ruckieofficial/rusty-nano-frame

Rusty Nano Frame is a Rust firmware project that plays a short animated GIF on a small LCD screen connected to an ESP32-C3 microcontroller. The ESP32-C3 is a compact, inexpensive Wi-Fi chip common in hobbyist electronics. This project runs a smooth, looping 40-frame animation at full hardware speed, with no operating system underneath, just the bare chip and the code. The main challenge the project solves is storage space. The ESP32-C3 has only 4 megabytes of flash memory, which is not enough to hold raw animation frames. To fit the animation, the project compresses each frame individually using a fast algorithm called LZ4, cutting file sizes by up to 90 percent. When the device runs, it decompresses each frame on the fly in the chip's RAM and sends it to the display over a fast data connection running at 80 MHz. To use this project, you need an ESP32-C3 board wired to an ST7789 display. The README includes exact pin connections. If you want to use your own GIF, a Python helper script converts any GIF file into the compressed format the firmware expects. You then compile and flash the Rust code to your board with a single terminal command. If you prefer not to install the Rust toolchain, the repository also provides a ready-made binary you can flash using a Python utility or a browser-based web flasher. The project is minimal in scope. It does one thing well: playing a compressed GIF on a small display as fast as the hardware allows. There is no networking, no user interface, and no logic beyond the animation loop. It serves as a clean example of bare-metal Rust on a RISC-V embedded chip and could be a starting point for anyone who wants to add animated visuals to a hardware project.