2025 · wearable hardware
Minecraft Compass
A lodestone compass that behaves like the item in the game, small enough to hold, designed as one object rather than a development board in a box. Simulator first, then a soldered prototype, then a first custom PCB and a printed shell.
Field demo — needle tracking heading on a 40-LED face.
Interactive firmware
40-LED face
A port of the program I used for software validation before hardware prototypes existed. The 40 LEDs fill the physical face outline — empty mask cells are not on the board. Power on, then turn heading — the needle is next to the control on purpose.
Desktop: drag heading. Phone: enable the device compass (HTTPS).
What I built
Summer 2025, after seeing physical Minecraft compasses online. I had just learned SolidWorks and wanted the silhouette, the needle, and the internals to be mine — not a fork of someone else’s board.
- Python simulator for the arrow, battery glyph, charging blink, and a low-power standby on an irregular 40-pixel face. The widget above is a port of that same validation program — the one I ran before any hardware existed.
- Proto 1: Seeed XIAO plus a hand-wired LED grid. Proved the parts; made intermittent solder joints painfully obvious.
- First EasyEDA PCB (Bedrock V1.0), assembled with pick-and-place: ESP32-C3, QMC5883L, charger, GPS header, 40 NeoPixels.
- Enclosure in SolidWorks, 3D-printed, brass inserts, 3500 mAh pack. Size was led by LED pitch until the board let me shrink it.
- Firmware moved toward C++ for a real low-power standby. Architecture and hardware are mine; much of the MCU code was written with AI assistance.
The useful lesson was packing and standby current — and that the display math had to exist before the plastic.
Board and enclosure
Front lid — LED window cover, same charcoal print as the enclosure body.
PCB export from EasyEDA.
Enclosure body — matte charcoal, same lighting as the other prints.
Display stand — printed holder for the compass.
Schematic
