Skip to content

smalltv-mod

One firmware, three modes, four boards. Turn a cheap SmallTV cube into a ticker, a Claude usage meter, or a plane radar.

The GeekMagic SmallTV is a small cube with a 1.54” colour screen, an ESP inside, and a USB-C port. This firmware replaces the stock apps with three modes you switch between in a built-in web UI, and it updates over WiFi. The web UI header shows a chip badge for the board it’s running on, and an optional scheduled night mode dims or turns off the backlight on an NTP clock and timezone you pick, without taking the device offline.

The SmallTV running its three modes

Stock and crypto ticker

Price, change, percent change, and a sparkline for up to 8 rotating symbols. Data from Yahoo Finance with no backend, or your own webhook.

Claude usage meter

An animated mascot plus your 5-hour and 7-day usage bars with reset countdowns, fed over WiFi by the clawdmeter-daemon on your PC. The daemon can auto-discover several SmallTVs on the LAN and push usage to all of them at once.

Plane radar

A scope centred on your location with nearby aircraft, headings, speed vectors, and callsigns, from the free adsb.lol or adsb.fi feeds or a LAN webhook.

Plus one thing that is not a mode: on the ESP32-C2 and the 8 MB SmallTV Pro the firmware carries a WireGuard client, so you can reach the device from outside your network without opening a port to the internet.

This firmware builds for four boards from one codebase. Confirm which one you have before you flash it.

The user manual skips the technical background and walks through plugging it in, joining WiFi, and everyday use in plain language, no prior knowledge assumed.