Use an ESP32 as an Itty Bitty Second Monitor for Your PC

You would have to be a little bit crazy to try to get real work done on a PC with a single monitor. A second monitor is just so useful. But what if you have one of those tiny IKEA desks that doesn’t have enough space for two monitors? In that case, you can follow Tucker Shannon's guide to set up an ESP32 as an itty bitty second monitor.

Jokes aside, this project may not have a whole lot of utility for most people, but it is really cool. It lets you mirror a computer’s display to the tiny 1.14” LCD screen on a TENSTAR T-Display ESP32-D0WD development board.

Surprisingly, the performance isn’t too bad. It has latency under 100ms on a decent network and can stream at 5-60FPS, depending on screen content and network bandwidth. The framerate is so variable because Shannon's code only sends pixel changes, so the amount of data transmitted can change pretty dramatically.

The only hardware you need is that TENSTAR T-Display ESP32-D0WD, which should cost around $10 from your favorite online retailer. The computer host app was programmed in Python, while the ESP32 was programmed with the Arduino IDE. All of that code is available on Shannon’s GitHub page.

If you do decide to use one of these, we’d love to know what you’re doing with it.