Scroll By ESPHome With IPod-style Click on Wheel

Whilst you’d be laborious pressed to discover a Hackaday author that feels any nostalgia for the DRM nonsense the iPod helped to introduce, we’ve acquired to confess that we miss that click on wheel. Spinning your manner via lengthy lists was a breeze, and the tactile response made it simple to cease precisely the place you needed. Today, we’re caught fumbling our manner via contact display screen interfaces that make easy duties like in search of to a specific spot in a music or video all however unimaginable to do with any form of accuracy.

If you happen to too yearn to as soon as once more really feel that refined thumping underneath your thumb, then check out this project from [landonr]. Technically the hand-held gadget is meant for use as a wi-fi distant for a house automation system powered by ESPHome, however that’s just one doable utility for this specific mixture of off-the-shelf parts.

If you happen to should, there’s a model with buttons.

Constructing your personal model of the hand-held system is an easy as mounting a LILYGO ESP32 T-Show TTGO, an ANO Rotary Navigation Encoder from Adafruit, and a battery pack to a scrap of perfboard. We’d in all probability look into 3D printing a case to make it a bit much less…pokey, however that’s as much as you. The consequence truly bears fairly a resemblance to Apple’s iconic media participant, however with out that pesky walled backyard to carry you again.

As talked about beforehand, [landonr] wrote the firmware with the intention of controlling a house automation system. So there’s quite a lot of stuff in there about turning on lights and such. However there are additionally features for media playback that look very promising. No matter software program you find yourself working on it, one factor is for certain: working via the menus goes to really feel like a dream.

We’ve lined a number of different residence automation remotes through the years. This good-looking wood mannequin stored issues easy with only a few bodily buttons, whereas this considerably extra whimsical strategy repurposed Nintendo’s Zapper gentle gun.