This teeny tiny TV plays The Simpsons all day, every day

A Raspberry Pi Zero, a 2.8″ Waveshare screen, and a little 3D printing magic is all fans of The Simpsons need to create a miniature perpetual watch party. That first part is a tiny lie — you need wires and stuff — but we’ll get into that later.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi Zero WH
• 2.8″ Waveshare screen
• Adafruit Mono 2.5W Audio Amplifier
• 1.5” speaker

A comprehensive list of every single wire, SD card and whatnot features in the build guide.

How is it made?

So long as your Raspberry Pi has header pins, you can just click the Waveshare screen directly onto them. Easy peasy and solder-free, just the way we like it. The teeny speaker gets a boost from Adafruit’s amplifier, and the minuscule knobs on the front actually work to adjust the volume and turn it on and off.

The 3D-printed parts take about ten hours to complete. We insist you match the purple filament, as Brandon did, so it looks just like the Simpsons family’s TV. All the STL files are available to download.

Videos playing on the tiny TV need to be encoded in a specific format before you put them onto a thumb drive and transfer them to the Pi Zero. There’s a section on this in the build guide, and you can copy Brandon’s video encoding script.

Build your own The Simpsons TV

We came across this build thanks to The Talking Sasquach, but they were inspired by Brandon Withrow’s design, which he posted on reddit ages ago. So many redditors asked questions wanting to build their own mini TV that Brandon took the time to put together this excellent tutorial, complete with The Simpsons GIFs. The Talking Sasquach’s video (above) is also brilliant if you prefer to learn that way; it’s detailed and doesn’t rush through any part of the build process.