A standalone, battery-powered desk box that shows live football scores, play-by-play, schedules, and news. Runs on the Hosyond ESP32-S3 2.8" 240×320 capacitive touchscreen module (LCDWIKI ES3C28P design). Everything is driven by the touchscreen — including first-time Wi-Fi setup.

Vibecoded with Claude by BruteSource. Full hardware notes are in HOSYOND_ESP32S3_BOARD.md.

Scores

• NFL and NCAAF (college games with at least one AP Top-25 team) — tap NFL / NCAAF in the header to switch.
• Scrollable list: live score + quarter, kickoff time + TV network for upcoming, or the final. "Halftime" / "End of 1st" between periods.
• Adaptive refresh — 20 s while a game is live, 5 min otherwise (adjustable). Scores are only polled while the list or a game screen is open.

Live game detail (tap a game)

• Big matchup with a ▸ possession arrow, quarter + clock, RED ZONE badge.
• Down & distance, timeout dots per team, stadium weather.
• Play-by-play — latest play in full plus a rolling history.
• STATS button → team box score + per-player passing / rushing / receiving (also reachable from a finished game).
• Score-change celebration animation (toggleable).

Team schedule — tap either team's name for its season: week, date, vs/@ opponent, result or kickoff/TV. Bye weeks inferred. Auto-scrolls to the next game.

News — newspaper icon → latest ESPN headlines for the active league; tap for the summary.

Wi-Fi setup wizard — no config file needed. Scans, shows networks with signal bars, on-screen keyboard (with symbols) for the password. Stored in flash; re-run any time from Settings → WI-FI.

Offline resilience — the last-known slate and the TV map are saved to flash, so games, times, and networks still show after a reboot even if a data source is unreachable. A rate-limited source backs off automatically.

Battery — reads cell voltage on GPIO9; header glyph (green / amber / red, ⚡ charging), voltage + % in Settings, blinking low-battery banner.

Standby — Settings → SLEEP or an idle timer. Screen + Wi-Fi off, tap to wake. (~2 days — deep sleep hangs on this S3 + octal-PSRAM board.)

Themes — 8 palettes (Midnight, Turf, Daylight, Amber, Neon, Volt, 49ers, Lime). Applies instantly, saved to flash. Boot screen is always Lime.

Settings also has: brightness, refresh intervals, boot league, NCAAF-today filter, score alerts, auto-sleep, Recalibrate, and Restart (soft reboot, for when the case is closed and the buttons aren't reachable).

Screen flip — SCREEN_ROTATION in config.h (0 = USB up, 2 = USB down); changing it re-runs touch calibration.

The old all-ESPN design got the device's IP rate-limited, so it's split across providers. Two free API keys are needed (both instant, no card):

Constant polling never touches ESPN's blocked hosts. Keys go in include/credentials.h (git-ignored) — see below.

A merged image is on the Releases page.

esptool.py --chip esp32s3 --port /dev/ttyACM0 write_flash 0x0 the-game-box.bin

If the auto-reset fails: hold BOOT, tap RESET, release BOOT, then flash.

Wi-Fi: the pre-built image has no credentials — it boots straight into the setup wizard. API keys are compiled in, so the public binary has none; for live data you'll want to build from source with your own free keys (or the device still works for whatever ESPN RSS / on-demand endpoints allow).

Requires PlatformIO (espressif32@6.6.0, pulled automatically).

git clone https://github.com/BruteSource/gridiron-esp32s3
cd gridiron-esp32s3
cp include/credentials.h.example include/credentials.h
$EDITOR include/credentials.h      # add CFBD_KEY + BDL_KEY (Wi-Fi is on-screen)
$EDITOR include/config.h           # set TZ_STRING, SCREEN_ROTATION
pio run -t upload
pio device monitor                 # open a FRESH monitor after each reset

Single flashable image:

tools/make_release.sh              # -> dist/the-game-box.bin  (flash at 0x0)

• Networking on a FreeRTOS task pinned to core 0; touch + redraw on core 1 never stall during a fetch. Idle-0 watchdog disabled for that task.
• Each response is slurped into a PSRAM buffer in chunks (yielding between reads), then parsed with an ArduinoJson Filter — only the handful of fields used are kept.
• Scores come from balldontlie / CFBD; ESPN (site.web.api) is hit only on-demand for a live game's clock/PBP or the box score, plus a once-a-day scoreboard pull for NFL TV.
• On-demand fetches (schedule, news, stats, focused-game detail) are serviced via request flags between score polls.
• The UI renders to a full-screen LGFX_Sprite in PSRAM; a second sprite backs the score-change overlay.
• Settings / calibration / battery trend in NVS; the game-slate + TV cache in LittleFS.

src/
  lgfx_conf.h     LovyanGFX panel config (ILI9341)
  display.*       canvas sprite, backlight, Lime boot screen, touch calibration
  touch.*         FT6336 raw register reads + tap/drag gestures
  net.cpp         Wi-Fi, NTP, every fetch + filtered JSON parse (core 0)
  wifi_cfg.*      stored credentials + scan/join plumbing for the wizard
  games.*         Game struct, mutex-guarded store, schedule, PBP, LittleFS cache
  news.* stats.*  news + box-score stores
  cfbd_teams.h nfl_teams.h   abbreviation + colour tables
  battery.*       GPIO9 ADC, smoothing, LiPo curve, charge detection
  settings.*      NVS-backed Settings struct
  theme.*         8 RGB565 palettes
  anim.*          score-change celebration overlays
  ui_list / ui_detail / ui_schedule / ui_settings / ui_news / ui_stats / ui_wifi
  main.cpp        setup/loop, screen state machine, standby
tools/            offline JSON parse checks, make_release.sh

MIT — see LICENSE.