DIY Monitoring Side Display

Goal

I want to fully control most devices in my room and monitor the performance and power consumption of my PC and server, so I am building a DIY monitoring side display.

This will be split into two series:

1. A high-performance side display based on Raspberry Pi.
2. A low-power side display based on ESP32.

Raspberry Pi Home Assistant Monitoring Side Display

Goal: use it as a smart-home monitoring side display.

Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5 + 7-inch touch screen + 3D-printed enclosure, still to be finished.

Software: Ubuntu 25 + Home Assistant

UPDATE 2025/11/15

Overview

TODO:

[ ] Connect LLM APIs, both local and remote, connect to the Home Assistant MCP, and implement a Mijia-control experience similar to Xiaoai.

[x] Design the 3D-printed enclosure.

3D Enclosure Design

Version v0.1:

Feature: implements the basic enclosure structure. The screen is fixed by magnets and the shell. The rear shell has cooling slots, and the bottom has anti-slip pads.

Issues:

1. The shell was too thin. The slicer wall-loop count was only 2, which was too low, so the frame did not connect properly and the rear cover separated.
2. The base was not deep enough, only 8mm, so it could not fit the Raspberry Pi plus the mini-HDMI cable.

v0.1

Version v0.2:

Feature: thickened the shell to 3mm, changed the wall-loop count to 5, switched to black filament, and increased the base depth to 100mm.

Issues:

1. Some generated supports were too small. The default Bambu support-printing speed was too high, 150mm/s, so the supports did not cool in time before the next layer. This finally caused a spaghetti failure, and some supports fused onto the structure and were hard to remove.
2. I did not fully account for PLA shrinkage and the inward shrinkage of this 3D-printed structure. The screen frame only reserved 0.4mm of clearance, so the screen could not fit into the structure.
3. There were no cooling slots on the top. Heat could not escape, and the Raspberry Pi fan ran too fast, causing noise.

v0.2

v0.3:

Feature: added top cooling slots, enlarged the front screen opening with 1mm clearance, reduced support-printing speed to 80mm/s, switched the shell color to white, and used Bambu’s automatic same-color spool-switching feature.

Issue: the top cooling slots still had a bit of spaghetti failure.

v0.3 front

v0.3 inside, with magnets

v0.3 rear

v0.3 bottom, with rubber pads

ESP32 Performance Monitoring Side Display

v0.1 MVP version:

• Windows only
• Serial communication only
• Displays only a fixed UI

[1.44inch Arduino SPI Module ST7735S SKU:MAR1441 - LCD wiki

LCD wiki

](https://www.lcdwiki.com/zh/1.44inch_Arduino_SPI_Module_ST7735S_SKU%3AMAR1441)

Technical route:

1. Soldering
2. PCB drawing
3. CAD / 3D printing

Reference Links

[3-2-2 Control a NodeMCU development board through a network service - Taichi Maker

Taichi Maker: Arduino, AI, and IoT application, development, and learning materials

](http://www.taichi-maker.com/homepage/esp8266-nodemcu-iot/iot-c/esp8266-nodemcu-web-server/pin-control/)

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/463349281

[Home - LCD wiki

LCD wiki

](https://www.lcdwiki.com/zh/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5#top)

ryan4yin

](https://thiscute.world/posts/ee-basics-2-esp32-display/)