Physical Digital Ad

Published: 8 February 2026 Updated: 15 February 2026, 01:14 UTC

Intro

One day at work last year, one of my coworkers brought in these physical digital advertisements. Apparently, the YMCA that he is on the board of recieved 9 of these trash electronics. he showed us one of them that he had already modified and had pushed the pilot episode of The Simpsons on it.

The device

the device itself is an LCD attached to three buttons (play/pause, volume up and volume down) and a speaker. I peeled off back to expose the electronics which allows you to see the impressively large battery, memory, storage, speaker, buttons, and a hall effect sensor. inside the front panel there is a magnet hidden, which the hall effect sensor detects and tells the board when to turn on (the device is open) or off (the device is closed) I think it’s really cool to look at and work with. I love hall effect sensors, they’re so versitile and useful 10/10 device

my friends and i looked up the hardware on the device before actually plugging the device into anything. it turns out the main microchip is some random company from china (unsurprising). apparently this unique style of advert must be popular because i found the company that made it, and this is what their business model is based on. they sell these electroncis as

The Software

by looking a little closer, you can see an exposed usb-c port. its insane to me that they just use a usb-c to do any of this. anyway, i took the advice of my coworker and plugged the ad into my laptop. i used my own usb-c to usb cord. sure enough it popped up as a usb device on my laptop!

My modifications

once i had the device plugged in, we downloaded a youtube video and pushed it to the device. the video that my friends and i landed on for pushing to the device is an AI video of will smith eating spaghetti. it is an incredibly old meme by now, but the video was perfect for this kind of cursed project. unfortunately, this caused the device registered as empty. however, with a little rescaling of the video size, the device was finally (correctly) on the device.

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