Low-Resolution Display Provides High-Nostalgia Animations

High-definition displays are the de facto standard today, and we’ve come to expect displays that show every pore, blemish, and bead of sweat on everything from phones to stadium-sized Jumbotrons. Despite this,  low-resolution displays continue to have a nostalgic charm all their own.

Take this 32 x 16 display, dubbed PixelTimes, for instance. [Dominic Buchstaller] has gone a step beyond his previous PixelTime, a minimalist weather clock and home hub built around the same P10 RGB matrix. The previous build was a little involved, though, with a nice wood frame that took some time and skill to create.

Building your own version of PixelTimes is really approachable. The case is mostly 3D-printed, and the acrylic parts [Dominic] laser cut could just as easily be cut with a saw. And that P10 board can be source for peanuts direct from Chine. The software for the project has been upgraded since the original version, supporting flicker-free animations. Everything runs on a NodeMCU, and there are even scripts to convert your favorite GIF to an animation. Oh, and it still displays the weather too.

This looks great and seems like a lot of fun, and [Dominic] kindly provides all the files you’ll need to build your own. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to build once you’ve got all the parts.

14 thoughts on “Low-Resolution Display Provides High-Nostalgia Animations

  1. I sometimes wonder whether anybody is even proof-reading the Hackaday posts before publishing them. The number of typos has really grown recently. At least they can fix the typos in the articles later, unlike in the comments. But I digress.

    Low-resolution displays are really great — they use much less power than the hi-res ones, can be made bigger and better visible from a distance, require much less memory and resources for programming, and look great.

        1. While that should have been proof-read out, I could, for example, understand a fluent-English-speaking-natively-French-speaker missing it because Chine is China in French.

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