This charming 1″ HDMI monitor needs no power source.

When you think of a display that connects to its source via HDMI, you probably think of the TV in your living room, a desktop monitor, or perhaps even a smaller display like a portable monitor. You probably don’t think of a 0.96-inch OLED PC monitor.

Recognizing the limitations of using a tiny HDMI PC monitor, manufacturer mitxela aimed to get a 128×68 dot matrix OLED screen and work as a PC monitor that plugs directly into its system. The manufacturer described his creation as “the smallest and worst HDMI display ever. “

The small OLED screen itself is not special. Manufacturers use them for all sorts of projects, such as DIY smartwatches, bulletin boards, or weather displays, for example. What makes the mitxela project unique is that it turns an OLED panel into a standard PC monitor that can be directly connected to a PC’s HDMI port – no Arduino or microcontroller required.

Mitxela showed a monitor connected to a Linux system and running i3, an open source tiled window manager. The manufacturer used the display to open a second terminal in the i3, resize the windows, and split one.

According to the manufacturer, to create the mini monitor, mitxela opened up the HDMI cable to access the four necessary wires and connected them to the monitor by soldering to the connector.

The trick was to use the HDMI cable’s I2C EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory). Mitksela said this allows the monitor to run on DDC (Display Data Channel) protocols, which determine how the PC reads basic monitor information such as resolution.

Perhaps the most convenient part of this project is that the monitor does not need to be plugged into an outlet.

“The 5V line on the HDMI port can apparently put out up to 50mA, so we don’t even need a power supply,” Mitksela said.

The manufacturer noted that the frame rate of the monitor is “low”. There is also a high risk of damage to parts, especially when connected to a laptop, so for many, this project will not work. But if you want to learn more about the project, the script files are available via GitHub.

You can check out the homemade monitor in action below: