WeAct Display FS is an inexpensive 0.96-inch USB display dongle designed to add an information display or a tiny secondary display to your computer or SBC.
We’ve seen this type of information display with products such as the Turing Smart Screen, a larger 3.5-inch color display, or small OLEDs integrated into cases such as the Pironman 5 Max to disable text. The WeAct Display FS V1 may be tiny, but it’s also a full-color 160×80 resolution display that can be customized with software provided by WeAct.
WeAct Display FS V1 specifications:
- Display – 0.96-inch RGB565 display with 160×80 resolution
- Host interface – “Reversible” USB 2.0 Type-A Full Speed (FS) port showing as a CDC device
- Dimensions – 43 x 14.5 mm
Since you wouldn’t want to get a display only for it to face the wrong direction, for instance, the desk or the wall, the company made the USB-A port reversible, and the user only needs to install one of the two provided pads on the unused side of the port to avoid short circuits.
WeAct provides two programs for it. The first one is the WeAct Studio System Monitor based on a fork of Matthieu Houdebine’s Turing Smart Screen Python project. This allows users to create UIs/themes with text, images, weather, and other features… WeAct says the little device only works on Windows, but the open-source project is supposed to also work on macOS, Linux (including Raspberry Pi OS), and essentially any operating system with support for Python 3.9+.
The second program is called WeAct Studio Screen Projection, and as I understand it, it emulates an actual display, so you could move any window/program to the USB display. I’m just not sure how a desktop OS like Windows will handle a tiny 160×80 “monitor”… I suppose it could be used to play a full-screen YouTube video or display photos for whatever reason. That one only works on Windows, and there’s no source code.
You’ll find the WeAct Display FS V1 (0.96-inch) on AliExpress for about $2 plus shipping, but while looking for information, I also noticed a 3.5-inch variant with 480×320 resolution for about $11.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I’m wondering if there exists any standard protocols to manage remote displays. It could indeed be convenient if such a protocol would exist, be easily implemented and adopted by BIOSes and boot loaders, to permit to take over a headless machine to boot in recovery mode for example.
There is this: https://lwn.net/Articles/820242/
Generic USB display, designed to connect with a Raspberry Pi or similar.
> There is this: https://lwn.net/Articles/820242/
Oh I wasn’t aware of this one, and it’s already mainlined, this is excellent! So all it would take is someone to implement this protocol into this controller and the device would work out of the box as an extra screen on linux! Great! Thanks for the pointer!
Sure… Can’t wait to install Chinese spyware on my PC with administrator credentials.
anyway it’s USB so it can also suddenly change into a keyboard and inject keystrokes to steal your files and upload them 🙂
What mcu does this use? maybe we can reprogram it?
The Turing Smart Display is based on the WCH CH552T 8-bit E8051 MCU, maybe it’s the same for the WeAct board.
The store page tells me that the item is no longer available. 🙁 This looks nice. I’ve been considering making something similar, but the part holding me back as that there’s not really a good protocol for hosts to talk to little displays like this. The best I can find is https://github.com/notro/gud and it wasn’t very easy to use last I looked. I should go back and look again, maybe it’s changed.
I don’t know if there’s any form of negotiation or advertisement of capabilities in order to support implementing only the most basic stuff. In the original announcement, the author said he specifically tried to target micro-controllers so hopefully he considered the possibility of limited capabilities.
The USB HID standard supports small RGB displays as found on some keyboards and is a good target protocol for such display.
Can you point out where in the standard this is? You can do anything you want over HID that’s completely propriatary and still HID.
I just got mine but the Linux support seems to be non-existent and the open-source variant of the app doesn’t seem to support it.
I will try making the Windows version of the official app work with it, but if anyone knows a working open-source project, I would be happy to hear about it. 🙂
Hey, I’m the maintainer of the turing-smart-screen project on Github, just to let you know the support for WeAct 0.96″ display is in a pull request and will soon be added! The turing-smart-screen System Monitor program can be run on Windows, Linux and MacOS as it is Python code
Can you advise me a method to use it in to aida64? Coz with the turing 3.5 display and the aida64 stats did a miracle. But only the original app… Can t do a theme.. so tedious
Need a some sort of aida64 support, the original app are useless