One of the more interesting display technologies of the moment comes from Sharp, their memory display devices share the low power advantages of an e-ink display with the much faster updates we would expect from an LCD or similar. We’ve not seen much of them in our community due to cost, so it’s good to see one used in an MQTT dashboard project from [Raphael Baron].
The hardware puts the display at the top of a relatively minimalist 3D printed encloseure with the LOLIN32 ESP32 development board behind it, and with a plinth containing a small rotary encoder and three clicky key switches in front. The most interesting part of the project is surprisingly not the display though, because despite being based upon an ESP32 development board he’s written its software with the aim of being as platform- and display-independent as possible. To demonstrate this he’s produced it as a desktop application as well as the standalone hardware. A simple graphical user interface allows the selection of a range of available sources to monitor, with the graphical results on the right.
All code and other assets for the project can be found in a handy GitHub repository, and to put the thing through its paces he’s even provided a video that we’ve placed below the break. User interfaces for MQTT-connected devices can talk as well as listen, for example this MQTT remote control.
HaD should have showed the picture with the hand it it – ie it’s tiny, the display is only 2.7inch.. Though I suppose the size of the esp32 module should have been enough… For a moment there I thought sharp had cheapish bigger display..
We know how big a bread board is lol
true!
Is it bigger than a breadboard?
2.7″ isn’t that small.
It’s not an epaper.
Cherry keycaps for scale?
I wish we could get Sharp to do a few runs of the great color memory displays they did for Pebble Time, though they had to run it with an fpga, so it’s probably a bit too complicated for hacking around with. But I haven’t seen any of those anywhere.