“The project” - your creative drive to “do a project with this device” is completely fulfilled by purchasing.

It’s a strange thing but there’s a direct line from creative desire to buying then not doing.

This is why I have so much electronics junk it’s all projects that I “completed” when I hit the buy button on Aliexpress.

This is just an ESP32 with a display

Ha, I also have an RPi, Pinephone box. Sad that these Linux phones were basically a hope-scam.

>>Between A5 and A4 in size

Very expensive.

For $59 you can get M5PaperS3 ESP32S3 Development Kit (960x540, 4.7" eInk Display, 235 ppi)

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5papers3-esp32s3-developm...

Or you can get:

https://lilygo.cc/products/t5-e-paper-s3-pro

But these have 4.7 inch display.

You can probably hack and repurpose old e-readers if you can be bothered with the technical pain.

Color is the hardest thing on your list. I think something that meets most other requirements is the Inkplate 10, which I’ve been using as an apartment status display for a few years now. It’s ESP32 based and I have it grabbing an image from Home Assistant every minute, which it works great for. Black and white only though.

Seeed Studio is pumping out somewhat smaller sized e-ink with relatively open hardware for Trminal use

https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/09/06/reterminal-e1001-e10...

People have had this dream for probably close to 20 years (since Kindle v1).

And yet it still seems out of reach beyond going with a full hdmi eink display.

The closest I have found is the M5Stack 4.7” eink display with built in esp32 and lipo battery.

So a few years ago I hacked up this sort of thing.

I bought a generic epaper display from aliexpress, a 5.8 inch 648x480 one that could do white/black/red with an SPI interface, then I wired that to an RP2040 board, then wrote a bit of circuitpython firmware for that which could receive commands over USB and draw stuff on the display.

I got as far as being able to send images to it, and writing a little host program on my PC that would do a partial screen update on a clock display and CPU/GPU temperatures once a minute, and draw a Mandelbrot set in the remaining space, with a full screen refresh every 15 minutes because it needed it, and a several minute “exercise” routine that would take every pixel from white to black to red and back to white at midnight, to improve screen appearance longer term.

And then I got bored/annoyed with it as the refresh was so slow (~30s for a red update) and the rp2040 needed me to manually press its reset button after every windows boot or the usb device wasn’t recognised. I thought about rewriting the firmware in C in case it was circuitpython that was flakey … but lost the impetus.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009976304564.html

> For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.

Like this?

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/new-ddr5-modu...

Remember when the future was each AA battery having its own thumb destroying built-in tester?

Imagine AA batteries with little LCD screens.

you'll probably enjoy this tiny screen embedded in a LEGO brick

https://youtu.be/6wBrOV2FJM8

I wonder if the previous generation felt that way about the little unlit LCDs that used to be in everything (although, I bet they were more than $2 adjusted for inflation).

Yeah, I hope they put displays on more things. The trends are weird though, since some things that used to have displays no longer have them; you have to use the app on your phone instead...

>For some reason, nothing says "future" to me more than having tiny screens embedded where they're not absolutely needed.

Yo, dawg:

https://epomaker.com/products/epomaker-rt82

Reminds me of the short-lived Windows SideShow display on a few laptops (~2003):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow

Unfortunately these are still a bit too expensive to e.g. have one on every key of a standard 101-key keyboard.

I wish my laserprinter had a screen like this.

Its menu is impossible to navigate.

Same for my office phone.

And not far from that are sentient toasters and doorbells.

I feel that the future may mean non-intrusive E-Ink displays where they are useful.

My first "job" between school and university was to assemble a bunch of keyboards for banking terminals. They used configurable key caps in that a printed sheet was snapped under a transparent keycap cover. I suppose I must have been working on a short production run for a small bank or a trial project, that didn't merit screen printing the keys.

As I worked through countless of those keyboards I mused that what it needed was a little screen on each keycap, so I could just do my job using software.

This was in 1982. Seems like we're nearly there.

I would think driving the screen is a big part of the cost and complexity, so having a cheap SoC that can do it probably just as important.

My first job I had a Sun terminal with a Black and White monitor because it was much cheaper than the color one. Kids these days wouldn't understand.

Keylogging? Just how do you think it can read any keystrokes?

As for inserting keystrokes, that will be obvious if it enumerates as a keyboard.

You should turn down your paranoia a little more.

Crypto hardware wallets have had little screens on them for ages now, for this same reason. Rather than trusting the app to tell you the truth about the tx it's presenting your key to sign, your key shows you the tx hash / amount to be transferred / etc, and asks you to make sure the details match before approving.

yubikeys already know who they are authenticating to. the relying party is verified as part of the FIDO2/CTAP2 protocol

AliExpress has a beautiful 7" screen for peanuts. It has a surprisingly clear display and has so many uses:

https://youtu.be/LC3INaZVqFA?si=2BV5N3_7TtWPRlUj

It even has USB power and speakers.

Try "camera field monitor." Example: https://www.amazon.com/FEELWORLD-Monitor-1280x720-Peaking-In...

I used one of these to make a teleprompter-style videoconference setup at home during the pandemic, so I could make eye contact with other meeting participants.

I scavenged an LCD screen from an old laptop and put it in a cheap case from AliExpress. It has a small driver board and a steel case. I use it as a small/portable TV. But it has USB-C for input and power, and HDMI input. It’s just about the size of an iPad and very nice.

I think that would work very well in a headless/data center scenario.

Peakdo have a miniHDMI 7"

https://www.peakdo.com/PeakDo-Ultra-thin-light-7-inch-Multip...

I have a portable monitor I used to use as a second screen while travelling.

I actually used it again recently while setting up a new home server, got me as far as SSH access.

It wasn't super cheap, but not that expensive either.

At a hacker conference in the early 2000s, I saw a maybe 5" cash register CRT screen on a tower server case. That was cool.

It inspired me much later to buy a 7" LCD for the same purpose. You can find them as Raspberry Pi accessories. Some of them have HDMI input, most use USB for power, and they are cheap - about 50€. The downside is that they tend to be almost bare circuit boards with a bit of plexiglass framing + stand.

There are also "DVD watching screens" for car headrests, which are more sturdy with a thick case. The downside there is that power supply (12, 1A or so) is more of a hassle, and good luck finding one without overscan. It's not in the specs if they have it or if it can be disabled.

Another option are HDMI/USB capture dongles and VLC. They’re cheap and take up no space when not in use.

How small are we talking? There are tons of cheap portable monitors built around laptop panels.

That's more or less what you get when enabling MFA with Authenticator on your iPhone.

Banking used to have dedicated dongles with displays before but now also changed to apps. Yubikeys don't seem to be as popular as they deserve. People simply want to carry less things around that can be lost and it's hard to beat the security/convenience ratio of Face ID.

This display is definitely programmable to show any output you'd want. A similar display is the Turing Smart Screen (linked in the article) which is a small image-over-usb display.

((I really wanted the latter display to work on my Mac, but there's unfortunately some OS-level USB buffering (I think) that ends up creating a corrupted image - https://github.com/mathoudebine/turing-smart-screen-python/i... ))

>>> I don’t really see the need for this

Yes that's the essence of most hobby computing.

You can? As linked in the article, it's open source and supports custom themes/UIs

https://github.com/WeActStudio/WeActStudio.SystemMonitor

Like ESL price tags?

https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/electronic-shelf-label.html

That's the point

Touch Bar. Given that it was removed in 2021 I'd say - No. However, the issue for me with it was that it replaced a functional key that I want to be tactile. While it's nice to slide a finger to control brightness and volume... I still want actual Esc and co to be physical keys.

Sure, but I would never put the linked device on my laptop. I would put it on a headless server.

It wasn't worth the extra cost to Apple to support it since the vast majority of consumers didn't care about it one way or the other.

Absolutely despised that nonsense.

Useless and no physical ESC for vim.

It also wasn’t optional, if you wanted a higher spec’d MacBook it was coming with a touchbar.

The keyboards of that era also had problems.

If it is oled it will be a perfectly black background.

All LCD vendors do that.

And exactly how would it be able to achieve that?

AliExpress links are often geo-restricted and only work from some country/countries.

works for me