The Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) is an ESP32 development board that’s been making the rounds for a while now, thanks to its value and versatility. For around $10 USD, you get a nicely integrated package that’s perfect for a wide array of projects and applications. Toss a couple in on your next AliExpress order, and all you need to do is come up with an idea. [Craig Lindley] had two ideas, and maybe they will help get those gears turning in your head. Even if you don’t need a network-connected MP3 player or GPS information display, we bet browsing the source code would be useful.
There are plenty of opinions about listening to music, but this first project is particularly interesting for those who like to keep their collection locally. [Craig]’s code can read the MP3s stored on the SD card and present the user with a menu system for browsing them by artist or album.
Should you want to add more music to the collection, you can connect to the player over FTP and directly upload it to the SD card. But perhaps the real kicker is that the audio playback is done over Bluetooth, so you can rock out wirelessly. While we don’t necessarily have a problem with the sparse UI, it seems like with a little sprucing up (album art, graphical menus), this would be a fantastic framework for open-source personal audio players.
The second project is perhaps most interesting because it brings some new hardware to the table, namely a serially connected GPS module. In its current state, we’d probably classify this one as more of a tech demo. Still, it can already show the device’s current coordinates, altitude, and speed. In addition, it can pull the current time and date from the GPS stream, which could have some interesting applications for those working on custom clocks.
We’ve had our eye on the CYD community for a while now and love the creativity that we’ve been seeing. We thank [Craig] for sending these projects our way, and as a reminder, if you’ve got something you’d like to show off to a global audience of hackers and makers, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. If you’ve got a thing for MP3 players, we’ve seen a ton. As for GPS trackers, we like to put them on our pets.
I bought one of these, pretty much because how cheap it was. I’m currently using it to display the temperature inside and outside my house and the local weather forecast from the NWS.
The hardest thing about it is getting the right parameters for the display – get them from the store’s download site and not from some random github site.
I woudn’t call CYD versatile. The I/O mess alone makes this a neat board for displaying stuff and taking input with the touchscreen, but not a lot of I/O available. And whatever is left from the display and touchscreen is wasted on things like an RGB led at the back side.
But as said, neat and cheap for GUI and touch applications.
Two pins and you have an i2C bus to connect an I/O expander ;-)
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The article graphic keeps giving me this A.C. Clarke/HAL 9000 vibe: “ALL THES WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.”