A maker known as brunokeymolen built a video alarm clock using a Waveshare ESP32-P4 module with a 720x720 pixel square display. The device plays user-loaded video clips as alarms, stored on a built-in SD card reader, with the module's RTC handling timekeeping. The full project code is on GitHub under the name videoalarmclock.
This is almost entirely a software project. The only custom hardware is a 3D-printed stand. The catch: video files must be AVI containers with 720x720 MJPEG video and PCM stereo audio at 44.1 kHz, and filenames must follow 8.3 FAT rules, eight characters maximum, no special characters. The Waveshare module itself is currently out of stock.
Read the original for the implementation details around video decoding on the P4 and how the SD card library was handled. The ESP32-P4 is a relatively new chip with a faster CPU core and more memory than prior ESP32 variants, and this project is one of the first practical consumer-style builds demonstrating what that headroom actually buys you.
[READ ORIGINAL →]