TOS Tricorder

A working TOS-era tricorder. Two displays, real sensors, ten menus, five games, a detachable medical scanner — and it types on your laptop.

Pick it up and it's already running. The round display idles with a moiré pattern, the LEDs breathe, and the main screen shows a menu you drive with the D-pad. Nothing to configure, pair, or install.

Underneath the prop it's a real instrument: temperature, tilt, magnetic fields and NFC, a battery-backed clock, WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB keyboard/mouse emulation.

📺 Walkthrough: https://youtu.be/mJSx17gsqMw 🔗 Docs: https://github.com/MakeItHackin/TOSTricorder ⚡ Update firmware in-browser: https://makeithackin.github.io/tricorder-flasher/

The medical scanner

The hand scanner detaches, with its own coin cell and a magnet the tricorder senses. Lift it off and the screen drops into the biofunction display; put it back and you return to where you were.

Buttons

Four directional buttons and SELECT on the back, where your fingers land. A, B, C across the front.

Button	Does
UP/DOWN	Move through a menu, or change a value
LEFT/RIGHT	Move between fields
SELECT or C	Choose
B	Back one level
A	Home, from anywhere

Menus wrap. If the arrows won't take you somewhere, press C — it hops focus between regions. On keyboard screens, SELECT taps a key and holding SELECT commits.

The ten menus

1. Con Mode — the wearable one. Pick an LED pattern, a moiré animation and something to show (alerts, starfield, quote packs, or your own text in your own colours), press Start, and it runs unattended.

2. Sensors — All Sensors on one screen, including whether someone is scanning your NFC tag. Individual screens show temperature, accelerometer and magnetic state in large type.

3. Animations — four moiré patterns for the round display, LED modes including per-pixel RGB, medical scan, condition alert. Starfield is flyable: velocity, star density, size, and hold SELECT for warp.

4. Clock — ship time, stardate and date on one screen. Two alarms, recurring or fixed to a date, plus a countdown timer that borrows one alarm. Battery-backed, and set during firmware upload.

5. Games — Quadrant Invaders, Battle of Wolf 359, Shuttle Pod Lander (ten levels), Cargo Bay Stacker, and Gagh. Crash and the ship breaks into flying vector fragments.

6. Keyboard/Mouse — appears on your computer as a real input device over USB or Bluetooth, pairing as Tricorder Mark I. Type manually or auto-type quotes. Move the cursor with the D-pad, by tilting the tricorder, or leave it jiggling to keep a machine awake.

7. RFID/NFC — the tag chip is on the board, so there's nothing to hold against it. Read it, or write text, a URL, or a seven-field contact card. Ships pointing at the project page.

8. WiFi — scan, join, and stay joined. Sync the clock over NTP with a timezone picker that handles daylight saving by rule.

9. Bluetooth BLE — scan for devices, manage pairings. Shares one radio with WiFi, so it starts only when used. Head-to-head games are in development.

10. Settings — sleep, LED brightness, QR code, the scanner auto-trigger, and your firmware build.

Battery

About four hours with both displays lit. Sleep mode gets you a full day — light sleep wakes on movement or a button and resumes where you left off; deep sleep saves more and reboots on wake.

Specifications

MCU	XIAO ESP32-S3, dual core, WiFi + BLE, PSRAM
Displays	1.69" 280×240 IPS + 1.28" round, separate buses
LEDs	3 addressable RGB
Sensors	Accelerometer with tap detect, Hall-effect magnetic, temperature, battery
Clock	DS3231, battery-backed
NFC	ST25DV64KC, onboard, read/write
Buttons	8
Audio	None — alerts are visual
Power	USB-C with charging

https://github.com/MakeItHackin/TOSTricorder