Why I’m building a stock ticker for your desk, and why it isn’t another app

Checking a stock price takes two seconds. Then you are in a brokerage app, then a news feed, then a chart you did not mean to open, and ten minutes are gone. The price was never the problem. The phone was.

Deskcast is my answer: a small LED panel that sits beside your monitor and shows the one price you actually care about, all day, without asking anything of you.

What it is

A 256 × 128 mm panel of 128 × 64 RGB LEDs, readable from 40 centimetres to four metres. It shows one stock, ETF or crypto at a time:

• The live price, refreshed as often as every 15 seconds (you choose, up to once an hour).
• The day’s move, in green or red, so the mood of the day reads before you read a number.
• The intraday chart, drawn against the wall clock, so a quiet morning looks quiet.
• The whole US trading day: pre-market from 4:00, the session, and after-hours until 20:00 New York time, with a countdown to the next bell. Crypto runs around the clock.

Market news appears on the same screen, with a short chime when a new headline lands. Quiet hours keep it silent at night.

The idea: a glance, not a session

Most finance tools are built to keep you inside them. A desk display is the opposite: it gives you the answer and lets you get back to work. You look up, you see the number and its colour, you look down again. The interaction is measured in seconds.

Three rules follow from that, and they drive every design decision:

1. No app to install. Setup happens over the panel’s own Wi-Fi network, from a phone. Your settings live on deskcast.app.
2. No broker connection. It only shows prices. There is no login, balance or portfolio to hand over, and nothing to hack.
3. Nothing to babysit. It updates itself over the air, with signed releases, and recovers from a bad update on its own.

Why LEDs, and why hardware at all

A browser tab can show a price too. But a tab is one more thing to lose among forty others, and a phone widget still lives on the device that distracts you. A lit panel in the corner of your desk is ambient: always there, never in the way, and it reads from across the room.

LED is a deliberate choice over e-paper. It is lit, so it is readable in a dim room, and it refreshes quickly enough to show a price moving, not a price from a minute ago. The cost is real engineering: a panel like this has no controller of its own, so the microcontroller has to stream every row of every frame, continuously, while also holding encrypted connections open and updating itself.

Under the hood

An ESP32-S3 drives the panel directly. A small backend sits between the device and the market data, so the display only ever talks to one API. Most of the interesting problems are in the firmware, where internal RAM is the scarce resource, and I am writing those up one by one. The first is the map of the whole system: Building a live stock ticker on an ESP32-S3.

Where it stands

Deskcast is an independent hardware project and it is not on sale yet. The price and ship date are not final. Prices may be delayed and nothing it shows is investment advice: it is for keeping an eye on a position, not for trading off.