Using miniature OLED screens, one team wants to let us make our own tiny, mobile gadgets.
The wearable gadgets on the market today are incredulously expensive. A pair of Google Glass will set you back by $1000 despite Google’s pair of hi-tech spectacles still being in beta. The Apple Watch is yet to be released and has yet to really prove itself bar a nifty dial on the side that lets us zoom in and out of the display but the cheapest version is expected to retail for hundreds of dollars when it’s made available next year.
So what if you were able to recreate the brilliant features of these wearables but much cheaper? And you could even customise them yourself? Well that’s what one Akron, Ohio based team is aiming to bring us, having launched a Kickstarter project for TinyScreen.
A colour OLED display, each TinyScreen can be fixed and customised at your will. Whether you want to make a giant wall of miniature blinking displays, or attach them to an existing device (or even make your very own wearable out of them) TinyScreens lets us do that whether we have programming knowledge or not.
Working with their TinyDuino platform (a smaller version of Arduino – a microcontroller that helps make things more interactive) users can customise the TinyScreens to display whatever information you’d like. Some suggestions include attaching them to a pair of normal glasses so that you can check information on the fly, to a smartwatch that communicates with your smartphone and notifies you of incoming messages and phone calls.
TinyScreens support joysticks too via Joystick Tinyshield or you can use the buttons on the side of the screen to play games. So far a Flappy Bird clone has been made for it while the team behind it explains that that are “many more games to come” through their own efforts and through their open source software library.
And, as if that weren’t enough, each TinyScreen has video support too. The team says any video of any length can be played on them when a microSD card is inserted (keep in mind TinyScreens do use batteries though so it’s probably best not to watch a 3 hour epic on them) though you’ll have to convert the videos into the proper file type. They’ve got computer software available that lets you do that though, so that’s definitely a feature to keep an eye on.
As it stands, the TinyScreen Kickstarter campaign is at $79,000 which is way above their $15,000 goal. It’s definitely happening then, but check the source link below if you want to back the project.
Source: TinyScreen Kickstarter
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