@morganrallen suggested an interesting application for it, for showing how fresh coffee is. After 3-4 hours coffee tastes pretty bad, even when on a hot plate. The idea is to press a button when new coffee is brewed, which then will display the current time on the display. When someone gets coffee, it is visible when it was brewed. The server application can notify interested people when new coffee is ready, or when it is time to make new coffee, and the server could trigger a new image on the display to show this as well. Different strengths could be displayed as well: Press one button for light and another button for strong, and the display shows different images. Probably the cheaper 2.9" display would be sufficient for such an application, which means the cheaper ESP8266 could be used as well instead of an ESP32.