Hacking a Smart Home Panel into a Bluetooth Trackpad - Hackware August 2026

Okay. Hi everyone. Uh I'm >> Hello. Hello. Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm Tang. You can call me 10. Like the number 10 is my surname. Uh yeah, I maybe a year ago I would call myself a senior software engineer, but recently I'm more like just a AI prompter. So it is what it is. uh maybe one day I'll be out of a job and I need to go a bit more into hardware which is why I'm here to put myself into the space so that you all remember about this guy who can do software and also do hardware. Uh yeah so uh kind of the same idea of what Kim was talking about with the clicker. I also wanted to do something to uh but my use case was quite different. Uh, I do the I wash the dishes at home and when I'm washing the dishes and I'm reading manga, I'm like, "Ah, I wish I could use my toe to the so I was looking into doing some Bluetooth page IDs. So, uh, HID human interface devices. Uh, and nowadays with ESP32, it's like way easy to just make your own. Uh, but I find that I wanted something with a touchcreen. I wanted something that uh, you know, it's easy to program. Uh so which is why I found this smart home panel. So this uh yeah so this smart home panel is uh is ESP up to 32 running under the hood. Um is under this Gishian brand but I'm sure you can find a lot is on AliExpress. It's about 25 to 30 S dollars roughly about there. Uh the one thing that is not super good about this device is that it doesn't have a lot of GPIO pins. So the the expos pins there are only three and then you can of course use the serial. Uh so there is Bluetooth and then there's a separate serial which is RXDX from this row or you can also uh hydrate it from this here. Uh the other quite good thing that I decided to choose this board was also because uh there is a inbuilt battery which uh battery u check using the JSP I think it's 2.0 maybe 1.5 I'm not really sure. Um but there a JST connectors which very good you can find those easily available. Um there's also speaker output. Um yeah and there are I believe uh at least six unused pins that are not really connected to any tracer. So if you want to do some soldering of the actual board itself, you could. And yeah, it includes a charging circuit by itself. Uh yeah. So uh it's about 4 in. These are the specs that they put on their website. Um it's got quite a bit of memory. Uh it's a 16 does it say here? Uh yeah 16 MB flash and uh 8 MBS RAM which is pretty good. Um what I realized uh during this project is that uh this while very good for a lot of use cases maybe isn't that good for uh running a 480 by 480p uh L LVGL uh which is a light and versatile graphics uh library. Uh turns out it's not as light as I would like. So uh this is the schematics that I found online. Um there's a lot of people who do a home automation actually have already hacked a lot of other things on this. Um so I am probably not the best person to ask about the actual hardware seeing as I'm an official uh uh AI prompter. Um yeah and these are some of the other stuff that I found while I was just looking around at what things have done. So uh this person has done uh this is oh just basically a screen that gives the update of the sensors in the same room. Um yeah they connect I think I believe he connect to it using uh because there's not a lot of processing left after rendering the screen. Uh he actually connects it to a home server. Home server serves a web page. The web page uh renders uh you just basically mirroring what the web page is serving and then he has the speaker to do the output. Uh he has actually access some of the additional sensors to it. Uh one thing this bot does have a onboard temperature sensor I believe. Uh but it's not good because it's on the bot and the bot heats up. So the calibration not that great. You can calibrate it but calibration not great. So, uh a lot of people I find they actually just hijack the pins and they attach external sensors. Um this is uh this is somebody just upgraded the UI and this is I I decided to showcase this project because it's actually on a light switch panel which is what it was used for. That's the size uh form factor of it. Um, yeah. So, it's the the the the pre-installed uh uh firmware. It's kind of um this is a nicer more complicated. I'm not sure if it's nicer. It is a little bit uglier, but it has more functions on it. And then, uh this person did a home media player and they do have their GitHub project there. You can have to uh control your speakers within the same uh Wi-Fi uh system. Um >> yeah. And I think this is one of the better uh user interface I've seen out of this uh device. And uh this was okay. So this was the first version of my uh my firmware. So I basically just overrode it. I did the LVGL. I managed to get the swiping functions working. Um but yeah, the problem was that uh once I started adding any additional functionality like trying to connect to Bluetooth and all that, it just crashed uh or the the the graphics just started shifting. Uh, I didn't really know why. I sent an AI to go and pro the memory and it was running out of memory. Maybe it was because the firmware itself was not very efficient. >> I don't know. I'm just a >> I think I know. >> Okay. I'm just official AI prompter. So that's what >> for justify. >> Yeah, I know. I know it was for ESP. He's he's the master here. which is why I didn't I didn't want to talk too much about how much about ESV. [laughter] Um yeah, so I'm going to give a live demo now which is uh always great to do at a talk. Um let's view >> how long it took them to build. Uh okay. I didn't research that hard. But uh generally I believe the the the the cost for the board itself should be around 25 plus. You add additional sensors $12 uh for the speakers. I I have seen some kits that come with the speakers provided. But it's basically anything with a three watt speakers should be uh more than enough to to to be run off this. Uh okay. So desk view. So this is the device right now and uh so I have decided to just natively render the thing. Oops, upside down. Oh, it actually corrects it for me. Nice. So I've uh I decided to render I I believe that uh just rendering it natively just maybe gives it a little bit more character than the LVGL stuff. Um and I did annoyingly add a slip function. So not slipping. Uh, I removed all animation because I got paranoid about the amount of memory that was left. And now let's turn on my Bluetooth on this side. And I have uh currently I currently have three apps. Uh the so the first one, okay, four apps. The first one is basically just a debug for me to debug the touchcreen. And then the second one, oops. The second one is a Bluetooth remote which uh is what I use to move the page of my manga when I'm reading. Um the third one is basically a trackpad. And the fourth one is a mouse jiggler because uh caffeinate on Mac OS it stops your Mac from sleeping when you're running AI only if you are plugged into a power source. So you still kind of want to have a mouse mouse jiggler when you want to have your AI running on battery. So let's buy a new device and then I'll do the Bluetooth trackpad because that's the most impressive one. So, pair match pair. And then once we open the trackpad, we now have uh Yeah. So, not sure if you can see that there's the mouse on the other side. >> And yeah, you can still do your tab. Uh you should be able to do scrolling if I remember if I did it properly. Um okay, there's no scroll. view. Okay, this is not long enough to scroll. Fantastic. Um, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you can scroll, can tap, uh, you can right click, which is a two-finger tap. And yeah, basically that's about it. Uh, I expected Chinme to come and talk also because I think he was talking about similar hardware. So, I thought this was kind of a a thing we could do together, but uh, he's not here today. Um, and I've run out of things to talk about. So, >> oh yeah, I need to be barefoot to do that, unfortunately. >> Yeah. Uh, I can talk a bit about the enclosure I I 3D printed, I guess, uh, just in line with the 3D printing talk that we had. So, uh, the way I like to do it generally when I slice the things, I like to do things by layers. So, you can see I ran out of this filament, this gray filament halfway through and then, uh, and then I had to switch to a white one. Uh, generally I like to connect things by M2 bolts and nuts. I have little slots that I put inside here for me to slide in a a nut. Then I can bolt in a M2 uh M2 bolt. Uh, let's see if you can see the boat behind the battery here. Yeah. So then then you can use both and nuts to connect multiple layers of things together. Um, generally this is just for the for the battery. I intend to be able to use a GPIO here. So I exposed it. Um, so next time I can add additional buttons or sensors if I want to. Uh, yeah, I think I've run out of things to talk about. Uh, any questions? >> Uler for the extra do that as a as a professional AI prompter. >> [laughter] >> Uh so so at first I did it with uh L I did it on Aru uh via the Arduino uh ecosystem and I did it on uh with uh LVGL. Um I I asked the AI to do the research. He gave me LVGL and that was what I used. Um eventually I wanted to squeeze out as much performance as possible. So I switched to uh just programming in C. Um and then it just flash. I think it still uses that uh Arduino ecosystem. It's just that it's all on the command line. uh my friend and yeah I just asked it to I just asked AI to write um if you're writing if I can recommend writing uh software that is reliable um recently I've been doing uh what's called uh open spec so I write the specifications and then the the AI will actually uh go through iterations based on the specifications the proposals and all that so it's way more consistent uh for for proper projects when you are doing software uh as a as a professional AI prompter. >> Which AI do you need? >> Uh, currently I'm subscribing to Codex. Uh, but at at work I actually use CL. Um, so it's it's pretty much the same process. I don't I don't particularly uh because at work I don't have to care about the tokens. So I just go crazy with the I don't bother to to to do this open stack uh things to save tokens. Um yeah. which say you both don't have to carry to >> uh I work I work for Agoda. So you can you can just go crazy with the tokens when you are if you are employed by >> Yeah. Uh we we recently set a limit on $500 for for uh for Frontier models. So I cannot spam opus anymore. Um I don't have access to Fable. Uh but I can use Sonet as much as I want. I think I think the hard limit now is like $10,000 which I I can't even use Finnish. Yeah. >> Where's the place again? >> Uh, I work at Agod like the travel. >> Is it the one I see on YouTube? I generated. >> Yeah, I hate that so much. Like that's my employer. But man, I wish I wish we paid actual artist, you know, but uh I am just but a professional AI prompter. Yeah. >> So, how much of this history is the thing that you actually get when you buy the panel? Because originally I thought the gray part is what you get, but then you said the gray part is >> you get you get up to up to here. This this uh this silver part. Uh so that's the panel and >> Okay. So the panel itself is like count like that. >> Yeah. Yeah. It does have a back panel, but actually the GPIO pins uh the this not pins, but the the sockets for the pins do stick out quite a bit, which is why I built that first layer so that it sits flat on my desk. >> Okay. >> Yeah. And then after that, I needed some space to to put the battery. Um so yeah, I just went with a regular I believe this uh is a PS3 controller battery. Um it comes with a with a protection circuit as talked about last uh talk. So always use batteries with protection. That's what I got from the last song. [laughter] >> Yeah. [laughter] >> Yep. Uh, anything else otherwise? Thank you.