A DeadFellaz Device for Halloween
What you can see in the video above is a small microprocessor board with a simple 320x170 pixel display, in a nice black and orange case that goes well with the Halloween theme of this post.
It’s running custom firmware that I wrote to randomly display one of the fellaz and his/her/its traits every few seconds, and makes a nice bedside ornament that you can see, even when you’re in the dark and gloomy autumn of Finland before the snow has fallen.
I have been a fan of the Horde since I found out about them. I don’t easily get sucked into buying NFTs, but Betty’s zombie collection is one of the few that I think has staying power. And even if it doesn’t, this isn’t investment advice: it’s just that I happen to like the whole project and the vibe it gives off.
Anyway, enough of the community spirit. This article explains how you can configure a LilyGO T-Display-S3 prototyping board to randomly display DeadFellaz NFT images and metadata. Follow it, and you too could be waking up in the middle of the night to the green glow of an arbitrary DeadFella with vital statistics displayed in a radium glow.
What you need
- a PC, preferably running Ubuntu 22.04. I’ll check out if this works with a Macbook or a Windows machine sometime in the near future.
- a LilyGO T-Display-S3
- A USB-C cable
- An open mind
Flashing the firmware
You’re probably not interested in how all the building and coding stuff works, and so you can get the latest copy of the firmware from this Github repository, and flash the firmware.bin file to your own S3 device.
If, however, you are interested in configuring an Ubuntu 22.04 machine to build your own firmware for some insane reason, then you should probably run through this part of the tutorial in any case, before you get elbow-deep in coding and running make commands. Just to get familiar with how all of this stuff works at the “setting it up” level. I’ll be providing a further tutorial very soon to explain how to build the firmware yourself, and that will allow you to write your own S3 device software if you feel so inclined.
So here goes…
The flashing bit
Step 1: clone the repository, or download the raw firmware.bin file from the firmware folder in the repository (remember where you put it when you do), and then head over to an online flashing tool helpfully provided by Spacehuhn at this website.
It is possible to install and use something known as the ESPTOOL at the command line level, if you really want to, but I switched to the German space chicken’s site because it works really well, and was much easier to use.
Step 2: you need to plug your S3 device into your computer using a USB-C cable connected to your computer while holding the bottom-right button down. Once plugged in, let go of the button.
This puts the device into “I can be flashed with new firmware” mode.
Step 3: then click on the green CONNECT button on Spacehuhn’s web page, select the “USB JTAG/serial debug” line in the pop-up window that appears, and click on CONNECT.
This creates a two-way dialog between your PC and the S3 device (over something known as a serial port), and allows the web page to flash new firmware to it.
Step 4: click the topmost SELECT button on the website, and select the firmware.bin file that you downloaded from my Github repository, and ensure that the loading address is 0000 on the website (it starts off with a default value of 1000, which won’t work).
Your web browser should look something like the image above.
Step 5: next, click the green PROGRAM button. Click CONTINUE, because of course you want to overwrite the contents of the device ROM with the DeadFellaz firmware, and then wait. You’ll see “Flashing… XX%” messages scroll by, until you reach 100%.
Step 6: finally, hit the reset button on your device. Don’t know where the reset button is? Fear not — just look at the picture below, and please excuse the flecks of dust and remnants of duct tape on my board case.
Or you can just unplug the device, thereby removing all power, and plug it back in again.
If everything has gone according to plan — congratulations! You now have a LilyGO T-Display-S3 device with the right firmware on it.
But … the device doesn’t know what the password to your home WiFi access point is, and so it can’t retrieve the DeadFellaz images or their data. Computer technology isn’t psychic, so you have to provide it with this information.
The config bit
I have done my best to provide instructions on the S3 device for setting up the WiFi connection:
However, I am more than happy to walk you through what is going on:
The device is now running as its own little WiFi access point. I kid you not. You probably have a black or white plastic box the size of a large paperback novel providing WiFi for your house — well, this little S3 device is running something similar, and only taking up the space of a matchbox.
You can find it by using your phone or your PC to scan for access points, and selecting one appearing under the name of “DeadFellaz”, and then you can connect to it with the password “undeadhorde”.
Once you’ve connected, open your web browser, and enter 192.168.4.1 as the website you want to visit. You’ll see the fact that you’ve connected appear on the S3 when the message “Connection from 192.168.4.2” pops up on the little screen.
Select your home internet-enabled WiFi access point from the web page, and enter your WiFi password, and then click on the “Submit” button.
Then wait. This is a low-powered computing device, so everything takes a while (and by while, I mean ten or even twenty seconds … I know, I know, this is an eon when it comes to modern computing times), and then the message “Trying to connect to <your WiFi access point name>” should pop up, followed by “Connected to <your WiFi access point name>”.
The S3 screen background will turn blue to show you that it really worked.
And then … the DeadFellaz begin to appear.
More config
Note that if you take your S3 device to a friend’s home to show them how amazing all this stuff is, you will have to configure the WiFi stuff all over again.
When you plug it in, it won’t be able to find your home WiFi, and so you will have to go through all the palaver described in the section above.
Conclusion
I do hope the above helped you set up your S3 device, and was … well, if not clear, at least clearer than the average instruction manual that comes with a piece of kit you bought from China on Aliexpress.
If it wasn’t, or if you found a bug or something that you think could be improved, please leave an issue on my DeadFellaz S3 Github repo, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Happy Halloween!
About the author
Keir Finlow-Bates is a prolific inventor and the CEO of Chainfrog, which was one of Finland’s earliest blockchain startups.
He is the author of several books about blockchain, including:
Move Over Brokers Here Comes The Blockchain, which explains blockchain in an understandable manner through the use of analogies without glossing over the technicalities, and
Evil Tokenomics, which lifts the curtain on how scammers use ICOs and other token projects to exploit the naive.
