Filed under: Embedded

While we were at SakuraCon this year I saw some animated gif badges and backpacks. Its a simple idea, you load animations on to them and they play while hooked onto your backpack. I asked about them and found out that they don't use a microsd card, instead you have to use an app to upload pictures to them and they only hold a handfull of images. Not having one of those I decided the best option was to make my own badge that loaded images from a microsd card.

I went looking for parts initially with the intention of building the whole thing myself. However, I quickly came across this Waveshare ESP32 AMOLED display. It has everything I wanted to build myself onboard and even more. Waveshare dev boards dont ship with batteries, but they did list the size of battery that would fit in the case so I picked some of those up as well.

On the software front I went looking for a library to decode GIFs on esp32 and stumbled across this project that does almost everything I wanted and targets the waveshare hardware. Great minds think alike I guess. There are some featues I want to add when I get time, but for now it covers the main points. It plays gifs from a microsd card, has playlist support, and can play one gif after the other.

With those two down there was one last hurdle. The gifs need to be unoptimized and rotated for use on the device (I'm using it in a wide orientation). The ESP32 doesn't have enough RAM to handle unoptimized gifs. I can run the commands easily enough to do that conversion, but my family is non-techinical. They needed a simpler interface to do that (I made one for my husband and son). So I whipped up this interface in a couple of hours that can take a video file or gif and apply the correct conversions so that it will play correctly on the badge. I called it GifMaker.

This was a fun little project that was helped along by the work of others. It was really neat to see other people working on the same thing I was. I'm overall really happy with the badge, it gets a little over two hours run time on a charge. I might add shuffle mode, and maybe wifi image upload. We'll see how my free time shakes out.