The GeekMagic SmallTV is as its name suggests, a tiny, vaguely TV-styled, device with a screen, that’s sold as a desktop notifier. Depending on the firmware running on the device it can display various pieces of information, ranging from the time and weather to the current price of Bitcoin. What makes it interesting is that it supports software updates over WiFi, so [Giovi321] has made a new firmware package for it.
It seems there are several versions of this device, something which appears to be reflected in the prices they sell for on AliExpress. The older version runs on the ESP8266, and there’s also a ESP32-C2 variant in the wild. The firmware supports both flavors, providing stock and crypto tickers, an ADS-B tracker, and a Claude AI token usage gauge.
What gives this potential is that the various functions are clearly split out in the code, and there’s nothing to stop you pointing it at a data source of your choosing. This makes it more than a bit of cheap e-waste novelty, and we hope that others will take up the baton and do interesting things with it.
The ESSP8266 is a chip we don’t see too much of these days, having been surpassed by its ESP32 siblings. Still, someone recently gave it a simple OS.
If only Chumby had lived long enough to become one of these …
sigh it seems to lack the beeper and button that would be needed for me to use it as an alarmclock
Good call … I am now considering obtaining one just to play with the innards and see if I can transplant it into a 1980s clock radio I happen to own.
Oh wow chumby. The most over engineered flash player around. The leather cover and the bag alone were extreme.
There’s a really good thread on the Home Assistant forums for installing ESPHome on it https://community.home-assistant.io/t/installing-esphome-on-geekmagic-smart-weather-clock-smalltv-pro/618029
I feel about the ESP8266 the way many feel about the Commodore 64: it is an amazingly flexible platform whose full potential has not nearly been exhausted.
Unfortunately it was not mature enough when released. The firmware was as unstable as its wireless connection, documentation chaotic, no reasonable SDK and until ESP-IDF came, it was hard to deal with. There is no reason to use it today beyond some legacy products.
nostalgia for 2014, back when wearing a tan suit was a major American scandal? also, it uses a little less power when not using any form of sleep than an ESP32
I see the ESP8266 as a pivotal device, because it gave us very cheap wifi connectivity in a microcontroller for the first time. Now it’s normal, then it was a very expensive second chip. Then suddenly it was a dollar.
I used a very similar piece of ESP32-S3 hardware to make a fun clock which plays videos in the background – https://chibidevices.com/
It’s BYOD, because I didn’t want to get involved in shipping things.
I had a knockoff SmallTV that was accidentally sent to me that ran some mining software on it instead of the SmallTV I ordered. I had unsuccessfully tried installing other firmware on it.
Opened up an issue on Github if maybe a port for my unit was in the books and four hours later it’s done. Incredible support.
Does AliExpress have a feature/function/button for ‘Just Send Me Any Random Object’? How else are you supposed to use the site (or, increasingly, Amazon or even Newegg, since everyone seems to be headed that same direction)?
Take any given device, and there will be 300 listings for it, under different ‘brand’ names (obviously from a random character generator), with different model names, with completely different specs, and with wildly different prices. There is NO WAY to find out any real facts about anything. The sellers have never laid eyes on the actual items. This marketplaceization of everything is something I just do not have the patience for.
This feels like an advertisement for the Geekmagic website, which I assume is a dropshipping business owned by the poster to sell those little tvs.
Sometimes people just like to hack on cheap gadgets. It doesn’t mean they manufacture them.
And in this case, the “droppshipping business” is Ali Express. I think we can rule that one out.
Dial back your cynicism. This is not the rest of the internet. This is Hackaday. We do this for fun.
I dunno. The better engineers that I have worked with were typically cynics. They were not bitter or haters or anything like that, they just never took anything at face value and assumed that there was always an agenda that was being made known.