I just received a package from California from a fellow called Michael Yim. He got in touch some time ago. I think I’d seen his miniature CRT monitor MS-DOS prompt toy available online, and I wrote to him. He said, “Okay, I’ll send you one to play with.”
Here is his link – a good read. I’m not sponsoring anything incidentally.
I’ll cut a long story short: it cost him $23 (US Postage Paid) to send from San Jose, USA to Galera, Southern Spain, and the post-people somehow managed to send the package back to him, so yesterday his second attempt arrived. Interestingly the packages look identical (from his photo of the first one) so goodness knows how the post-people blew the first attempt.
But here is what arrived in the end – absolutely no purpose but great to have, the green USB-powered C: Prompt” monitor is going on top of my PC monitor. This absolutely reminded me of my late-1980’s act Sirius-1 (Victor 9000 in the USA). I love it.
Plug it into USB, prompt lights up complete with flashing underscore cursor – that’s it 🙂 The USB is out the back… Isn’t it great that someone has spent the time to make these.
I also received another one – identical but with a white c:\> prompt… In both cases the screens are even curved like the originals (way before flat screens).
Not a lot more I can say about these but to say that they’re a great gimmick.
There was a third light-up miniature PC that looks like several towers I’ve owned over the years before switching to Mini-PCs. No monitor display on this one – just the various LEDs typical of Tower PCs. Isn’t that fun…
That’s it for the tiny PCs, the only other thing that arrived in the box was a tiny paper-white display board the company sell – It needs hooking up to an ESP to do anything with it – but out of the box it is showing a HELLO world message (typical paper white, no power needed – not a dummy display, non-volatile – only needs power (and processor) to change the message.
Anyway – here it is. It’s just an SPI connection and these days getting the display running should be simple – at least for a “Goodbye world” 🙂
The display arrived as in the image left saying “Hello World”.
I told ChatGPT I want to use ESPHOME rather than Arduino and…
ESPHome DEV version is currently (19/10/2026) needed to make that little display work. And as if by magic… I loaded in the project you see here… I’ve doctored my SSID and password to protect the innocent. Why use a Seeed ESP32-C6 board? Only as I had one handy with pins attached – the display also came with pins attached. EASY. This is fun… see pins in code – it seems the board can run on 3v3 or 5v, I used 3v3. All pins below connected to the Seeed ESP32-C6. No other parts – just USB-C to the C6 for power.
esphome:
name: eink-c6
friendly_name: E-Ink C6
esp32:
board: seeed_xiao_esp32c6
framework:
type: esp-idf
logger:
api:
ota:
- platform: esphome
wifi:
ssid: "blah"
password: "xxxxxx"
ap:
ssid: "E-Ink-C6 Fallback"
password: "12345678"
spi:
clk_pin: GPIO19
mosi_pin: GPIO18
miso_pin: GPIO20
display:
- platform: epaper_spi
model: SSD1681
dimensions:
width: 152
height: 152
cs_pin: GPIO21
dc_pin: GPIO1
reset_pin: GPIO0
busy_pin:
number: GPIO2
enable_pin: GPIO16
rotation: 0
update_interval: 30s
lambda: |-
it.fill(Color::WHITE);
it.print(
76,
60,
id(font_large),
Color::BLACK,
TextAlign::CENTER,
"GOODBYE"
);
it.print(
76,
90,
id(font_large),
Color::BLACK,
TextAlign::CENTER,
"WORLD!"
);
font:
- file: "gfonts://Roboto"
id: font_large
size: 20