#ESP32

I picked up a Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) — an ESP32 with a built-in LCD —

Let’s make the Internet of Things a bit more useful, and less like The Internet of Turd by hacking some smart plugs so they no longer phone home to China.

This is an update to a [previous blog post]https://beta.ncot.uk/blog-posts/freeing-smart-devices-with-tasmota/ I wrote about modifying [smart sockets]https://beta.ncot.uk/blog-posts/hacking-smart-home-devices-literally/.

I have a load of smart devices in my house that all have ESP8266 microcontrollers inside them. They all work with the Tuya SmartLife app on my phone, and the Tuya integration in HomeAssistant. They also all talk to China to do anything. I’d rather they didn’t. China doesn’t need to know I want to turn my lighting on.

Making a microcontroller produce graphics is very similar to making an old 8 or 16 bit computer draw images. They both have small screens, not much RAM and not enough CPU power to draw all the screen all the time.

The ODroid GO is a handheld console that sells itself as a device that will run emulators of all your favourite 8bit systems. And it does that job rather well, I spent at least five minutes with mine playing Tetris, and it was a good emulation. Then I installed the Arduino libraries for it, plugged in a USB cable and started trying things out.