Simply in time for Christmas, mechanical engineer Tucker Shannon has created a tiny, elf-sized monitor for a desktop laptop. At 1.14 inches and with a decision of simply 135×240 pixels, it isn’t helpful for many digital duties. However for distant monitoring dashboards or IoT shows, it may are available actually helpful. Except for that, you gained’t discover a cuter show wherever.
So far as the {hardware} is anxious, all that’s wanted is a TENSTAR T-Show ESP32-D0WD. This all-in-one board comes geared up with an ESP32 microcontroller — which offers each processing and Wi-Fi capabilities — in addition to a miniature show.
The software program consists of two major elements: a transmitter that runs on the host laptop, and a receiver that runs on the ESP32 board. The transmitter takes display captures from the host machine, then finds pixels which have modified for the reason that final seize. These pixels are then run-length encoded and despatched to the receiver by way of a customized protocol over Wi-Fi to replace the show.
Given this methodology, body charges fluctuate wildly from about 5 to 60 frames per second. The variety of modified pixels between frames closely influences this, however the high quality of the Wi-Fi community additionally elements in. With 100 milliseconds or so of delay on common, you gained’t be doing any tiny gaming, nevertheless it gained’t matter a lot for many dashboard functions.
The supply code and setup directions are accessible on GitHub. When you have this little board already, it will be a enjoyable undertaking to play with over the weekend.

