When it is up and running, the Fruit Jam drives a Dell monitor over a DVI-D connection and fills it with a sphere of colorful swirling spirals, glowing rings, arcs and twinkling particles on a black background. The picture holds 640x480 at 60 FPS while sixteen thousand particles are simulated. Up close, the sphere keeps rotating and morphing its multicolored geometric shapes, so it never sits still for a second.
The project is a port of the maker's own Bubble Universe visualization to the Adafruit Fruit Jam, a mini computer built around the Pico 2. The underlying algorithm comes from another designer, and porting this piece is the maker's first move on any new platform. In my view that is a smart way to put a fresh board through its paces. Anyone who wants to poke at it can, since the source code lives in a public GitHub repository.
A couple of hardware details stand out. Printed markings on the board itself name an ESP32-S3 WiFi coprocessor, MicroSD, DVI video and audio, a Qwiic output and two USB ports. The schematic instead labels that coprocessor slot as an ESP32-C6, alongside USB C power and data, DVI-D video output and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Which silicon actually sits in that slot is the one thing I would love to see cleared up.
It is not locked to the Fruit Jam either: the same code runs on a plain Pico 2 with an Adafruit PiCowBell HSTX DVI attached, and the maker shared a clip of that arrangement too. Seeing the identical particle field working on two different boards makes this one of the more satisfying ports I have come across lately.
Project by Movie Vertigo. Watch it on their YouTube channel: