The Cheap Yellow Display is an all-in-one ESP32 board with a touchscreen, that’s as the name suggests, cheap. It’s appeared in a great many projects since it emerged from the depths of AliExpress, and today thanks to [Nickm324] it takes the turn of becoming a mini TV.

The tiny TV project world is one of successive developers building on previous works to deliver their own refinements on the idea, so this one borrows heavily from an earlier ESP32 project. Its twist on the idea is a single button interface using the CYD’s BOOT button. It supports a range of “channels” of which each one is a different piece of media played from the SD card. As far as we can see it’s only able to play synchronised .mjpeg and audio files, probably a shortcoming of the older ESP32 found on the CYD. The photo features a rather cutesy retro 3D printed TV case which annoyingly isn’t linked from the repository at the time of writing.

It’s a nice idea, and the CYD makes it as easy as possible with minimal wiring. Yes it’s a novelty, but we’re guessing there could be many non-novelty applications for it too. It’s certainly not the first such project we’ve seen, here’s an earlier one.