You are at your desk, deep in a project, when you suddenly wonder how your printer is doing. Then you realize you need to grab your phone, open an app, and wait for it to load. Sound familiar? PrintSphere on GitHub solves exactly this—but it uses a round display. I had no round screen, but I did have a drawer full of rectangular Open Nextion panels. Problem solved.
Hardware selection was straightforward—the ONX3248G035 3.5″ model. The Open Nextion board is built for serious DIY enthusiasts: ESP32-S3 processor, maxed-out RAM and flash, rich peripheral interfaces suitable for all kinds of projects. Honestly for a print status display you do not need half of that horsepower, but hey, why not. The only real requirement was a decent-looking desktop stand.
Open Nextion source material is incredibly comprehensive—power schematics, hardware framework diagrams, 2D DWG files, 3D STP models, reference project source code, even an online flasher tool and source code included. With 3D drawings on hand there is no need to measure or draft from scratch—shell adaptation was a non-issue. I knocked out a clean desktop stand in about ten minutes—almost embarrassingly simple, but it works. The display panel itself has adhesive edges pre-applied: peel, stick, done. Firm and secure. Power comes through a USB port on the left side. The base STEP file is on MakerWorld—anyone who needs it can just print it directly.
Hardware done, software next. PrintSphere is also ESP32-based, so the underlying drivers barely needed touching. The real work was adapting display and touch initialization for Open Nextion specific hardware and rebuilding the UI from scratch to suit the new rectangular form factor and interaction patterns. The port went smoother than expected—most of the headaches were screen init sequences and touch calibration. The end result looked good and worked well.
Following the original project open-source license, I have published the port on GitHub: the Open Nextion PrintSphere project page. If you do not want to clone, compile, and flash yourself—and happen to have an Open Nextion screen—grab the pre-built bin from the releases page and flash it using Open Nextion web-based flasher tool—select local flash, pick your bin, set address to 0x00, done. No build environment needed.
Looking ahead, I plan to keep updating the project—adding support for the 2.8″ screen variant and verifying compatibility with more printer models. Feel free to Star the repo to follow along.
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