Creating a Fake Broken Screen Tool with Arduino & ESP32

Projects General Guidance
1

I’m working on a project to simulate a fake broken screen effect using an Arduino Mega2560 and ESP32. The goal is to display cracks or glitches on an OLED or TFT screen, similar to Fake Broken Screen Prank - Cracked Full Display

The plan:

  1. The ESP32 generates random crack or glitch patterns or loads predefined images.
  2. The Mega handles displaying the visuals with added flickering effects for realism.
  3. The two communicate via UART for simplicity.

I need help with:

  1. Tips for creating realistic crack/glitch effects.
  2. Optimizing serial communication between the ESP32 and Mega for smooth performance.
  3. Suggestions for libraries or methods to make this work seamlessly.

If anyone has worked on something similar or has ideas to share, I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

2

Why do you need two boards?

1 Like
3

Study fractals, search for images of broken displays and determine the patterns.

Typical crack has a starting point and jig jags over the screen (like lightning).
Remember the places of the jigs and the jags,
From a random jig (or jag) start a smaller new crack.
repeat this with random intervals

Good exercise is to draw the cracks very slowly and observe carefully what you actually do.

Premature optimization is loosing time. First get it to work.

No known libraries.

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