Tejas Patel
Tejas Patel
write to
tjs13.9@gmail.com
theme

The bench

Electronics

Microcontrollers, sensors, actuators and the small devices they turned into.

my part
Maker
when
2023 to 2025
context
Personal and university
on the bench
7 entries in the dated log
updated
A palm-sized ESP32 console running Snake, with 65535 as the high score on screen.
A hand holding a bare colour screen on its board, showing the Cosmic Knobulator menu with Discovery, Quiz and Story, wired to a knob, with a grey printed shell and a knob cap behind it.
Cosmic Knobulator,
A hand holding a two-inch ESP32-S3 touch board whose screen shows a live camera preview labelled LIVE, Touch to capture, framing a crumpled blanket.
A camera with a touch screen,

Warp Drive, working name Cosmic Knobulator

A grey 3D-printed enclosure with a knob and a small screen, the Warp Drive proof of concept.
The proof of concept in a first printed enclosure: a knob and a small screen drawing stars.

I built and coded the first proof of concept, a knob and a small screen, in a single day, by my own account. A photo of the breadboard is dated 21 March 2025. The full story is in the Warp Drive study.

The firmware in VS Code beside a Wokwi simulation of the board and its screen.
screen The firmware in VS Code beside a Wokwi simulation of the menu, 2 May 2025.
The blue Warp Drive shell held in both hands, its screen window still empty and a lime knob under the right thumb.
The blue unit with a lime knob. The earlier prints were grey.
Inside the blue Warp Drive shell: a coin vibration motor, a buzzer, a wrapped LiPo cell and hand-soldered wiring held in place with hot glue.

the knob's potentiometer

buzzer

flat battery

the knob's potentiometer

buzzer

flat battery

Inside the blue unit, with its board, 10 June 2025.

Games on a small screen

A palm-sized ESP32 console on its Snake title screen, the high score reading 65535, a joystick above the screen and a USB-C lead plugged in.
detail Snake on a palm-sized ESP32 console, 3 April 2025.
A joystick module and a TFT display, the controls for the ESP32 games.
The controls: a joystick module and a small TFT.

The high score reads 65535 because it’s unwritten EEPROM. The code reads two bytes of EEPROM for the score and never writes a starting value, so a fresh board shows erased flash.

The console runs four games from one modular library, Space Invaders, Flappy Bird, Snake and Breakout, with a joystick and a vibration motor for haptic feedback. The game files are dated 1 and 2 April 2025 and these photos 3 April, after the first Warp Drive breadboard.

Smart textiles

The smart-textile bench: a soldering station and a swatch with sensors and LEDs sewn in a grid.
A swatch with sensors and actuators sewn into the fabric in a grid, for a university project on wearable anxiety monitoring and guided breathing. 19 November 2023.

A speculative game

Four dot-matrix panels in a printed frame, one red pixel lit, for the speculative game.
Eight dot-matrix panels in a printed frame, one red pixel lit. 13 August 2023.
The open enclosure of the speculative game: two boards, a USB lead and colour-coded wiring.
Inside the box: a main board, sensor modules and colour-coded jumper wires, powered over USB.

Five sensors and eight dot-matrix panels in one box, a speculative game about how friends at a distance might play together.

The rest of the bench

A soft circuit on a wooden desk: felt shapes joined with conductive thread, crocodile clips, two 9 V batteries and an LED, with scissors and a pen beside them.
A soft circuit on the desk: felt shapes, conductive thread, crocodile clips and two 9 V batteries. 19 September 2023.
A hand-held sensor board in front of two screens showing its live data.
A sensor board, held in front of a screen of waveforms.

The attention lamp is another speculative design project: LEDs, a human presence sensor and one button, designed to help a person train their ultradian cycles of focus.

Tejas at his desk in headphones, a monitor and a games console beside him. To the right of the console is the Attention Lamp, a small orange box with a red LED on a stick.

the attention lamp

the attention lamp

1 April 2023.

On the bench

7 entries in the dated log

  1. Cosmic KnobulatorBare colour screen, a knob, jumper wires
  2. A camera with a touch screenESP32-S3, two-inch touch screen, LVGL
  3. Snake on a palm-sized consoleESP32, small TFT, joystick, vibration motor
  4. An e-ink habit trackerESP32, 2.13-inch e-paper, printed case
  5. A cube that changes colourFrosted cube, lit from inside
  6. Sensors and actuators on a fabric meshFabric mesh, sensors and actuators in a grid
  7. Eight dot-matrix panels, one red pixelDot-matrix panels in a printed frame
The whole log, newest first
next in the labRendersKeyShot and Creo renders.Read it
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