Summary

  • Built an Altoids-tin laptop with an ESP32, tiny screen, and a handmade keyboard.
  • Runs Doom, NES & Game Boy emulators, streams internet radio, and offers voice AI chat.
  • Pocketable Altoids-tin travel computer — tiny keyboard and quirky looks, great for demos.

Did you know that there's an entire scene around stuffing chips into an Altoids tin and making it do all sorts of things? We've seen it before with the Raspberry Pi, where someone even created a Kickstarter to help get an Altoid tin console up and running. There's something about the size of an Altoid tin that makes people want to turn it into a teeny-tiny electronic device.

Well, an Altoid tin comes with a base and a lid, so why not turn it into a laptop? That's exactly what one person did with an ESP32, complete with a miniature keyboard you can actually type on.

This tiny Altoids ESP32 laptop is the ultimate travel accessory

You may get weird looks while you use it, though

Over on the ESP32 subreddit, user SuperRadMaker showed off what they've been working on. It's a full ESP32-powered computer housed in an Altoids tin, complete with a screen and a handmade keyboard, so you can use it wherever you go. I can't imagine typing a full report on the keyboard would feel great, but the fact that it's even there is an amazing feat.

SuperRadMaker lists off a ton of cool things this ESP32 gadget can do, but here are my top picks:

- doom — DOOM via a PrBoom port

- nes — NES emulator (nofrendo fork)

- gb — Game Boy + GBC (gnuboy)

- radio — streams internet radio over WiFi (SomaFM, any Icecast HTTP stream)

- ask — Grok AI chat via xAI API, responds in synthesized voice through the speaker

Yes, it runs Doom. In fact, a few people on Reddit joined the thread to ask whether it could run Doom, only to learn that SuperRadMaker was one step ahead of them. You can also check out videos based on this little project on the creator's YouTube channel.