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(Image credit: Tucker Shannon) Share Share by: Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Share this article Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google When thinking of a desktop monitor, one would naturally think about a high-resolution display, perhaps one of the best monitors would suffice? But, surely you wouldn't think about building your own, tiny 1.14 inch display? Tucker Shannon did just that , using an ESP32 microcontroller based board.
Shannon's project is based on the TENSTAR T-Display ESP32-D0WD, which has an integrated 1.14-inch ST7789 LCD display with a resolution of just 135 x 240 pixels. Just big enough to see something, but it feels like a secondary display for ants, rather than any productivity tasks. In the video above, we can see a scaled Google Chrome window, essentially the same output as seen on Shannon's main display, just mirrored and scaled to the ESP32 desktop monitor. Screens like the ST7789 are common in the maker and microcontroller world; a quick look in my desk drawers shows a few examples of this and compatible displays.
The process for sending the video stream to the ESP32 is to capture the main display and stream the frames over Wi-Fi using a custom protocol. The stream only sends changed pixels by comparing the current frame with the previous one. This means that for relatively static screens, Shannon's project can achieve 60FPS, but for more active displays, it drops to around 5FPS. Of course, this also depends on network speeds and quality, but Shannon states that latency is less than 100ms end-to-end on good Wi-Fi.
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/maker-stem/microcontrollers/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/maker-stem/microcontrollers/maker-builds-tiny-usd10-secondary-1-14-inch-display-using-an-esp32-you-could-play-crysis-on-it-if-you-squint#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.