Engineer and maker Victor Barahona has built a compact gadget inspired by Star Trek’s famous Tricorder family of multi-functional sensor-packed devices: the Tinycorder.
“Tinycorder is a small multi-purpose device that seeks to pay tribute to the mythical tricorder of the sci-fi series Star Trek,” Barahona explains of his creation, in translation from the original Spanish. “It includes several sensors, as well as a high-resolution and low-consumption screen that allows us to use it as electronic badge.”
The compact Tinycorder is part badge, part sensing platform — and all inspired by Star Trek’s Tricorder. (📷: Victor Barahona)
Barahona’s device is driven by a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 itself a compact host for an Espressif ESP32-C3 microcontroller — giving it a single 32-bit RISC-V core running at up to 160MHz, 400kB of static RAM (SRAM), 4MB of flash memory, and both single-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (BLE) radios with Bluetooth Mesh support. The screen is a Sharp Memory LCD, a low-power black-and-white display panel tprovides a higher refresh rate than ePaper while drawing much less power than traditional LCDs.
Elsewhere are three push-button switches, used to control the gadget’s user interface and choose from the three integrated sensors: an ams osram AS7341 11-channel spectral color sensor, a Sensirion SCD40 photoacoustic carbon dioxide sensor, and a Bosh Sensortec BMP280 piezo-resistive temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure sensor. To further expand its capabilities, though perhaps not quite as far as the on-screen Tricorders that inspired the project, there are two analog input pins accessible at the front for external devices.
The hardware is squeezed into a two part 3D-printed case, measuring just 75×85×10mm (around 2.95×3.34×0.39″) and weighing a lightweight 70g (around 0.15lbs). As you’d expect from a device that doubles as a badge — complete with a screen displaying Barahona’s contact information, including scannable QR Code — there’s also a mounting point for a lanyard at the top of the case.
More details on the project are available, in Spanish, on GitHub; Barahona is planning to release STL files for the case and source code for the firmware under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3, but had not yet done so at the time of writing.
