Why?

I waned to make something visually pleasing and allow people to connect without looking at the phone, 

Several ESP32's laying around and a desire to use the nice coloured COD LED filaments.

To make conversation succinct and fun.

Something to use AI for

What?

Lets start with the hardware; ESP32 dev board, 3 x push momentary push switches, 3 cob led filament, 20*4 LCD screen (I2C interface), 1.28inch round TFT display (SPI interface), battery charge board, 18650, 1 on/off switch;

I also wanted an excuse to use clear epoxy so being winter and lots of logs being around this initially sounded like a nice idea, sit on the desk, good angle, and yeh it is, but having to drill out cut out 4 logs... loooooong (making 4 as gifts).

All web infra is deployed in aws with terraform, you can sign up to the site here https://social.busyrain.com/ ..please don't hack me! Details to follow about how you can connect your ESP32 client to the chat.

Annoying bits:

The TFT screen took a lot of revisions to get the colours to display correctly; here my what i got to with the help of github copoliot!

#define COLOR_BLACK    0x0000
#define COLOR_WHITE    0xFFFF
#define COLOR_RED      0xF800
#define COLOR_GREEN    0x07E0
#define COLOR_BLUE     0x001F
#define COLOR_CYAN     0x07FF
#define COLOR_MAGENTA  0xF81F
#define COLOR_YELLOW   0xFFE0
#define COLOR_DARKGREY 0x7BEF

Good things:

ESP32 Wifi manager library.. very useful, 

ESP32 OTA.. allow you to update the device over wifi; or where I'm hoping to get to is it will pull down latest firmware from aws s3.

Those COB LED filaments look so good.

All backend infrastructure is deployed with Terraform; using bedrock ai to keep folks posts succinct (and add some swearing) and cantonise profile pictures.

Source code to follow, as well as final assembly of all 4 devices! ..epoxy time!