The GeekMagic SmallTV is as its name suggests, a tiny, vaguely TV-styled, device with a screen, that’s sold as a desktop notifier. Depending on the firmware running on the device it can display various pieces of information, ranging from the time and weather to the current price of Bitcoin. What makes it interesting is that it supports software updates over WiFi, so [Giovi321] has made a new firmware package for it.

It seems there are several versions of this device, something which appears to be reflected in the prices they sell for on AliExpress. The older version runs on the ESP8266, and there’s also a ESP32-C2 variant in the wild. The firmware supports both flavors, providing stock and crypto tickers, an ADS-B tracker, and a Claude AI token usage gauge.

What gives this potential is that the various functions are clearly split out in the code, and there’s nothing to stop you pointing it at a data source of your choosing. This makes it more than a bit of cheap e-waste novelty, and we hope that others will take up the baton and do interesting things with it.

The ESSP8266 is a chip we don’t see too much of these days, having been surpassed by its ESP32 siblings. Still, someone recently gave it a simple OS.

This may say more about us than the current state of the telephone network, but unless your Grandma is still kicking, how many phone calls do you take that are actually worth picking up? Around here it’s one variety of scam or another, with the odd cold-calling salesperson to round it out.

So when we saw [Bolan Xu]’s texting-only TERMINUS cell phone project, it took but a minute to decide that, yeah, we wouldn’t miss the telephone part of the phone very much either.

The trade-offs are immense when compared to your smartphone; there’s no voice, no web browser, no social media, and no camera. But on the flip side there’s also no spyware and no annoying spam calls. Besides, he’s built a QWERTY keyboard onto this thing, and that does seem to be what most of us miss in this era of black rectangles.

In terms of electronics, its rocking a tiny OLED display for you to read your messages on, driven by an ESP8266. When WiFi is available the plan was to bridge over the internet in an SMS version of VOIP, but [Bolan Xu] ended up installing a cellular modem in it anyway.

As you can tell from the skeletal case, this is very much a prototype, but it is a promising project. We’ve seen ESP-based phones before, but they tend to be a bit smarter, and run on ESP32 instead of the more modest ESP8266.