{"$schema":"https://ejfox.com/schema/page-twin@1.json","kind":"project","url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/pixel-canvas","json_url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/pixel-canvas.json","generator":"ejfox.com/json-twin@1","data":{"cacheVersion":"2026-05-13-gear-cards","html":"

I spend all day looking at screens that want something from me. Pixel Canvas is a screen that doesn't — a networked 320×240 display that sits on my desk and quietly shows me my own life in the Vulpes palette.

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It's an ESP32-S3-BOX-3B running a little Arduino REST API, driven by a bash CLI that rotates through \"scenes\" every fifteen minutes. Each scene is a tiny self-contained script that fetches from some corner of my data and draws it with primitives over HTTP — the weather, the last film I watched with my rating, the book I'm in the middle of, my best typing speed, a random card from the gear closet, a line from my journal.

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A day of the display's rotation, compressed — all fourteen scenes as the device cycles them
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\n\"Today's\n
Today's weather as a desk-display scene
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\n\"The\n
The last film I watched, with my rating
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The whole thing is the opposite of a notification feed. Nothing on it is urgent, nothing is trying to pull me back in. It's ambient — you glance at it the way you glance out a window, and mostly you just let it cycle in the corner of your eye while you work.

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That's the part I actually care about. I've been tracking myself for years across a dozen systems, and the usual pitch for all that data is optimization: quantify yourself, find the inefficiency, grind it down. I've never been interested in that. I wanted to turn the panopticon inward and just look — not \"how do I do more,\" but \"what does a day of mine actually look like when it's reflected back and I'm not the one narrating it\"

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\n\"A\n
A random gear card
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\n\"Best\n
Best WPM, pulled from my typing stats
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\n\"The\n
The book I'm currently reading
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\n\"Morning\n
Morning greeting
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How it works

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\n\"A\n
A todo scene
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\n\"Clock\"\n
Clock
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By now there's a scene for nearly every corner of the archive — a random old tweet, a draft note yanked out of Obsidian, this week's intelligence-summary wiki page, the day's site analytics, a line of cipher text, and when there's genuinely nothing to say, a quiet field of ambient dots.

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\n\"A\n
A random tweet from the archive
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\n\"Today's\n
Today's site analytics
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\n\"A\n
A line of cipher text
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\n\"Ambient\n
Ambient dots
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The scenes I like best are the ones that catch me off guard — a tweet from a version of me I'd half-forgotten, a book I keep meaning to finish. A small calm machine for remembering there's a life on this side of the screen too.

","title":"Pixel Canvas","metadata":{"title":"Pixel Canvas","date":"2026-05-27T04:00:00.000Z","category":"Hardware","featured":true,"draft":false,"tech":["ESP32-S3","Arduino","LovyanGFX","Bash","REST API"],"state":"doing","ai-involvement":"ai-assisted","tags":["hardware","device","dataviz","quantified-self"],"words":532,"images":13,"imageDetails":{"total":13,"cloudinary":13,"withDimensions":0},"links":13,"codeBlocks":0,"headers":{"h2":1},"toc":[{"text":"How it works","slug":"how-it-works","level":"h2","children":[]}],"type":"post"}},"_links":{"self":"https://ejfox.com/projects/pixel-canvas.json","html":"https://ejfox.com/projects/pixel-canvas","index":"/projects.json"}}