Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) was designed as a board featuring an ESP32-based system, a resistive touchscreen, and an SD card. Alun Morris converted Kiwix’s offline Wikipedia packages into a custom format, enabling access to Wikipedia, including its images, on the CYD without an internet connection.
The project is also connected to the ESP32 web browser Morris previously developed.
Why it matters
This work offers a practical example of how a broad archive of information can be used on low-cost, portable hardware that is not continuously connected to the internet. Converting Kiwix content into a custom format shows that offline access requires not only storing the data but also creating a usable display structure. SD card support and the touchscreen demonstrate that this approach is based on a directly usable interface rather than remaining merely a technical experiment. The connection established with the developer’s earlier ESP32 web browser also indicates that the project combines different forms of offline use on the same hardware rather than serving as a single application. However, the news article does not provide details about the scope of the archive or its usage limitations.
Background
Cheap is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we published a news article mentioning this name in the last 90 days; that article is dated August 26, 2026.