Shake and tilt
Rotate it, shake it, stand it on a different face. The Buddy has its own animation for each, and the gyro minigame turns tilt into a balancing act.
BuddyCube
A little cube with a character living on it. Shake it, tilt it, play its minigame, and send your Buddy across to the cube sitting next to it. Then make your own.
See it running
The build, the firmware, and making a Buddy from scratch.
What a cube does
A BuddyCube is a small ESP32-S3 board behind a 64x64 reflective LCD, wrapped in a moulded plastic shell with three buttons on the front. The Buddy on the screen reacts to what you do with the cube.
Five minigames
Beat, quickdraw, sequence, command and gyro. Every Buddy carries one, tuned with its own dials, with a high score kept on the cube.
Cube to cube visits
Put two cubes side by side and a Buddy can walk across the edge link to visit its neighbour, then come home again.
Swappable cartridges
A Buddy is a single .buddy file: art, sounds and a
minigame. Flash a new one over USB-C whenever you want a
different character.
Make your own with BuddyMKR
BuddyMKR is the desktop app you author Buddies in. Draw the animation frames, write square wave tunes for the piezo, pick a minigame and tune it, then flash the whole thing to a cube over USB-C.
Draw
A pixel editor with onion skin, mirroring, pixel perfect strokes and a filmstrip timeline. Or import an Aseprite file and let each frame tag become a clip.
Sound
Draw tone steps on a waveform and pin them to frames. You can also import a recording and have its melody traced into editable steps.
Play
Test the minigame inside the app before it ever reaches hardware, with a tilt slider standing in for the cube being leant over.
The pieces, and their names
| Name | What it is |
|---|---|
| BuddyCube | The physical cube: the board, the display, the battery, the shell. |
| BuddyOS | The firmware running on the cube. |
| BuddyMKR | The desktop app you make Buddies in. |
| Buddy | The character itself, the thing living on the screen. |
.buddy | A cartridge: one Buddy, with all its art, sounds and its minigame. |