Warp Drive · Tejas Patel

What it is

Warp Drive is a desk toy for children aged 6 to 12. Turn the knob up and the stars streak past; bring it back to zero and you drop out of warp, four times in five in front of one of 18 things in space, from a comet to the Ring Nebula. The fifth time it is empty space. I wired it, drew the shell and printed it myself. AI coding assistants wrote most of the firmware; I set what it should do, tested it on the device and fixed what they got wrong. Then I listed it on my own shop. A handful went out, and some were sold.

A starfield was running on my bench by 21 March 2025, on an ESP8266 board with a 128 by 128 screen and a knob. The work was everything after that: a shell, a second button, sound, light and a buzz, and a unit finished enough to put on a shop page.

The blue Warp Drive on its Quiz screen: 'Identify the object' with Ring Nebula selected, both red LEDs lit and the lime knob at the top right. — The blue unit flat on, in Quiz mode. The width is from the final CAD.

Breadboard to shelf

The builds I photographed, in order as far as I can date them. The dates come from the photos and the files around them; the first printed box has no dated photo, and it is the box I exported from CAD on 23 and 24 March.

21 March 2025: an ESP8266 board, a 128 by 128 ST7735 screen and a knob. Then the first printed box, in March, the grey handheld with a loop (by 17 April), the grey builds laid out with the 2-inch 240 by 320 bench rigs of May, and the blue unit, photographed in June, that I listed for sale.

Five decisions

Each one is dated by the file or the photo it shows up in.

decision 1

Twelve CAD exports in eighteen days

CAD line drawings of twelve Shapr3D exports of the Warp Drive shell, 23 March to 10 April 2025, at one scale: a plain box with a screen window and a lid, an L-shaped body with the screen on one side and the knob on the other, and a split shell with a loop and a button cap. — CAD drawing

I drew the shell in Shapr3D, and twelve of its exports fall in eighteen days, a few of them only a minute or three apart. The first three, on 23 and 24 March, are a plain box with a window for the screen and a lid, the first box I printed. On 7 April it became an L, the screen on one side and the knob on the other, and by that night it was two halves with a loop and a cap for one button. The last exports, on 8 and 10 April, refine those halves into the grey handheld in the April photos. I printed the shells myself, on the Flashforge Inventor I had during development; my printer now is a Bambu P2S.

12exportsmeasured · sourceShapr3D export filenames in Cosmic Knobulator/CAD/archive, 23 Mar 2025 17:10 to 10 Apr 2025 00:01in 18 days, 23 March to 10 April

decision 2

A bigger screen, with room for words

A hand holding a bare 2-inch colour screen on its board, its menu titled Cosmic Knobulator with Discovery, Quiz and Story, wired to a potentiometer with a black and white knob, a grey printed shell behind.

By 9 May I had a 2-inch, 240 by 320 screen on the bench, wired to a knob and showing a three-mode menu under the working name, Cosmic Knobulator. The extra room is what Story mode uses: a paragraph of narration under each object. The firmware asks for PSRAM for its sprites and falls back to the heap if it can’t, and its loop aims at about 60 frames a second.

4.7×the pixelsmeasured · source128 × 128 = 16,384 px (V1 header, ST7735) against 240 × 320 = 76,800 px (User_Setup.h:87-91, ST7789; ino:240-241)of the first screen

decision 3

A loop on a bag, then a box on a desk

The grey handheld prototype hanging by its loop from a blue S-carabiner on a backpack strap, its WARP DRIVE Discovery Mode screen upside down because it hangs.

The grey handheld had a loop, and on 11 May it was clipped to my backpack with a carabiner. Hanging there, the screen reads upside down. People didn’t find the handheld ergonomic, and I took the shell on as a redesign exercise. A later body in CAD, on 12 May, is a flat box 75 by 68 mm that sits on a desk with the screen the right way up, and it read much better for the kind of device the toy was turning into. That box is the shape that went on sale.

decision 4

A second button, for more

Warp Drive in blue, its screen on the main menu: Discovery, Quiz, Story, with the lime knob beside it and one blue and one red LED lit.

The handheld had one button, and its screen said what it did: “KNOB:SEL BTN:GO”. On 17 May the firmware gained a second one, and I gave it the extra jobs. In Discovery it opens a fact about what you found, in Story a fact about the stop, and in Quiz a helpline that marks two wrong answers. From 22 May it also opens the sound and light settings on the menu. The first button stays go and back.

decision 5

Wi-Fi off, everything drawn on the chip

The inside of the blue Warp Drive shell: a coin vibration motor, a buzzer, a small microcontroller on the back of the display board, a wrapped LiPo cell, hand-soldered wiring and hot glue.

The board went from an ESP8266 to an ESP32 and then to the ESP32-S3 Super Mini in this unit. Every object is drawn in code on it, in files like comet.h and ring_nebula.h, with no images to load. I switched Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off in setup to save the battery, which also means there’s no app and no account. The motor buzzes harder the faster you warp, after a short burst at ignition, and the buzzer and LEDs can be turned off from the menu. Inside, it’s hand-soldered and hot-glued, and it looks it.

Play it

This is the toy’s Discovery mode, ported to TypeScript and running in your browser: the same 18 objects, beeps, lights and buzz. Quiz and Story aren’t ported; they live on the toy.

Loading the toy’s ported Discovery mode.

Turn the knob up and the stars streak; bring it back to zero and you drop out in front of something four times in five, and in empty space the fifth. No object comes back until you have seen all 18, and each one stays until you turn the knob up or go back to the menu. The page asks an Android phone to vibrate while a hand is on the toy and for a few seconds after, and on iOS 18 it clicks a hidden switch, which should give a tick. When I tried it on phones, it worked on some of them, as far as I remember.

Hold the left button for three seconds and the toy says goodbye: “Designed on earth”, my name and my mark. That screen went into the firmware on 4 September 2025, and the face in the corner of this site is a redrawing of it.

What I’d change

Powered off with a long press, the toy only went into deep sleep, and the notes in the firmware folder say the battery drained too quickly. The screen never slept, the two LEDs weren’t fully off and the screen’s pins were left floating. In November 2025 I changed the firmware to deal with all three, working with an AI assistant, and I haven’t measured the result. The notes name one more drain: the knob is a potentiometer wired across the 3.3 V rail, which on paper draws about 0.33 mA all the time. The fix they list is a transistor that cuts its power, a hardware change. It hasn’t gone into a board since. Carl Sagan is why I started looking at the night sky, and Warp Drive is my way of handing that to a child. It runs on curiosity: turn the knob and you find something new. Every object comes with a fact, the animations had to feel real, and the lights, sounds and buzz make finding one something you feel as well as read. Quiz mode brings the facts back so they stick, and Story mode tries to tell the sky the way Sagan did.

outcomes

What it is

Breadboard to shelf

Five decisions

Play it