Making it a real product

The last case design wasn’t really great and the headers with bare PCBs were a problem, adding a lot of thickness to the case. I had been using off the shelf parts and that meant I was heavily restricted when it came to 3D design. We were also facing problems with powering the display cleanly off of the ESP32 board, seeing regular flickers on the display.

But what about the actual experience of using it? Even there, I had entirely forgotten about direct interactions with the display and had included all controls only via the companion app.

Adding better interactions

Swpn wanted to experiment with simple RGB sensors & came up with the idea of using one as an input for the LED board, which would allow users to swipe in the air in front of the panel and have it react to the gesture (‘member Project Soli?).

Improving the case

The case was too thick again needing standoff to fit in the thick wiring, and with the ESP32 being an off the shelf consumer board, headers had to be soldered in and then dupont cables used to wire everything up.

All these wires (is a good song) were getting in the way of the display’s own components on the back. One of the best ways we could think of to solve all the problems in one shot was to design a custom PCB.

Designing a custom PCB

If we wanted to make this a consumer product, we could not be hand wiring all the components together for each order. We needed a drop-in solution with us only putting the display & case together before shipping it to a customer - a built to order PCB.

Our PCB needed to have the following at least -

I might be missing a few obvious components to bring it all together, but I have no experience with PCB design.

This meant I had to speedrun KiCad & PCB design, so fun!

This is an ongoing project & was last updated 8 March 2026, we’re now waiting on quotes from manufacturers