This is me. I just put up an LCARS MQTT logger and a clock with touch support, on a Raspberry Pi 2B V1.1 with a 3.5' TFT touchscreen, all of which I bought for that purpose
10 years ago. I took a few stabs at it over the years, but in that time I also married and started a family and ultimately could never find enough time or sustained drive to do it.
Five days ago, I stumbled upon that package again, and in between my work tasks I casually chatted with o3 on how to get that screen to show something. I explored my original idea (driving via SPI interface directly) but that turned out to be a dead-end - and then went back to the framebuffer approach (system overlay handles the screen, I write to /dev/fb0); o3 made me a quick prototype to prove the concept - and then I fired up Aider with gemini-2.5-pro, and got the MVP the same day. I casually iterated on it over the next 4 days, improving performance, functionality, style and adding touch support.
I can tell you, if not for LLMs, that board would continue to gather dust in the drawer for the next decade. Instead, I'm on my way to extending this to realize my other old dream - making it into LCARS A/C control panel to replace the vendor-provided wall-mounted one.
Also, in the past couple months, I explored many other ideas and did a few prototypes, and started feeling again the energy I last had in high school. LLMs are just that good at removing the "blank page syndrome" and making every incremental task just more cost-effective, to the point they start to fit in my otherwise busy adult schedule.
