The trickiest part of this build seems to have been the display. The round ST77916 panel garbled when driven through Arduino_GFX's QSPI bus, so the maker moved it over to esp_lcd in quad mode, fed from internal DMA buffers, and got it working properly. That kind of swap, dropping a familiar graphics stack for the lower-level driver, is exactly the right call when a panel misbehaves.
The project itself is neat: the maker wanted their free world-radio site, Air Drift, to exist as a small object on the desk, so they wrote firmware for a Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-1.85 board. Nothing needs soldering, and installation happens entirely in the browser: plug in the board, open the install page, press Install, and scan the WiFi QR code shown on screen, thanks to native USB and ESP Web Tools in Chrome or Edge. The firmware even updates itself from GitHub releases.
Plenty of details stand out. Audio decoding runs on core 0 with the UI on core 1, so the two never fight. The stream buffer and decoded cover images live in the 8 MB octal PSRAM, with JPEGDEC and PNGdec decoding in small chunks into buffers the maker controls. Pressing Drift lands on a random station, with countries weighted by station count, and if a stream does not answer the radio just drifts onward. Station and song names run around the rim of the 360x360 screen, and left alone while playing, the display turns into a spectrum radiating from the album cover.
One trade-off worth noting: mbedTLS only allocates internal RAM on the S3, so during an HTTPS stream there is room for roughly one more handshake. The maker routes the directory over plain HTTP and stops the old stream before each drift to stay within that limit. The maker also says the chip is not fast enough for a sliding view of the earth, which that same chip's dual cores probably cannot rescue.