SmallTV Hacking With Surprisingly Little Fuss
We’ve seen the GeekMagic SmallTV line of gadgets earlier than — these low cost devices mix a microcontroller and a show in somewhat plastic case that can be utilized to point out the time or climate. Powered by both an ESP8266 or an ESP32, the issues may simply go for a pastime construct if it wasn’t for his or her professionally produced enclosures. In reality, we wouldn’t be shocked if GeekMagic lifted the thought from an current DIY undertaking.
As you may anticipate we’ve seen a number of hacks for these gadgets already, which often includes changing the inventory firmware. But this newest strategy is exclusive in that you just don’t have to mess with the inventory software program, nor do you could get away the soldering iron. By leveraging a built-in picture viewer operate of the SmallTV [Yongha Kim] shows how you can get the gadget to display pretty much whatever you want.
The trick right here is that the picture is being generated by a machine on the community, say your desktop or server, and being pushed over to the SmallTV over HTTP. In this instance the picture is being generated in Python with the Pillow library, and [Yongha] has it displaying Claude and Codex utilization information, however you might actually strategy this nonetheless you would like.
All you could do is create a 240×240 picture and shoot it over to the gadget, so that you’re free to provide you with no matter kind of visuals you’d like. It even helps GIF in the event you’d prefer to work animation into it. The content material can in fact be no matter info you’re serious about displaying, and it may be generated by no matter programming language or device you’re most comfy with. It’s an enchanting proof of idea, and now that the strategy has been demonstrated we’re to see the place the neighborhood can take it.
If this all sounds somewhat too simple in your tastes, don’t fear. There’s a a lot deep rabbit gap you’ll be able to dive into should you elect to replace the device’s firmware entirely.
