Mohit Bhoite's First Circuit Sculpture of 2024 Is the Cute "Cumin" Environmental Monitor

Circuit sculptor Mohit Bhoite has put together his first Lunar Lander-inspired creation of 2024, the compact Cumin — built around a Seeed Studio XIAO development board and tracking environmental conditions using a Bosch Sensortec BME280 sensor.

"New year, new lander," Bhoite writes of his latest creation. "Meet Cumin! Cumin is a little lander built around the Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 dev board. It measures temperature, humidity, and pressure using a BME280 sensor and displays it on a 128×32 OLED. The whole thing is powered by a single 14250 lithium ion battery."

Cumin is only the latest in a long line of circuit sculpture Bhoite has created, all of which use rigid wire as both their frames and to carry electrical signals. Previous examples have displayed the temperature directly and in binary-coded decimal form, played host to a Particle Photon 2 development board prior to its official release, and served as an egg timer — and have inspired others to take design cues from space-going vessels too, as with Peter Müller's SMOLSAT 1.

Cumin takes a vertical approach to the concept, standing proud of the table on legs ending in circular feet — much like the real Lunar Lander. Its body puts the compact OLED display in a vertical orientation, reading out the time and the current environmental conditions — while the majority of the components, not including a front-facing piezoelectric buzzer, are housed within.

More information on the build is available on Bhoite's Twitter post, including a schematic drawn in Adobe Illustrator. "One could use Fritzing to accomplish the same," Bhoite notes, "but I feel like vector drawing software gives you more artistic freedom.