I was gifted a Tidbyt. These gadgets are ok, not super useful. Just consumption for consumption sake
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
46 points (89.7% liked)
Technology
83330 readers
3366 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
A LED matrix with audio and home assistant integration. ...what for?
So... a screen
With really low resolution
And talking AI.
I saw this use-case and was immediately interested. This hangs near my front door so I know what’s coming. This particular one has some limitations, but I think the low-res nature of this class forces some nice design decisions.
Little devices like this are popular amongst some Diabetics for displaying their continuous glucometer data (I built something similar using an eink screen and the Dexcom home assistant integration). It's fun to see what people use these for!
My mom recently found out she has diabetes, and doing something like this for her I think would make life nicer. How did you manage to build something like this?
I can't really give you a step-by-step guide, but here's the gist of how I did it: I have a dexcom CGM, and use the dexcom share functionality in the app to sync the CGM data to a Home Assistant plug in. From there, the blood glucose data is treated like any other sensor value in Home Assistant, so the sky is the limit.
How you could implement this for your mom would depend on what brand of CGM she can get, and the level of tech aversion or savvy she is. xDrip and Nightscout are excellent projects which would also help you make something that uses or displays CGM data, if you didn't want to use Home Assistant.
Ahhh, honestly this was a lot more helpful than you probably know, so thank you very much for sharing <3.
Ok great! Best of luck and have fun.
How do I learn these talents!
Thanks for the insight. That's a really awesome use case: near real-time health tracker data.
Cool stuff but with a price of 279$ upward its hard to do the jump if i have to configure everything myself.