u/fabpub

It's called p3a. A 4-inch display that sits on your desktop (or shelf) and cycles through art it takes directly from the internet.

The hardware comes ready out of the box (!!). No soldering, no assembly. You unbox, insert a microSD card into the slot, then flash it using your web browser. No IDE, no toolchain, no command line.

What it plays:

- Trending GIFs from Giphy

- Pixel art from Makapix Club (a pixel art social network)

- Traditional art from six museum APIs: Art Institute of Chicago, Rijksmuseum, V&A, Wellcome, SMK, Harvard Art Museums

- Your own local files from the microSD card

Framework note: under the hood it's ESP-IDF on an ESP32-P4, not Arduino-core. Board is the Waveshare ESP32-P4-WIFI6-Touch-LCD-4B (https://www.waveshare.com/product/arduino/boards-kits/esp32-p4/esp32-p4-wifi6-touch-lcd-4b.htm?sku=31416). I'm posting here because this feels more like a maker conversation than a framework one.

Code, docs, and the browser flasher: https://github.com/fabkury/p3a/

Makezine article: https://makezine.com/projects/desktop-pixel-art-player-p3a/

IIIF is how major museums expose their image collections online for free. You can specify an image resolution, and the server produces JPEG files on demand. It's pretty neat.

So I brought it to p3a, my ESP32-P4 pixel-art frame. Hundreds of thousands of artworks from six institutions now stream straight to the device:

- Art Institute of Chicago

- Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)

- Victoria & Albert Museum (London)

- Wellcome Collection (London)

- SMK / Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen)

- Harvard Art Museums

IIIF itself is standardized, but each museum's discovery layer is idiosyncratic. AIC has its own search API, Rijks needs a Linked-Art resolver walk, Harvard needs a BYOK key... so each museum gets its own dispatcher.

p3a runs on the Waveshare ESP32-P4-WIFI6-Touch-LCD-4B (720×720 24-bit IPS). It plays animated WebP/GIF, static PNG/JPEG, and connects directly to Makapix Club and Giphy. Links are in the comment below.