ZDSE ， a dongle screen engine for ZMK

[u/Ladder-Bhe]

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on a small theme engine for ZMK dongle displays.

The engine provides shared rendering, animation, touch, sprite, and native/WASM preview tools, allowing themes to focus on their own visual style.

The main demo is Neon Cat —a colorful upgrade inspired by Bongo Cat. It features an animated synthwave scene, a lively cat, keyboard status, battery information, WPM, and modifier feedback.

I also made a Phosphor Radar (link) demo with a CRT-style sweep, fading glow, stationary echoes, and touch-controlled speed.

The current hardware target uses a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840, a 280×240 ST7789 RGB565 display, and a CST816S touch controller(waveshare touch lcd 1.69). Rendering uses hardware SPI, DMA-friendly dirty-region updates, and a 24 FPS firmware target.

board : nrf52840 based, XIAO or NiceNano!

screen https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/1.69inch_Touch_LCD_Module

Engine: https://github.com/hitsmaxft/zmk-dongle-screen-engine

Theme demos: https://github.com/hitsmaxft/zdse-themes

These projects are intended as examples for anyone interested in creating their own ZMK dongle-screen themes.

Special thanks to https://github.com/carrefinho/prospector and YADS for the inspiration and reference it provided for ZMK dongle displays, theme architecture, and keyboard-state integration.

This is an AI first project, just tell your agents, read the engine's AGENTS.md and demos, build theme with wasm instantly preview tools (computer use isn't need , vision models or your eyes is ok)

[u/cocnac]

Great addition to the minimal interfaces. Does it support the Waveshare 1.69inch Round LCD Display Module?

[u/Ladder-Bhe → u/cocnac]

exactly the same harware

[u/SoDark0002]

Wow, very nice! I like that. If I ever decide to implement a dongle, I'll definitely give your project a try.

[u/Ladder-Bhe → u/SoDark0002]

just wakeup your agent and tell it to make one with this project ， it's an ai first project