[curisama] has put together a project simply entitled The Badge. It’s simple enough, being a little round screen that you wear. Only, it does a wide variety of rather interesting things.
The build is based on the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75C. It’s not a very fun part number, but it describes a device which combines a 466×466 round display with a milled aluminium case and an ESP32-S3 to drive everything.
[curisama] started building a custom firmware for the device, intending to use it as an air mouse. Soon enough it had a touchpad, too, a bunch of extra keys, as well as a clock and some games. It was given the ability to record audio too, up to 52 minutes in WAV format. From there, it also gained a rather fetching liquid simulation, with water sloshing around the round display with a little boat riding around on it. This took some optimization, with [curisama] pushing the animation from 3 FPS all the way up to 18 fps, making it much more fluid and satisfying to watch. There were other optimizations too, with [curisama] figuring out how enabling the CONFIG_PM_ENABLE flag and some other tweaks could push standby battery life from 11.9 to 19.6 hours. Not a bad gain at all.
If you need a handy yet unassuming round object to act as a human interface device and some other stuff besides, consider buying the Waveshare part and flashing it yourself. You can do so right from your browser. We’ve featured plenty of other interesting projects with Waveshare parts in recent years, too. The integrated-display-and-microcontroller market is booming for makers right now, and it’s one we’ll continue to follow with interest. If you’re doing innovative stuff in this space, be sure to notify the tipsline!
FYI Scamazon has it listed WITHOUT the C, but if you go to the photos at the bottom, WaveShare has a static jpeg saying it’s the C. Scroll down under Description to Features and it’s in there. amazon dot com/Waveshare-ESP32-S3-Development-Resolution-Microphones/dp/B0GGXHXMRW
That is the battery free model, you probably want amazon dot com/gp/product/B0GGY19TF9
Oof, almost $60 after tax, and still a deal.
Also one in a square-ish case with watchband, with battery, https://www.amazon.com/waveshare-ESP32-S3-2-06inch-Watch-Microcontroller/dp/B0FJQZ7SBG/
The software work is nice! Those are some impressive performance improvements for a visual liquid simulation on something as small as an esp32 s3! The battery life is also impressive.
Waveshare products themselves are generally less in the “hack” segment and more of something sold at a definite premium for people who aren’t up to the DIY or hacking level when it comes to hardware. Granted in this case it’s all nicely packaged up, far cheaper than investing in a metal capable lathe lol. So tempting though to grab something more barebones and to mill a nice case for a wearable.
But too many other projects… and no lathe =X
I had the “other” uncased version of this display, and I completely failed at designing a “pocketwatch-like” case for it. My CAD skills absolutely suck, and as much as I really wanted to use it as a means to get better at modern CAD tools, that learning exercise instead ended up becoming an obstacle to getting the project “finished” (as much as you can ever call a personal project truly “finished”….).
So I bought this version with the nice aluminium case instead.
And only after I bought this version with the fancy case, and after much head-scratching, did I realise that it doesn’t have a dedicated RTC chip. Meaning that it’s somewhat useless at keeping accurate time without a regular network connection… Meaning that it’s somewhat useless for my purposes, because I need accurate time-keeping over long periods of time where it won’t have a network connection…!
Waveshare products are usually pretty good as an “all in one” “drop-in” solution, they manage to pack an awful lot in to a quite small package. But as with any solution you haven’t designed specifically for your needs, there are always trade-offs. And in my experience of half-dozen or so of their products, their supporting demos, examples, libraries, BSPs, etc, often leave an awful lot to be desired. I don’t even want to think about how much time I’ve spent poring over QMI8658 datasheets because of Waveshare’s half-baked and badly implemented libraries…