u/TechnicalPirate95

I've been slowly building out my desk for a while, and the one thing I never found was a desk display that can show my portfolio metrics. The commercial options are pretty much just boxes with so many LEDs you may as well just look on your phone. I wanted something retro, and these boring-ass options weren't cutting it.

So I built one myself (duh). What it does:

• Stocks, crypto, and forex modes — live prices for whatever you configure
• Invest mode — pulls your actual portfolio P&L directly from Trading 212 or Interactive Brokers in real time
• Rotary dial - to cycle through modes and navigate, nothing else needed
• Configured entirely through a browser portal on your local network — no app and no account

The enclosure is fully custom, designed in CAD and 3D printed specifically around the internal components, so nothing is rattling around in a repurposed project box. Each one is hand-assembled and I build them myself.

The display is a dot-matrix LED panel, which I chose deliberately over LCD or OLED because of the retro preference I mentioned, which gives it more of that trading terminal feel rather than a phone propped up on a stand

A few weeks ago I picked up a Raspberry Pi Pico W with the fairly modest goal of learning embedded C. I'd been writing software professionally for a couple of years but had never touched anything at the hardware level, and I wanted to understand what was actually going on beneath the abstractions. I started with an LED matrix display and basic stuff like getting pixels to light up and that was fine for about a week before I started wondering what else I could actually do with it.

The thing that changed everything was discovering the GPIO input pins. I'd been thinking of the Pico purely as an output device, but once I wired up a KY-040 rotary encoder and got it talking to the board, the whole project shifted.

A few weeks later, here's what it does:

- Stocks mode — pulls live prices for a configurable watchlist
- Crypto mode — same thing, any pair you want
- Forex mode — live FX rates, configurable pairs
- Invest mode — your actual portfolio P&L from Trading 212 or Interactive Brokers, updating in real time via a wrapper over the yfinance API
- Weather mode — local weather derived from your settings
- Everything navigated with the rotary encoder, no app needed

The firmware is written in C and handles WiFi, data fetching, display rendering, and a browser-based config portal all running concurrently on the Pico W. I chose a 32x8 display because I wanted to build something retro and the low resolution handled that great, like a Bloomberg terminal rather than something littered with LEDs it's basically just a phone with a stand.

Quick-cut build video too: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3UFcVyQCaM8

Happy to go deep on any part of the build in the comments : ) I'm also not too experienced with Raspberry Pi or microcontrollers, so if anyone has any suggestions please share!!

A few weeks ago I picked up a Raspberry Pi Pico W with the fairly modest goal of learning embedded C. I'd been writing software professionally for a couple of years but had never touched anything at the hardware level, and I wanted to understand what was actually going on beneath the abstractions. I started with an LED matrix display and basic stuff like getting pixels to light up and that was fine for about a week before I started wondering what else I could actually do with it.

The thing that changed everything was discovering the GPIO input pins. I'd been thinking of the Pico purely as an output device, but once I wired up a KY-040 rotary encoder and got it talking to the board, the whole project shifted.

A few weeks later, here's what it does:

- Stocks mode — pulls live prices for a configurable watchlist
- Crypto mode — same thing, any pair you want
- Forex mode — live FX rates, configurable pairs
- Invest mode — your actual portfolio P&L from Trading 212 or Interactive Brokers, updating in real time via a wrapper over the yfinance API
- Weather mode — local weather derived from your settings
- Everything navigated with the rotary encoder, no app needed

The firmware is written in C and handles WiFi, data fetching, display rendering, and a browser-based config portal all running concurrently on the Pico W. I chose a 32x8 display because I wanted to build something retro and the low resolution handled that great, like a Bloomberg terminal rather than something littered with LEDs it's basically just a phone with a stand.

Quick-cut build video too: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3UFcVyQCaM8

Happy to go deep on any part of the build in the comments : ) I'm also not too experienced with Raspberry Pi or microcontrollers, so if anyone has any suggestions please share!!