Tech got boring. So we gave it eyes.
Cubie is a small interactive device with an OLED face and a joystick.The hardware, the Android app and all 15 games work. The final enclosure and the product around it are still being built.
We wanted tech we could clip to a bag.
Technology had started to feel like rows of black rectangles asking for attention. We wanted the opposite: a small thing with eyes, useful when needed and quietly funny the rest of the time.
Something a person might name before reading the specifications.
First, make two eyes appear.
No enclosure. No joystick. No battery plan. We connected a 128 x 64 OLED to an ESP32-C3 and tried to put a face on it. The first successful boot was not impressive to anyone else. To us it was the moment Cubie stopped being imaginary.
It was two eyes on a screen. That was enough.
Everything after this point exists because that boot worked.
Then the phone started whispering to it.
We built an Android app and connected it over Bluetooth. Suddenly the little face knew about notifications, songs, playback timing and live lyrics. The phone did the heavy work. Cubie made it feel small and alive.
Maps and the LED ring got far enough to demo and not far enough to trust, so they are still paused rather than shipped.
A face on wires is not yet a Cubie.
The prototype finally answered the physical questions. OLED at the top. Joystick below. Charging, protection and input wiring had to fit inside one small object.
Jaimin Panchal, a designer from Gujarat, stayed beside the process rather than taking the model away and handing it back finished.
Every version cost money we did not have.
Bad ideas cost money. So do good ones.
A different board. Another print. A material that looked right online and felt wrong in our hands. Prototyping turns small decisions into a long stack of payments.
Funding Cubie has been harder than writing the code. Some days we were not deciding which version was best, we were deciding whether we could afford to try another version at all. Advit started this at fifteen and is still learning in public.
This is not a mockup. It runs the real firmware.
The browser version includes the games menu, all 15 titles, the shared score and high-score shell, retry behaviour and joystick input. Exact obstacle timing still runs on the physical hardware.
60 ways to stare back.
15 games. One tiny screen.
Every game uses the OLED and the joystick. The shared shell shows the title, the score and the saved high score.
The hardware works. Everything else is still moving.
Tell us what's still wrong — that's what actually moves this forward.
Please do not just say cool.
We are too close to Cubie to notice everything wrong with it. Tell us what is confusing, what you would remove, or send the strange feature idea you assume nobody wants. A specific criticism helps more than a polite compliment.