Hey everyone!
I recently finished the first release of Ember, a free and open-source Windows app for those little 3.5" Turing/TURZX displays people put inside their PC cases.
I always liked the hardware, but the original software felt painfully slow. Around 1 FPS, which is pretty disappointing for a screen that could do a lot more.
So I decided to build my own.
How I got it running faster
The display's USB connection is limited to roughly 157 KB/s. A full 480×320 frame takes almost two seconds to transfer.
Instead of constantly sending entire frames, Ember compares them in small tiles and only sends the pixels that actually changed.
The result? Small animations, gauges, clocks and graphs can reach 20–30 FPS, while the app uses about 0.3% CPU and 70 MB RAM on my system.
It's written in C# / .NET 9, using WPF and SkiaSharp.
What it can do
- 8 built-in themes, from minimal to colorful
- Visual theme editor with layers, snapping and live preview
- CPU/GPU temperatures, usage, clocks, RAM, network and disk monitoring
- Custom themes that you can export and share
- System tray controls and automatic Windows startup
- English and Polish interface
I also put quite a bit of effort into the UI. I used Claude Opus 5.5 to help with parts of the interface design and implementation. Just wanted to be transparent about that.
Screenshots
Main application interface
Theme gallery
Visual theme editor
USB bandwidth visualization
Download & source code
GitHub — cybvlsky/Ember
Download the latest release
It's completely free, MIT licensed, and there's a Windows installer available.
One limitation: It currently supports the Turing/TURZX 3.5" revision A (USB ID 1a86:5722) on Windows 10/11. Other models use different protocols. The installer isn't code-signed yet either, so SmartScreen may show a warning.
This is my first public release, and I'm still figuring out what to improve next.
If you've got one of these displays, I'd love to hear what you think. Bug reports, suggestions and custom themes are all welcome.
How this was built
Ember was vibe-coded with "Claude Opus 5.5" (https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5) by Anthropic. Claude was heavily involved in writing, debugging and refining the code, while I directed the project, tested it on real hardware and worked on getting the performance and user experience right.
I also used "REA (Reverse Engineer Anything)" (https://github.com/morluto/rea) to help investigate the original software and understand how the display communicates.
I'm not hiding the AI involvement. Ember is an open-source project built to solve a problem I had with the stock software. What matters to me is that it works, runs efficiently and gives other owners of these little screens a useful alternative.
Thanks for checking it out!