What a time to be alive! The range of things you never knew you needed but absolutely must have expands at a breakneck pace, such that it’s now possible to pick up a belt buckle with an embedded LED matrix to scroll messages. We have no idea what the use case for something like this is, but some people will buy anything.
One such person was a friend of [Brian Moreau], who doubled down after being gifted the glowing bauble by turning it into a WiFi enabled Tweet-scrolling belt buckle. It appears to be a just for fun project, and to be honest one would need a heck of a belt for the buckle after his mods. He added an ESP8266 to take care of monitoring his Twitter account and driving the display on the belt buckle, a non-trivial task given that the thing is programmed with only two buttons that scroll through characters to compose a message. The microcontroller might have fit inside the original buckle or only added a little to its bulk, but [Brian] decided to replace the two coin cells powering it with an external 6-volt battery pack. That required a buck converter to power the ESP, so the whole thing ended up being thrown in a case and acting more like a neat display than a flashy fashion statement.
We’d bet some tradeoffs could be made to reduce the bulk and get that buckle back where it belongs, though. Once it does, maybe it’ll be part of a complete LED-laden ensemble, from head to toe.
I knew that the smart belt buckles are going to catch on sooner or later. Waiting for the display size inflation now.
The World Wrestling Federation could put a YUGE LCD display on their trophy buckles!
All well and good as long as your gut doesn’t obscure the view…
That’s why we need the display inflation as mentioned by @Alphatek above ;)
Me especially :)
A.K.A. Dunlop’s Disease: Where your gut done lopped over your belt.
What’s the retort stand typ thing that’s holding it? Looks useful.
A nest is about the size of a large belt buckle,
Temperature is not the only measurement that can be displayed.