ESP32 Forum

Hi all, longish-time lurker, first post in General Discussion.

I have a slightly unusual use case in mind and wanted to ask before I overbuild it. As a side project this year I wrote a tennis prediction algorithm in Python, basically an Elo rating fed with ATP and WTA results, with separate ratings per surface (clay, hard, grass) and a small adjustment for rest days and travel. It runs fine on a PC and spits out a daily CSV of upcoming matches with probabilities.

What I would love is a little always-on desk gadget: an ESP32 that pulls that CSV over WiFi a few times a day and shows the next few matchups and their model probabilities on a small e-paper or OLED panel. No heavy compute on the device, just fetch, parse and render.

Questions for people who have done similar dashboard things:
- Is parsing a small CSV/JSON over HTTPS on an ESP32 painful in practice, or fine with the current IDF/Arduino HTTP client?
- E-paper vs OLED for something refreshed only a few times a day, any regrets either way?
- Any memory gotchas I should expect when holding a few dozen rows of text in RAM?

Not looking for hand-holding on the model side, that part lives on the PC. Just want to know if the display side is as simple as I am hoping. Thanks.

Should work just fine. Just as an other option: you could also decide to generate the image on the PC side, then send that over to the ESP32; that might make it easier to modify what's displayed later on. I'd personally use E-ink for stuff that is not often refreshed (unless the 'blink' that a refresh does is irritating to you), first of all that allows you to run the device in deep sleep most of the time which enables running it off a battery, and secondly because a static image tends to burn in on OLED-based displays.