SmallTV Hacking With Surprisingly Little Fuss

What happened

SmallTV Hacking With Surprisingly Little Fuss, according to Hackaday. Powered by either an ESP8266 or an ESP32, the things could easily pass for a hobby build if it wasn’t for their professionally produced enclosures. But this latest approach is unique in that you don’t need to mess with the stock software, nor do you need to break out the soldering iron.

The trick here is that the image is being generated by a machine on the network, say your desktop or server, and being pushed over to the SmallTV over HTTP. In this example the image is being generated in Python with the Pillow library, and [Yongha] has it showing Claude and Codex usage data, but you could really approach this however you wish.

All you need to do is create a 240×240 image and shoot it over to the device, so you’re free to come up with whatever sort of visuals you’d like. It even provides support for GIF if you’d like to work animation into it.