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Show HN: Raspberry Pi 400 with a $2 IPS 240x240 micro display
- ISL 6y agoThere's a lotta cool/interesting applications for a tiny display like that. Thanks for sharing. :).
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoOther than watch-like functions, can you give me some ideas?
- jepler 6y agowatch lofi hip hop radio, of course. https://learn.adafruit.com/lofi-hip-hop-raspberry-pi-radio-braincraft https://learn.adafruit.com/lofi-hip-hop-raspberry-pi-radio-b...
- jcims 6y agoThat's pretty cool. That joystick looking thing made me think it would be cool to have some old school knobs to change the (youtube) channel.
- sgroppino 6y agoOriginally I was just using it to display the IP addresses after reboot on a smaller 0.96" 80x160. Then a screen shot... then zoom. I'm thinking more about some QR code with basic sysinfo.
- samstave 6y agoQR for status or info on anything is the winner here... can you array these off a single PI? Imagine this: An installation where there is an array of these screens - they are associated with whatever you want info on - they cycle btwn a screenshot of the item, some basic text (like IP/UPC/Barcode/QR to a fully detailed product/item page, uptime/health status...) etc... And you can just have a PI running a bunch of these on a 42" rack, or on shelves of retail items etc....
- lostlogin 6y agoYou can probably do this off an esp32 without too much trouble.
- samstave 6y agoPlease educate me on where I should go for esp32?
- BigJ1211 6y agoYou can get those on banggood and aliexpress for incredibly cheap as well. You can look into nordic stuff as well for bluetooth related microboards to develop on. If you're just starting out I can recommend looking at m5 which has nice little kits to get started. It's a bit pricier though. https://m5stack.com https://m5stack.com
- djbeadle 6y agoThe M5 kits caught my eye at MicroCenter a few weeks back when I was doing some holiday shopping, I couldn't tell if they were just toys or actually useful. Any pointers on them?
- jburgess777 6y agoM5Stack is an AWS partner for a new “AWS IoT EduKit” so I imagine you will be seeing more projects using them in IoT roles. The getting started guide has some examples. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introducing-aws-iot-edukit/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/introduci...
- lostlogin 6y agoI went to a local electronics store and got one. I then looked on AliExpress and found them for a fraction of the price. I mainly use ESP8266, as it’s cheaper but it’s less powerful and doesn’t have 5v output, just 3.3v (or at least the ones I have were like this). I don’t have any real coding skill but between the Arduino IDE, ESPHome, MQTT and some mucking about, I got where I wanted to be. The sensors are so inexpensive and there are so many (light, temperature, fire, smoke, moisture, humidity, distance, gasses, weight, open/close, current etc). It’s really impressive what is out there.
- tra3 6y agoSame thing you’d use a blink (1) for. Long build jobs notifications. Slack notifications. Temperature display. Lots of use cases. 1: https://blink1.thingm.com/ https://blink1.thingm.com/
- noisy_boy 6y agoHow about embedding them in a split keyboard in the middle so I don't even need to move my hand off the keyboard? E.g. I can just touch and jump to any part of the open file? Won't be very accurate due to the small size but sometimes I just need to go to a specific section and then I can scroll.
- ehnto 6y agoI guess the line number and use the jump to line shortcut.
- nabilt 6y agoI used a similar screen to display the user interface for my DIY reflow oven. The raspberry Pi and Linux is overkill for this project, but it's so much easier building a GUI than on a microcontroller. https://nabil.me/2020/12/01/diy-reflow-oven-w-exhaust-build-part-1/ https://nabil.me/2020/12/01/diy-reflow-oven-w-exhaust-build-...
- Scoundreller 6y agoReminds me of the first atomic clock wristwatch: http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/ http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/ > Batteries are included (they last about 45 minutes but are rechargeable)
- drzaiusapelord 6y agoSupposedly, that retails for about $30,000.
- jrockway 6y agoDepending on your tolerance for accuracy, rubidium standards are much cheaper and smaller. Obviously the second is defined in terms of cesium, so if you really want to be the reference clock for your entire country, you're going to need to shell out the cash for a cesium standard. But if you merely want to be within a nanosecond per day, rubidium is fine for that.
- herodoturtle 6y agoIn a mini server farm like the one we're running at work you could stick one on each box and run htop or something along those lines. Cool for a sys admin to have a status display of each physical box's htop graph at a glance.
- tjungblut 6y agoit actually reminds me of the Logitech G15 that I had over a decade ago (or G19 as the later model). The screen can be used to show some stats like CPU and RAM usage, or for games some kind of extra information like your health, your ammo count etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_G19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_G19
- lostlogin 6y agoI have one in an IT little closet at home that displays a few stats. Temperatures, line speed, my public IP, a few PiHole stats, NAS storage space, etc. Another screen shows a few values from temp and humidity sensors that some esp chips are collecting.
- scotty79 6y agoNot sure why but the first thing that came to my mind was making HamsterTV set for your hamster. I don't even own a hamster currently and haven't owned one in few decades. I think I'm watching way too much random youtube makers.
- Jeema101 6y agoI like where you're going with this. The hamster will of course also need buttons to change the channel to other hamster-related programming if he or she so desires. :)
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoEureka the next big thing is Peleton for Hampsters :-) Edit for the BT labs injoke
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoA display for a pihole or a display for a pi based streamer
- vyrotek 6y agoMaybe something like Stream Deck?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- roel_v 6y agoI ordered a few by accident from AliExpress and they showed up yesterday. I don't know for the life of me what to do with them. I was thinking maybe as a temperature/humidity monitor thing, but it would have to be mains powered because I don't think there's a way to make a device like this diy'able (with arduino and dht22 level components) and make it run off a battery for more than a few months. So any suggestions are good.
- chris_st 6y agoLook into the low-power mode of whatever microcontroller you're using... I did an AT-Tiny85 project, and it burned through the battery. I then switched to low power for a while, and it draws micro-amps (!) when in low-power mode, so the battery would have lasted hundreds of times longer. Oh... umm... the display, yeah. Maybe have an on-button for the display to power it up only when you want it?
- dmitrygr 6y agoThis is a strange way to do this. Linux already supports such displays to be used as a real framebuffer. Why all the python and screenshotting?
- sgroppino 6y agoCouldn't make it work with those modules.
- opendomain 6y agowhat are the specs form this display? the title says 240x240, but what size? How many colors and refresh rate?
- inamberclad 6y agoIt looks like I2C, so it's probably damn slow.
- joezydeco 6y agoThey're SPI driven and store their own pixels. You don't need to clock it like a parallel display.
- sgroppino 6y agoDriver: ST7789 Interface: SPI Display color: RGB, 65K color Resolution: 240x240 Backlight: LED Operating voltage: 3.3V
- fermienrico 6y agoThere is a weird spot in the display market that is painful as a embedded developer: Displays under 400x240 pixels, usually the gfx buffer can be managed in the ram of the MCU. Nothing fancy needed, can get decent framerate on SPI bus running at 16 MHz. Anything above this range gets super ugly: no good displays exist and if they do, they're expensive or outdated (800x480 resolution is basically impossible to obtain). Furthermore, driving this display requires crazy shit like multiple SPI channels (QSPI), or some neutered version of DSI protocol...impossible to find docs for and if they have docs, theyre in Chinese. Then there are ultra high resolution displays, for e.g. cell phone market or laptop screens. You're now looking an entirely different beast. MIPI/DSI hardware support is required and a bunch of NDAs, need dedicated GPU and a proper linux running. Ideal display tech would be 5"inch diagonal, OLED (low power consumption), 800x480 (or similar) and can be run using ARM Cortex-M4 or similar microcontroler arch. That would open up opportunities for so many device categories that doesn't exist today. Imagine a VT100 terminal clone running on 8" 1024x768 resolution screen with a cheap ESP32 + display driver chip. Or a slightly more beefy Cortex-M7 running zephyr/linux. So many things we could build.
- nrp 6y agoIt's an interesting challenge, but MIPI DSI is sort of the right interface for small size displays too high resolution to drive with SPI. There are a range of Cortex-M4 and M7 MCUs that have DSI output (e.g. https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/DSI_internal_peripheral https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/DSI_internal_peripheral). The solution is probably just better documentation for the panels and their DDICs.
- cxcorp 6y agoOh wow, I didn't even know ST had a wiki! I wonder if they also have a section on the STM8 family?
- exged 6y agoAside from very simple use cases, you'd probably struggle to render 800x480 or 1024x768 frames on an MCU. At 1024x768 especially, the pixel rate (47 MP/s at 60Hz) and framebuffer size (2.3MB at 24bpp) are just too big even for large MCUs. APs are the right tool for the job. It's true that for hobbyists, documentation is lacking and DSI is complex to get started with. The best solution would probably extend DSI with something like EDID. DSI displays can then be plug-and-play (like HDMI / DP) using an universal driver. Another option is eDP, but it's not so common on cheap APs or screens.
- quanto 6y agowhere would I get the display for 2 USD?
- fortran77 6y agoYou may think this is "tiny", but I got a lot done on my Apple ][ back in 1978 with a 280x192 pixel display.
- wang_li 6y agoYou’re 280x192 pixel display was probably 13” or even larger. This display is 1”x1”. You can get about six lines of 12-15 characters on it if you want to be able to read it from further than 6” away.
- sircastor 6y agoThis seems really great for times when I want to boot up a PI but don’t want to bother with finding a display and PSU for that display, and I don’t want to unplug my computers display. A quick display for simple things.
- th0ma5 6y agoLike /r/cyberdeck
- condomhacker 6y agoI want to make a smart glass like device with a tiny display or a projector, Raspberry Pi Zero as the main board and powered by a battery pack. Does any one have any input regarding optics? Just thinking about the possibility of having a linux machine always on you seems really exciing.
- oso2k 6y agohttps://youtu.be/50614QMNQPo https://youtu.be/50614QMNQPo Maybe this would be a place to start.
- andrey_utkin 6y agohttps://github.com/andrey-utkin/wearable-computer/wiki https://github.com/andrey-utkin/wearable-computer/wiki
- barnabee 6y agoSeconded! The Vufine+ [1] is about the best option I’ve found so far. It works and is a standard HDMI display but it’s really small in your vision (so need v large font sizes), has quite a lot kind of obstructive stuff from the casing etc. in your field of view, and feels bulkier than it needs to be. I’d be happy with much lower resolution like these displays specially if it appeared larger and clearer. I actually bought a transparent OLED thing [2] recently with the intent of trying to hack it into something wearable but no progress on that yet and not sure if it’ll actually even be readable. [1] https://store.vufine.com/ https://store.vufine.com/ [2] https://a.aliexpress.com/_BSV8F6 https://a.aliexpress.com/_BSV8F6
- godot 6y agoA bit off-topic but related to the intro in this readme.. > Why? > I'm super bored in lockdown. Add a Raspberry Pi 400 and a few tiny displays... I feel like there are two distinct kinds of lockdown experience. One, you have kids, and you have absolutely no free time because now your kids are home and you're working from home. Two, you don't have kids, and you're super bored every day. Seems like not much in between.
- denimnerd42 6y agothey don't go to bed? I work in my garage workshop from bedtime to midnight or one a few times a week. I've turned out way more finished projects than I ever did before the pandemic.
- d0ugal 6y agoI have a 3yo and a 10 month old. Way too tired for that. Maybe if they were a bit older?
- chrisacky 6y ago4, 3 and a 1 y/o for me. Can agree, that it's been hard to maintain the same focus and energy recently.
- Roritharr 6y agoWe feel like the worst parents in the world because our kids apparently don't need as much sleep as other kids. We've tried extensive bedtime rituals, tried tiring them out by going to the forest and making em run etc, but we really can't get our 1,5 year old to need more sleep than we do. Our 4 year old tends to sleep an hour longer in the morning, but the little one is really killing us from a freetime standpoint with his 7 hours a day of sleep he needs (5-6 at night, 30m-1h a day). Naturally this is driving my wife and me insane. Daycares were open, but we've decided to take our older one out to reduce his contacts and give the daycare some breathing room as they are also at their limits because they've had staff quitting because they didn't want to risk getting infected for this little money (understandable imo). The whole situation for parents is absolutely disastrous, my wife should have been looking for a new job already, but it was simply not realistic for her to start working a new job with me retaining mine and the kids at home. As a young family in a high cost-of-living metro-area we had to decide to move as we can't afford to live here while giving our kids the space at home they need without support that allows us to work effectively.
- Just1689 6y agoYou should add an affiliate link for the screen
- peterburkimsher 6y agoNice! I was thinking about coupling it with a thermal printer. Line editors like ed make much more sense when used with a printing teletype, which is what the RPi 400 would be with a little printer attached.
- lazyjones 6y agoSemi-OT: I wish someone would make flexible building blocks for fastening/connecting such parts, i.e. something like Lego or Fischertechnik but better suited for electronics. Many people use 3D printers, but they seem wasteful for printing temporary cases for such projects. Wood is a possibility, but not so quick to work on. There has to be something better than duck tape and rubber bands...
- rualca 6y ago> i.e. something like Lego or Fischertechnik but better suited for electronics. There are already lego raspberry pi boxes. They are sold for less than $5.
- lazyjones 6y agoThey're not very flexible though, I can't just take any accessories like the display in the article and attach it properly with a few extra blocks.
- rualca 6y ago> They're not very flexible though, I can't just take any accessories like the display in the article and attach it properly with a few extra blocks. Well, you can. You just need to attach the accessory to a lego piece that suits your fancy, and you're done. https://www.lego.com/en-us/page/static/pick-a-brick https://www.lego.com/en-us/page/static/pick-a-brick
- utopcell 6y agoThese 240x240 IPS displays are awesome and dirt-cheap. The best "application" I've seen for them is a tiny retro game console [1]. [1] https://www.funkey-project.com/ https://www.funkey-project.com/
- welly 6y agoLove the concept of that but you'd have to have children's hands to play it. I can only see frustration and the thing being thrown across the room if I had one.
- vyrotek 6y agoCould you make an alternative to SteamDeck? A 4x4 arrangement with some clear plastic buttons on top of each individual screen would be pretty useful. Especially if it was a preview of a specific video source.
- Namari 6y agoWhat is it? A screen for ants? -- Derek Zoolander
- sgroppino 6y agoLOL - wait until you see the keyboard I'm working on...
- dirtybirdnj 6y agoDamnit you got here 4 hours before I did! Well played. Maybe it's just a computer for really, really, ridiculously good looking people.
- Simplicitas 6y agoKudos for the WHY in the README! Love it when a hacking adventure gives us a raison d'etre, and a well-deserved one too.
- mireq2 6y agoReally cool display even if it has problems with tearing. I played around with that display a bit - https://youtu.be/8S1BXnx-vLE https://youtu.be/8S1BXnx-vLE (STM32, 60+ fps), https://youtu.be/Wql4WTpPrWs https://youtu.be/Wql4WTpPrWs (ESP32, ~40 fps)
- sgroppino 6y agoAdded more info on displays and code for 80x160.
- ellis0n 6y agoGood work! My first 240x240 display was a Palm Treo 750 and 320x240 apps were unusable because 80 pixels were out of sight, haha Add your contacts, social links and donation button
- PostThisTooFast 6y agoI like this Pi, but the fact that they didn't put full-sized HDMI ports on it pisses me off to an unreasonable degree.