The Ultimate Arsenal Fan Accessory

Mark

21 May 2026 — 2 min read

*Built Exactly One Week Too Late... PL Season Finished

We’ve all been there. You’re rummaging through your electronics graveyard and you spot them: a spare 3.2" OLED display and an ESP32 microchip just gathering dust. Your inner engineer immediately whispers, “We could build something with that.”

Then you remember your 15-year-old daughter is a massive Arsenal fan (thanks dad). And then it hits me: A dedicated, hardware-based Premier League table and team tracker.

The logic was flawless. The execution? Swift. The timing? Impeccable.

I successfully finished building and coding the ESP32 PL Tracker just in time for... the final whistle of the entire season. Yes, the matches are over, the points are tallied, and the dust has settled.

!! The big bright side: The Gunners won the '25/26 league 🔴⚪!!

Now she gets to stare at a beautiful, glowing, high-contrast screen permanently cementing Arsenal at the very top of the table for the next three months. If you ask me, that’s not bad timing; that’s strategic engineering.

The Tech Under the Hood

Because I used a few private network libraries I already had lying around, the software side came together over a weekend.

The Brains: An ESP32-WROOM-32 dev board handles everything from fetching stats to handling OTA firmware updates.

The Glass: A monochrome orange OLED (driven by the SSD1322 controller over 4-wire HW SPI). It’s crisp, bright, and makes top-of-the-table stats look absolutely glorious.
The Pipeline: It hooks right into my home automation MQTT broker to publish device status and listen for display brightness commands (so it doesn't blind her at night). It also serves up a local web interface at http://espPLMonitor.local for manual updates and quick reboots.

Finishing Touches

Right now, it’s sitting on my workbench as a glorious sandwich of loose wires, development pins, and green PCB. To make it acceptable for a teenager's bedroom, I am currently printing a custom 3D enclosure in rugged, sleek PLA+. Naturally, it will be printed in a very specific shade of Arsenal red, um, black.

Will it actually do anything useful between now and August? Not really. But until the next season kicks off, it serves as a beautiful, glowing monument to Manchester City dropping points.

If you want to build your own (perhaps slightly earlier in the season next time), you can check out the source code, check the pin configurations, and view the full setup guide over on GitHub.

Check out the full project on GitHub: esp32_PL_tracker

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My GitHub Projects

A quick reference to all my public GitHub repositories at github.com/merlinmb, covering ESP32 hardware projects, home automation tools, and various utilities. Repository Description Language esp32_cosensorCO₂ monitor using a Sensirion SCD4x sensor on ESP32, with a 256×64 OLED sparkline display, MQTT telemetry, and a built-in web server