When building your own electronic devices, whether for a personal project or a product prototype, the size of your screen usually dictates how big the device ends up being. And when it comes to building wearables, small displays are key. That’s exactly what TinyScreen brings to your electronic toolset.
Designed for electronics makers and tinkerers, it’s a thumb-sized screen that measures a hair just under one inch diagonally. The small size makes it ideal for integrating into lightweight wearable gadgets, including smartwatches, smart glasses, and other screen-toting accessories.
TinyScreen is a full-color OLED display, sporting a 96 x 64 resolution and 16-bit color depth, with its brightness controllable directly from a software interface. While you can use TinyScreen itself with other electronic parts lying around at home, its creator, TinyCircuits, also sells miniature boards they call “Shields” that you can pair it with to build small devices with as little work as possible. There are currently 25 Shields available, each one packing different sets of electronics that include sensors, storage, communication interfaces, controllers, and even a TinyDuino processor.
The company has also built pre-made software modules that you can use to turn the Tinyscreen, paired with different Shields, into a smartwatch, smart glasses, a handheld gaming console, and a video viewer. They also have a custom open-source Arduino library, if you’re up to doing some coding to create your own applications.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for TinyScreen. Pledges to reserve a unit (the OLED display panel only) starts at $25.