Flea cinema: 1.14-inch secondary display for desktop PC

Martin Jud

23.12.2025

Translation: machine translated

A maker, i.e. a hobbyist focussing on hardware projects, has scaled down his desktop to a 1.14-inch display. The flea cinema works surprisingly well - as long as there isn't too much movement on the screen.

In his GitHub project, Tucker Shannon shows how he converted a small ESP32 developer board with an integrated 1.14-inch display (135 × 240 pixels) into a second monitor. Normally, the board displays sensor values or status messages. The fact that a complete desktop suddenly appears on it is therefore a small breach of the rules.

How the mini monitor works

In order for the display to show anything at all, the PC does the actual work. A Python script runs on the computer and continuously generates screenshots. Each frame is compared with the previous one and only the pixels that have changed are sent. The image data is processed using OpenCV and NumPy and transmitted to the board via Wi-Fi using a dedicated protocol.

The library «mss» is used for screen recording. The ESP32 receives the packets and draws them on the display using the TFT_eSPI graphics library. This creates a mini monitor that is not intended for such applications, but works surprisingly well.

How smoothly the flea cinema runs

The frame rate depends directly on how much is happening on the screen. If there is hardly any movement, the setup reaches up to around 60 frames per second (FPS). As soon as animations, videos or other fast content come into play, the amount of data increases and the frame rate drops to around five FPS. The latency is less than one hundred milliseconds with good Wi-Fi. The low FPS and rather high latency are unsuitable for gaming away from «Minesweeper». Nevertheless, everything can be displayed - including «Doom».

What the maker itself says about it

In the associated Reddit thread, Shannon responds to questions from the Community. He emphasises there and in the GitHub project that the developer board essentially acts as a receiver, while the PC takes care of screen capturing, frame comparison and compression. The achievable frame rate therefore depends on the WLAN and how many pixels change per frame. He sees the project primarily as a learning experiment in ESP32, Wi-Fi streaming and efficient image transmission. He also shows a short video on Reddit that demonstrates how smoothly the mini display runs with rather static content.

Shannon sees the mini display as a candidate for small monitoring or IoT dashboards, as an experimental surface for his own ideas or simply as proof of what is possible with a cheap ESP32 board (approx. 11 US dollars) and some code. Or as a technical curiosity.

Martin Jud

Senior Editor

martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.ch

I find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.

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