SmallTV Hacking With Surprisingly Little Fuss

We’ve seen the GeekMagic SmallTV line of devices before — these cheap gadgets combine a microcontroller and a display in a little plastic case that can be used to show …. SmallTV Hacking With Surprisingly Little Fuss. 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.

In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if GeekMagic lifted the idea from an existing DIY project. As you might expect we’ve seen several hacks for these devices already, which usually involves replacing the stock firmware. 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.

By leveraging a built-in photo viewer function of the SmallTV [Yongha Kim] shows how you can get the gadget to display pretty much whatever you want. 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.