Small Dashboard

An impulse buy on Aliexpress resulted in a cool little project. I saw this on youtube somewhere, advertised as a companion to home assistant. For $9 canadian, I couldn’t pass it up.

It’s a 1.8" LCD display, driven by an ESP32 microcontroller. It connects to your WiFi and can display time/temperature, has a rudimentary image gallery. There are many different versions including ones that have a tap button on top; mine doesn’t.

As part of it’s functionality it exposes a webserver – you can change it’s settings, upload images, etc. Of course this be automated.

I pressed into service as a small dashboard, and it’s been quite useful.

There are various types of information I present. Even though the display is tiny, and the resolution is 200x200 or so, having an always on dedicated display is handy.

Meeetings

It’s helpful to know when my next meeting is, so I don’t miss it. Since small dashboard shows the next meeting screen 80% of the time, I also show the remaining pomodoro time (“P 13:41”). The obscured part of the screen shot is the meeting title.

Health

This screen is a gentle reminder to meditate and exercise. The data is pulled in via Garmin API.

Road cameras

My final screen captures the views from various road cameras. There’s no particular reason for this – it’s just interesting to keep an eye on the snowline in the winter, or watch a car travel the road at night.

On my desk

The small tv is really tiny. I didn’t realize how small it is, but it does provide surprising utility. I would like to reimplement it in something larger and more controllable in the future.

Below is the actual unit on my desk, next to the ikea temperature/clock/alarm unit.