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Tiny ESP32-Based Nintendo-Themed Xmas Ornament
Reporting from Shanghai, China
Dec 29, 2021
Hackers can build pretty much anything these days, such as tiny switch ornaments for your Xmas tree, playing GIFs with the help of an ESP32!
Apparently, we live in a golden age of hobby electronics where a number of projects can materialize from the comfort of one’s home with free tools and relatively cheap parts. Hence, maker “scottbez1” built a miniaturized Christmassy Nintendo Switch that plays animated GIFs from an SD card on a tiny 1.14” LCD display, with the power of ESP32 (pictured below).
As the Hackaday writer, Dave Rowntree, notes: “Obviously such a diminutive hack requires a custom PCB, which was a job for KiCAD. Armed with a 3D model of the LCD, the casing and PCB outline were drawn using Fusion 360. The PCB hosts an ESP32 module for all the heavy lifting, with the Wi-Fi adding some fun future capabilities not yet explored. The design is about as tight as it can get without pushing the limits of the PCB process too far, including a neat trick of sneaking passives inside the body of the SD card! That’s another space-saving idea we’ll be banking. All-in-all, a neat little hack showing some good modelling and construction techniques, and a good-looking end result.”
Readers can find the code for this project on scottbez1’s GitHub webpage, and they can also watch a YouTube video demonstrating the entire process of creating this project.