Yet another ESP8266 hack: partly inspired by an ancient X10 alarm clock controller, and partly by the Chumby, this is a bedside touchscreen controller for WiFi LED lights, with a few extra features thrown in and planned.
The chip is a TI ADS7843 clone (even table references in it's datasheet match TI's datasheet, and not it's own numbering -- had me scratching my head, until I found the TI datasheet, and then it made sense :).
Had to write driver from scratch, to use hardware SPI (otherwise there aren't enough pins). MOSI/MISO/CLK are shared with the ILI9341 display driver. While at it, added support for differential mode (code I could find used bitbanged SPI and single-ended mode). The code is currently a frakking mess, but once cleaned up, it'll be on github.
So, the $22 Digole can be replaced by a $7 generic module (running ucglib, a much nicer graphics lib, too!). Getting closer to the ~$13 mark, which makes much more sense for this device.
Support for the touchscreen controller is still missing (shouldn't be hard, though).
Note: there is also a port of ucglib to NodeMCU at https://github.com/devsaurus/nodemcu-firmware/tree/dev-ucglib (which convinced me to give the Arduino port a try; thanks!!). That port strips out most fonts from the source (avoiding this was the part that took me a while to get working).
I loved my Chumby and was upset when the touchscreen died. I attempted a similar smarthome control project with a STM32F429-DISCOVERY board and ESP chip but abandoned it for some reason. Love how cheap this is so I might give it a shot. And great advice on the XTC-3D, I attempted to "fix" a recent 3D print with liquid tape but it didn't turn out as nice as your case. Might have to pick some of that stuff up.
So cool.. Nice, simple, elegant... I am interesting in files for 3d printing enclosure as well.. Hope you attach those here soon. Cheers