AtlasCube Controller

A pocket remote for the radio — its own screen, its own battery, no phone.

Firmware EXPERIMENTAL · built 2026-08-20

⚠ Prototype. The Controller is a bench build, not a finished product — hardware, pin map and firmware all still move. Everything below describes the current prototype and will change.

The Controller is a second, much smaller ESP32 device that talks to AtlasCube directly over ESP-NOW — no Wi-Fi network, no router, no pairing with a phone in between. It wakes on a touch or a key press, shows what the radio is playing, and goes back to sleep. Where the Android app is the full remote, this is the one you leave on the desk.

Hardware

MCU	ESP32-C6 (RISC-V), 4 MB flash, no PSRAM One of several planned builds — the C6 is what the prototype runs on. Other MCUs are coming, an ESP32-S3 version among them, each with its own board and firmware image.
Display	CO5300 / ICNA3306 AMOLED, 240×296, QSPI
Touch	CST816D capacitive digitizer on the same FPC
Keys	4×3 matrix in the LP-GPIO domain — wakes the chip from deep sleep
Link	ESP-NOW, peer-to-peer with the radio
Power	Single LiPo cell — TODO: cell size, connector, charger
Enclosure	TODO

What it does

Now playing

Station or track name, straight off the radio
Play / stop, previous / next, volume
Source picker — radio, SD card, Bluetooth
Per-page wallpapers, swipe between screens

Browsing

The radio's playlist, scrolled on the pilot
The radio's SD card, folder by folder
Pick without switching the source first

Settings

Pair with / forget a radio
Button map, sleep timeouts, brightness — kept in NVS
Opens the radio's own settings screens remotely

Power

Light sleep while idle, deep sleep after a timeout
Wake on touch or on any key
Panel cut from power in sleep — TODO: measured runtime

Screens

photo

Now playing

photo

Playlist

Flash the firmware

Requires a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave). Firefox and Safari don't support WebSerial.

Before you click Connect: hold BOOT while plugging in the USB-C cable and keep holding until the browser's port picker appears. Console and flashing both go over the chip's USB-Serial/JTAG, so the port only appears while the board is in the bootloader.

Plug the Controller in over USB-C, holding BOOT.
Click Connect and pick the serial port.
Click Install in the dialog and wait for it to finish.
Power-cycle the board, then pair it with the radio from Settings.

AtlasCube Controller ESP32-C6 · full image: bootloader, app and the wallpaper partition

The image includes the wallpapers, which live in a raw flash partition rather than a filesystem — flashing replaces them. There is no OTA yet: the 4 MB layout has a single app slot, so every update is a USB flash.

← Back to atlascube.net