There’s a wealth of options to add small displays to microcontroller projects but it can be a little bewildering to know where to start; additionally, it can also be a little bit of a lottery in terms of getting a quality image and frame rate. The vPlayer is an innovative little ESP32-based touchscreen display that aims to make this easier.
The bespoke PCB design hosts an ESP32 and a smartwatch display as well as a collection of connectors and an SD card. In fact, the fully assembled and tested device comes with an SD card and an example test video file on board. Over on the documentation pages, there is a link to a custom Windows or Mac video converter application which allows you to convert video files to the correct format, which you can then copy to the vPlayer SD card and it will loop through all the files on the card. If you’re a Linux user then fear not! There is an example command also on the documentation page allowing you to use ffmpeg to convert files using the terminal.
Video playing aside, there are heaps of examples for the vPlayer listed on the product page and shown in the product video. Among the examples are direct ESP-CAM feed monitoring, a local weather station display, traffic webcam feeds, an external computer telemetry display and more.
Power comes via USB-C which also can transport data. As with all ESP32s, there is onboard WiFi and Bluetooth. The smartwatch display is small but crisp and there is onboard backlight control as well as a touch interface. Digging into the specs there are UART, I2C and I2S broken out to JST SH/SR connectors as well as further IO pads available on the PCB.
With a commitment to continued updates and examples being developed, this is a really interesting project which we hope to see incorporated into lots of projects!
