The lab

Bitcoin on the Glyph Matrix

The Nothing Phone 3 has a small LED matrix on the back that Nothing lets you write toys for. Mine shows the Bitcoin price. Long-press to switch between the price and a Bitcoin glyph; a background service refreshes every five minutes. Phone 3 only, because it is the only one with the matrix.

Discipline
Hardware & Firmware
Year
2025 · Public repo
Stack
Kotlin · Android · Glyph Matrix SDK · CoinGecko API

Nothing ship a Glyph Matrix SDK for the Phone 3 and a debug flag that has to be set over adb before the phone will load an unsigned toy. That is most of the work: the display is a small monochrome grid, and drawing legible digits on it is a typography problem more than a rendering one.

The rest is a background service, a five-minute refresh, and a long-press handler that toggles between the icon and the number.

It only runs on the Phone 3. Every other Nothing handset — Phone 1, 2, 2a, 3a — has the older glyph strips rather than the matrix, and there is no graceful degradation to write.

Open to interesting problems

Got something
that needs building?

hello@louisreed.co.uk