebedev.com/electronics/optimus-maximus/#51...
Think this was $1200. Honestly don’t think I would spend any extra money on dynamic keys- I never look at my keyboard.
The Elgato Stream Decks, although not keyboards proper, come very close
Funny you mention that. There's a lineage from one to the other: https://www.theverge.com/c/features/24191410/elgato-stream-d...
Makes sense that they moved from individual screens to one big one under a bunch of transparent keys.
That keyboard definitely had wow factor for me when it came out.
It was like: wow this is overkill... but it looks so nice with custom layouts that match the games.
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.
If only Apple would have done that with the F keys instead of the touch stripe they tried...
AR glasses or VR passthrough could make some really cool hotkey graphics
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... :)
Admittedly at $2, thats within the cost bucket of an expensive keyboard.
Tell me you’re unaware of the artisan keyboard scene prices without telling me you’re unaware of the artesian keyboard scene prices
I wish my laserprinter had a screen like this.
Its menu is impossible to navigate.
Same for my office phone.
I would think driving the screen is a big part of the cost and complexity, so having a cheap SoC that can do it probably just as important.
I feel that the future may mean non-intrusive E-Ink displays where they are useful.
And not far from that are sentient toasters and doorbells.
My first job I had a Sun terminal with a Black and White monitor because it was much cheaper than the color one. Kids these days wouldn't understand.
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.
[1] https://lilygo.cc/products/t-dongle-s3
[2] https://www.stationdisplay.com/
[2] https://imgur.com/a/yXjK3Ge
Seems perfect for a YubiKey type of device. Know where your authenticating to.
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.
yubikeys already know who they are authenticating to. the relying party is verified as part of the FIDO2/CTAP2 protocol
What's stopping this thing from keylogging or inserting keystrokes?
Malicious USB devices are fairly common, and this certainly has the 'right' form factor.
There's a reason 'do not plug in a USB drive you have found in the parking lot' is reiterated in every corp security training.
Keylogging? Just how do you think it can read any keystrokes?
As for inserting keystrokes, that will be obvious if it enumerates as a keyboard.
You should turn down your paranoia a little more.
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.
The paranoia stems from this being a suspiciously cheap device that is meant to be ordered in bulk from China.
> 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).
There are plenty of USB keyloggers available for purchase right now.
While I can try and conjecture how those might work, that's not really in my lane.
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.
The better attack vector would be the programs you need to use the display
You need to install an executable on your machine.
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.
AliExpress has a beautiful 7" screen for peanuts. It has a surprisingly clear display and has so many uses:
https://youtu.be/LC3INaZVqFA?si=2BV5N3_7TtWPRlUj
It even has USB power and speakers.
Try "camera field monitor." Example: https://www.amazon.com/FEELWORLD-Monitor-1280x720-Peaking-In...
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.
Oh that is cool, I never knew about them.
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.
Peakdo have a miniHDMI 7"
https://www.peakdo.com/PeakDo-Ultra-thin-light-7-inch-Multip...
I have a portable monitor I used to use as a second screen while travelling.
I actually used it again recently while setting up a new home server, got me as far as SSH access.
It wasn't super cheap, but not that expensive either.
I recommended https://www.aurga.com last time this came up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41138701#41140193
Another option are HDMI/USB capture dongles and VLC. They’re cheap and take up no space when not in use.
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.
It would be nice if motherboards can POST to a mini display like this even without any igpu in the processor.
How small are we talking? There are tons of cheap portable monitors built around laptop panels.
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 can't vouch for any particular one, but there are a number of cheap network KVMs now which enable that kind of remote management.
e.g. https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/03/21/jetkvm-a-69-kvm-over...
OK awesome. JetKVM looks perfect, I saw wireless hdmi as well but this is better.
Just be careful with wireless hdmi. 5ghz should go through walls but 60ghz won’t even go through a curtain.
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”.
Probably can’t do that for $2.
Then just sell it as the Deluxe™ version for $9.99, problem solved :)
I really want a little USB drive with an eink display on it so I can set a label for each of my drives
Like ESL price tags?
https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/electronic-shelf-label.html
we could end so much security pain by having a dedicated display for authentication. It’s not like a second display is very expensive anymore…
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!
There is a lot of overlap between this and "modern" nixie tube clocks such as this one:
https://www.amazon.com/LONYIABBI-Electronic-Simulation-Power...
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
Without seeing a security audit of it, I don't trust running random shit from AliExpress like NanoKVM on my network or on my machines.
It could well be cheap to get a bunch of Westerners to self-pwn their machines.
Looks good.
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
Pretty cool, but I’d definitely recommend anyone interested in little screens pick up a used Stream Deck for around $70 on eBay.
Obviously it’s not the same price range but the Stream Deck is way more useful and user friendly.
0.96-inch USB display dongle -> ⁶¹/₆₄″ USB display dongle
On the surface, cool idea, but seems like a huge security risk.
What was that extra bar of information called on Macbooks?
Were they a success?
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
Keyboards were so bad I've switched to using non-apple laptop with linux after a few months with touch bar.
Good news is they've improved a lot in subsequent generations. But if you're happy with Linux, I'd stick with it :)
I have it all now: MacBook, iMac, framework with Linux, pc with windows and Linux.
Later, they made Macs with both a physical Esc key and a Touch Bar. It was a bit better, but it still sucked.
I agree. The contextual UI was great and I loved it, but having it instead of the top keyboard row was a terrible idea
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.
Sure, but I would never put the linked device on my laptop. I would put it on a headless server.
It wasn't worth the extra cost to Apple to support it since the vast majority of consumers didn't care about it one way or the other.
Absolutely despised that nonsense.
Useless and no physical ESC for vim.
It also wasn’t optional, if you wanted a higher spec’d MacBook it was coming with a touchbar.
The keyboards of that era also had problems.
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.
Nah, Apple has far too much hubris.
“You’re holding it wrong.”
— Steve Jobs re antennagate
I've been a vim user for a long time but it still took me a second to sort out "ESC for him". :)
Oops. Just switched to iPhone the other day still learning the keyboard.
Ctrl+c is the same as ESC for vim and easier to type.
I remap Capslocks to ESC which is even easier.
These are the same displays used in the fancy vapes !
Would be cool if I could reprogram it for some other output, because I don’t really see the need for this except for maybe on a raspberry pi “server”.
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.
((I really wanted the latter display to work on my Mac, but there's unfortunately some OS-level USB buffering (I think) that ends up creating a corrupted image - https://github.com/mathoudebine/turing-smart-screen-python/i... ))
>>> I don’t really see the need for this
Yes that's the essence of most hobby computing.
You can? As linked in the article, it's open source and supports custom themes/UIs
https://github.com/WeActStudio/WeActStudio.SystemMonitor
The 0.96“ OLEDs (not all of them true RGB) have been dirt cheap on AliExpress for years now.
Any idea whats the dpi is ?
Curious this is so highly voted. These displays are absolutely tiny.
That's the point
Neat! This is exactly what I was looking for the other day.
And with some probability some malware.
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.
If it is oled it will be a perfectly black background.
The author of the article admits he's never actually seen the item he's reviewing. The pictures are from the manufacturer.
It may be a cool gadget, but it may be vaporware and/or blogspam.
… or the real thing powered on and operating may actually look bad and people would not buy it if they knew what reading it would be like in practice.
All LCD vendors do that.
"it’s USB so it can also suddenly change into a keyboard and inject keystrokes to steal your files and upload them "
And exactly how would it be able to achieve that?
Malicious USB dongles capable of achieving this have been demonstrated before. For example, a Windows-targetting variant injects the keyboard sequence
For example, a Rubber Ducky [1] can trivially be configured to accomplish this with the included tooling in under 5 minutes.[1] https://shop.hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky
Sold out.
AAAAANnndd its out of stock. Nice work HN!
dead link
AliExpress links are often geo-restricted and only work from some country/countries.
works for me