A UI-Focused Display Library For The ESP32

January 9, 2026 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

If you’re building a project on your ESP32, you might want to give it a fancy graphical interface. If so, you might find a display library from [dejwk] to be particularly useful.

Named roo_display for unclear reasons, the library is Arduino-compatible, and suits a wide range of ESP32 boards out in the wild. It’s intended for use with common SPI-attached display controllers, like the ILI9341, SSD1327, ST7789, and more. It’s performance-oriented, without skimping on feature set. It’s got all kinds of fonts in different weights and sizes, and a tool for importing more. It can do all kinds of shapes if you want to manually draw your UI elements, or you can simply have it display JPEGs, PNGs, or raw image data from PROGMEM if you so desire. If you’re hoping to create a touch interface, it can handle that too. There’s even a companion library for doing more complex work under the name roo_windows.

If you’re looking to create a simple and responsive interface, this might be the library for you. Of course, there are others out there too, like the Adafruit GFX library which we’ve featured before. You could even go full VGA if you wanted, and end up with something that looks straight out of Windows 3.1. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own graphics code for the popular microcontroller platform, you should probably let us know on the tipsline!

Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip!

Hackaday Podcast Episode 352: Visualizing Sound, And Windows 11 Is A Dog

January 9, 2026 by Kristina Panos No comments

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

On What’s That Sound, Kristina had no idea what was going on, but [Flippin’ Heck] knew it was a flip dot display, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, with not one but two ways of seeing sound. We also take a look at benchmarking various Windows releases against each other on 12-year-old hardware.

We also talk about painting on floppies and glitching out jpegs in a binary text editor. Finally, we discuss the history and safety of autopilot, and take a look at the humble time clock.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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The Full-Sized 32-Wheeled, Articulated Bus Built For A 1976 Movie

January 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 70 Comments

Regardless of what your opinion is on cult-classic movies that got mixed-to-negative box office reviews when they were released, you have to admire the ones that went all out on practical effects and full-size constructions rather than CGI and scale models. Case in point the 1976 satirical comedy film The Big Bus that featured an absolutely massive articulated double-decker bus. With 32 wheels and multiple levels you’d think that a scale model would be used since most interior shots were done in the studio, but instead they built a real bus.

In this video by [Timeworn lengends] the genesis and details of the vehicle are covered. At the core of this road-worthy bus are two cabover International trucks, which were temporarily attached with a quick-release mechanism and required a second driver for the rear section who followed radio instructions for steering. In 1976 dollars, the entire bus prop cost between $250,000 and $500,000 USD to construct — making it one of the most expensive props ever made, especially considering the relatively low budget.

A fiberglass shell gave the bus its characteristic design, with the over the top ‘nuclear reactor’ propulsion befitting the comedy satire. Although the bowling alley and swimming pool were not really inside the bus, there was a functional bar installed along with the functional cockpit at the front.

Despite the movie flopping at the box office and critics being very mixed on its merits, it’s hard to deny that this bus prop is very unique and probably has a big part in why the movie has become a cult classic. As for the closest real-life equivalent, there is the articulated, double-decker Neoplan Jumbocruiser, which had its own troubled history.

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Drive 1024×600 Pixels Via I2C With An ATtiny85

January 8, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

If you need to drive a big screen for a project, it’s fair to say your first thought isn’t going to be to use the ATtiny85. With just 512 bytes of RAM and 8 kilobytes of flash memory, the 8-bit micro seems a little cramped to drive, say, a 10″ screen. Yet that’s exactly what [ToSStudio] is doing with TinyTFT_LT7683: 1024 x 600 pixels of TFT goodness, over I2C no less.

With the right TFT controller, this little micro-controller can do magic.

The name kind of gives away the secret: it won’t work on just any TFT display. It’s using properties of the LT7683 display driver, though if you don’t have one of those, the RA8875 is also compatible. Those drivers can take more than just a pixel stream– a good thing, since you’d be hard pressed to get that many pixels streaming from an ATtiny. These are character/graphic display drivers, which means you can get them to draw both characters and graphics on the screen if you speak the lingo.

It’s still not blazing fast; the documentation suggests “static or moderately dynamic UIs” as the suggested use case, and a clock is of the pre-programmed examples. From that, we can surmise that you can get 1 FPS or better with this code. You’re limited both by the simple micro-controller and the bandwidth of the I2C bus, but within those limits this seems like a very powerful technique.

This isn’t the first ATtiny graphics library to blow our minds, but if you really want an impressive graphics demo from the little micro that could, you really need to race the beam.

Thanks to [Thomas Scherer] for the tip!

A photo of the various parts for this MSLA 3D printer

Build A 2K Resolution MSLA 3D Resin Printer For Cheap

January 7, 2026 by John Elliot V 13 Comments

Have an old Android device collecting dust somewhere that you’d like to put to better use? [Electronoobs] shows us how to make a Masked Stereolithography Apparatus (MSLA) printer for cheap using screens salvaged from old Android phones or tablets.

[Electronoobs] wanted to revisit his earlier printer with all the benefits of hindsight, and this is the result. The tricky bit, which is covered in depth in the video below the break, is slicing up the model into graphics for each layer, so that these layers can be rendered by the LCD for each layer during the print.

The next tricky bit, once your layer graphics are in hand, is getting them to the device. This build does that by installing a custom Android app which connects to a web app hosted on the ESP32 microcontroller controlling the print, and the app has a backchannel via a USB OTG adapter installed in the device. [Electronoobs] notes that there are different and potentially better ways by which this full-duplex communication can be achieved, but he is happy to have something that works.

If you’re interested in resin printer tech, be sure to check out Continuous Printing On LCD Resin Printer: No More Wasted Time On Peeling? Is It Possible? and Resin Printer Temperature Mods And Continuous IPA Filtration.

An RP2040 Powered ADS-B Receiver

January 7, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 34 Comments

If you’ve ever heard the sound of an aircraft passing overhead and looked at an online plane tracker to try and figure out what it was, then you’ve interacted with ADS-B. It’s a protocol designed to enable easier aircraft monitoring, and it just so happens you can decode it yourself with the right hardware and software — which is how [John McNelly] came to develop ADSBee, an open source ADS-B receiver based around an RP2040.

ADS-B uses on–off keying (OOK) at 1 Mbps, and operates at 1090 MHz. This might seem like a rather difficult protocol to decode on a microcontroller, but the RP2040’s PIO is up to the task. All it takes is a bit of optimization, and a some basic RF components to amplify and digitize the signals.

However, not all aircraft utilize the 1090 MHz ADS-B implementation, and instead use a related protocol called UAT. Operating at 978 MHz, a second receiver is needed for decoding UAT traffic data, which is where the CC1312 comes into play. ADSBee may even be the first open source implementation of a UAT decoder!

What’s quite impressive is the various form factors the module is available in. Ranging from small solder-down modules to weatherproof outdoor base stations, nearly every potential need for an ADS-B receiver is covered. With POE or ESP32 S3 options available, there is no shortage of networking options either!

ADSBees have been placed in numerous locations, ranging from base stations to drones. One user even built out a tiny flight display cluster complete with traffic indicators into an FPV drone.

This isn’t the first time we have seen ADS-B receivers used by drone enthusiasts, but this is certainly the most feature rich and complete receiver we have come across.

Powering On A 1985 Photophone CP220 Videoconference System

January 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

The concept of remote video calls has been worked on since Bell’s phone company began pitching upgrading from telegrams to real-time voice calls. It wasn’t until the era of digital video and real-time video compression that commercial solutions became feasible, with the 1985 Image Data Corporation Photophone CP220 being an early example. The CP220 is also exceedingly rare due to costing around $25,000 USD when adjusted to inflation. This makes the teardown and repair on the [SpaceTime Junction] channel a rather unique experience.

Perhaps the coolest part of the device is that the manual is integrated into the firmware, allowing you to browse through it on the monochrome CRT. Unfortunately after working fine for a while the device released the magic smoke, courtesy of the usual Rifa capacitors doing their thing. This is why a full teardown was necessary, resulting in the PSU being dug out and having said capacitors swapped.

After this deal the device powered on again, happily accepting a video input and saving screenshots to the floppy drive before it was replaced with a FDD emulator running FlashFloppy firmware. Unfortunately no video call was attempted, probably because of the missing camera and having to set up a suitable POTS landline for the built-in modem. Hopefully we’ll see that in an upcoming video to see what we common folk were missing out on back in the day.

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