u/fabpub

Back in June I shared a survey of which museum/library APIs are actually usable for browsing collections. This is the project that survey came from.

This is p3a, an open-source (Apache 2.0) device I built. It is a 4-inch, 24-bit, 720x720 desktop frame that plays artworks straight from museums' own IIIF endpoints. It uses no server, no cloud account, no phone app or any software to install on your computer. The hardware is a $40 off-the-shelf ESP32-P4 board (comes ready out of the box), so setup takes minutes, almost like a consumer product. It is powered by USB-C and connects to the internet via wi-fi.

p3a currently rotates through hundreds of thousands (!!) of openly licensed works from:

- Rijksmuseum

- Victoria and Albert Museum

- Wellcome Collection

- Statens Museum for Kunst

- Harvard Art Museums

- Smithsonian

The Art Institute of Chicago unfortunately dropped its support very recently, but other institutions are on the roadmap of the p3a project.

Happy to go deeper on implementation details (Linked Art walks, compliance levels, rate-limit etiquette) or anything. The project is open source : https://github.com/fabkury/p3a . I personally have two p3a's: one at home, one at work.

I got tired of typing variants of the same thing at the end of many prompts:

"""

...

...

Please do this:

1. Study this task.

2. Ask me questions to collect my preferences and final decisions about this task.

3. Then proceed with this task.

"""

So I made twq, a 24-line skill that does the above (but a bit better). It is similar in spirit to grill-me, but execution-oriented: grill-me pressure-tests a big plan; twq is for everyday tasks where you just want Claude to surface its assumptions before acting.

This is the skill I use the most!

Example of \"Task With Questions\"

Public domain (CC0): https://github.com/fabkury/twq

I've been building a little open-source device (called "p3a") that, among other sources, pulls public-domain art straight from museum/library/gallery IIIF endpoints and shows it on rotation on a 4-inch screen.

The starting point for this feature was a research problem: which institutions' APIs are actually usable if you want to...

- list collections,

- paginate through them,

- jump to item X of Y,

- search by keyword?

I surveyed tens of sources (museums, libraries, aggregators), sorted them into tiers with a capability matrix, and added live-endpoint verification notes. The result is here: https://github.com/fabkury/p3a/blob/main/reference/museum-art/docs/museum-candidates.md

The kinds of things that I found:

- the Met and Cleveland have lovely CC0 APIs but expose images as plain CDN URLs, no IIIF at all.

- the recurring headache is pagination: offset/range (easy) vs. cursor-only (Rijksmuseum) vs. walk-the-collection (Getty, Bodleian, e-codices).

Normalizing things like that behind one "next/prev/jump" interface was basically the whole game.

On the upside, IIIF hands you a JPEG on-demand at whatever canvas size you ask for. This turned out to be ESSENTIAL, since the ESP32-P4 in p3a can't load large multi-megapixel originals. "Give me this artwork at 720px" is exactly the primitive I needed.

I'd love this group's comments or corrections: anything I misjudged, or capability-ready institutions that I should add?

This is p3a, an open source ESP32-P4-based art player I built.

It is a 4-inch, 720x720 pixels desktop art frame that, among other sources, plays artworks straight from museums' IIIF endpoints. No cloud, no proxy, no smartphone middleman app. You connect it to a USB charger or power source, the firmware builds the Image API URL and pulls the JPEG on-device.

It currently rotates through hundreds of thousands (!!) of free artworks from:

- Art Institute of Chicago

- Rijksmuseum

- Victoria and Albert Museum

- Wellcome Collection

- Statens Museum for Kunst

- Harvard Art Museums

- Smithsonian Institution

These institutions offer the online endpoints that fit the needs of p3a (others are listed for the future). This is a payoff for a decade of open-access and IIIF work. Free content consumable by a gadget a hobbyist can flash and configure truly in minutes. The fact that IIIF provides JPEGs at user-requested canvas sizes is critical for the ESP32-P4 chip, otherwise the files would most likely be too big to load.

The device also lets you:

- see each artwork's author, title, date, source

- easily save ("pin") artworks into "playlists" by swiping on the touchscreen

It's a companion to museum-going: something that keeps rotating collections on a shelf. My current personal favorite is the "Chicago Artists" tag of the Art Institute of Chicago.

More info about this project can be found on GitHub, or feel free to ask me here.

This is p3a, an open-source ESP32-P4 pixel-art player I built. Its screen is 4 inches big, 720x720 pixels. As a special feature, it can act as a PICO-8 monitor and speaker.

The device serves a web page that runs fake-08 (open-source PICO-8 emulator) as WASM in the browser. You load a cart (.p8 or .p8.png file), play with the keyboard, and frames stream to the display over WebSocket. Game audio comes out of p3a's speaker. The ESP32-P4 isn't emulating PICO-8 itself, it's the monitor and speaker.

All info on the repo: https://github.com/fabkury/p3a

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 is ESP32-P4 and 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 and a USB-C cable. 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

Plus one special bonus feature:

- Play PICO-8 games on the device

The board (the whole device) 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):

- 4-inch 720x720 px 24-bit IPS display with capacitive touch

- ESP32-P4 plus ESP32-C6 co-processor handling Wi-Fi 6

- 3W speaker

- Flashing via USB-C

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

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

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.