This PC Stats Monitor Moonlights as a Mario Clock
This PC stats monitor, powered by an ESP32-C3 Super Mini, changes into an animated retro game-themed clock when your computer is off.
Certain types of information are always helpful to have in front of your face while you navigate your digital workspace. Metrics like CPU utilization and temperature, disk usage, and available RAM, for instance, are very important to power users. But screen real estate is limited; no matter how much there is, there never seems to be enough. So these types of dashboards often get the boot when lots of applications are opened.
For this reason, some power users rely on small secondary displays that are dedicated to displaying important information. Redditor AdvertisingFormal746 has just created a display of this sort that not only serves up a steady stream of PC statistics, but that also doubles as a retro game-themed clock when the computer isn’t running.
To make this work, a Python script running on the host computer grabs a new set of PC stats via WMI every second. This data is then wirelessly sent to an ESP32-C3 Super Mini development board via UDP. This board displays the information on either a 0.96- or 1.3-inch OLED display. The hardware is contained in a 3D-printed shell to keep things looking nice.
That’s the useful part of the build, but the fun begins when the computer is turned off. If no statistics are received for a set period of time, the monitor switches into clock mode. Display updates are accompanied by Mario, Space Invaders, or Pong animations that change the digits.
To configure the system, AdvertisingFormal746 developed a website that runs on the ESP32 board. It allows the user to choose the clock animation they want, configure the date/time format, change the display labels, and more.
Full details and 3D design files have been posted to GitHub for anyone who wants to reproduce this work. Go grab everything if you have a spare ESP32-C3 Super Mini and OLED display sitting around.