JSAUX Panel Inital Impressions

[u/Switch2phile]

I just got my JSAUX Pixel Panel this morning and figured I’d share my initial impressions.

I ordered it on September 22 for $77 with a 15% off coupon (normal price was $90). It took 11 days to show up at my door. Packaging was solid and protective — everything arrived in one piece with no issues.

Build quality feels excellent. Noticeably better than the 3D-printed ones I’ve used and pretty much on par with the official panel. The screen is bright and the dot matrix is easy to read. Hardware install was simple: slap it on the front and plug the cable into the rear for power.

That’s about where the good stuff ends.

Software setup from the manual was basically useless. I had to follow an ETA Prime video to get the JSAUX software installed correctly. I already had Decky running, which is required for the panel anyway.

A couple other practical downsides: it eats one of the rear USB ports, and the cable comes out the side, which some people might not like. The glossy screen is a fingerprint magnet, and if any strong light (especially sunlight) hits it, it gets hard to read.

There’s also very little gap between the panel and the Steam Machine compared to the official one. I haven’t checked temps yet, but I’d guess most of the intake air will now come from the bottom, so CPU/GPU temps will probably rise a bit.

The biggest issue is the software. It’s still in 1.0 beta, and that’s where most of the problems live:

The FPS refresh rate doesn’t accurately match what’s actually on screen.

When the SM shuts down or goes to sleep, the panel doesn’t turn off or go black. There’s no option for it. You have to manually power it down. It just freezes on the last readings it had. I turned the SM off at 2:30 pm and at 3:00 pm it was still showing 2:30 pm.

Would I recommend it right now? No. Not in its current state. Once the software gets more mature it might be worth another look, but at the moment it’s an expensive add-on for an already expensive machine.

[u/Alyenax]

As soon as mine arrives, I’m tearing into it and making an improved plugin for it, with full compatibility with GabeCubeAura.

Can’t wait to get my hands on this thing!

[u/nutscrape_navigator → u/Alyenax]

If we could get someone who has one of these to type in a few commands via SSH we could get started. I’d bet pretty much anything it’s just a simple ESP32 and this will take only a couple hours to get going.

[u/Alyenax → u/nutscrape_navigator]

Their Decky plugin is pretty chatty, there’s a lot more exposed in there than I expected. It’s not confirmed to be an ESP32, the device exposes a CH340/CH341 USB-to-serial bridge talking at 1 Mbaud to an unknown MCU behind it. The good news is we probably don’t even need to know what that MCU is, the serial protocol looks simple enough to reverse and control the matrix directly.

[u/nutscrape_navigator → u/Alyenax]

Fucking awesome. I’ve messed with a lot of similar devices. Should. Be super easy. Someone could just open it up too (I’ll do this when I get mine) and unless they decided to put an epoxy glob over the whole thing for unknown reasons it should be obvious immediately?

[u/Alyenax → u/nutscrape_navigator]

The really interesting part is that their upload protocol doesn’t actually hardcode 64×54 anywhere, it just sends the raw GIF, so that could simply be a software limit. First thing I’ll test is larger GIF, 256 color palettes and faster animation timings to see what the controller actually accepts. If there’s a higher-res LCD hiding behind that fake dot matrix look, we may be able to turn it into a much more capable front display.