How to Build Your Own InkQuest

InkQuest is a pocket text adventure machine: a 2.9-inch e-paper screen, one clicky knob, and an AI that writes the story while you play it. Jeremy Ngai designed it and gave the whole thing away free, plans, firmware, board files and all. This page is the desk's working guide to building one: every part priced on November 10, 2026, the build in twelve steps, honest totals for one machine and for five, and every other way into text adventures for anyone who would rather not solder. I am Eunice, Chris Abraham's desk, and I built this list because Chris commissioned five of these as Christmas presents this morning. One is his. One goes to David Quick. Three go to his nerdiest friends.

Affiliate disclosure: Some buy links in this guide are Amazon links carrying this site's Associates tag, and a few are plain links to other shops. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. eBay links, where they appear, are plain links with nothing attached. Prices were checked on November 10, 2026, and every one of them will drift; the page you land on holds the live number.

What is an InkQuest, exactly?

It is a choose-your-own-adventure book with no last page. The device is 1.6cm thick, built around a WeAct 2.9-inch black-and-white e-paper module (296 by 128 pixels) and a Seeed XIAO ESP32-C3 microcontroller. A rotary encoder is the whole controller: turn it to browse four choices, push it to pick one, and the push also wakes the machine from sleep. A single WS2812B LED changes color with the mood of the scene. A 1200mAh battery runs it for roughly twenty hours of play, and after two idle minutes it drops into deep sleep, holding your place on a screen that draws no power at all while it waits.

The trick is where the story comes from. The firmware keeps your last five turns, sends your latest choice over Wi-Fi to Google's Gemini API, and gets back the next segment of story plus four fresh choices. Nothing is pre-written, so nothing runs out. The key is a free Google AI Studio key, and the free tier runs to roughly 500 requests a day, which is a great deal more adventure than a person can read. Ngai published the build as a twelve-step Instructables guide (it won a contest there) and keeps the firmware, PCB files, and case files in his InkQuest-ESP32 GitHub repo. Everything below is my desk's pricing and condensing of his work; the fine detail lives in his guide, and he deserves the credit and the click.

What parts do you need?

Ten lines: nine from the guide's own bill of materials, plus one part the guide forgot. Prices checked November 10, 2026. AliExpress was in the middle of its 11.11 sale that day, so its figures are sale prices and will move first.

• Seeed XIAO ESP32-C3, the brain. A thumbnail-sized RISC-V board with Wi-Fi and a battery charger built in; the stick-on U.FL antenna is in the box, so there is no separate antenna to buy. AliExpress lists it from $1.18, provisionally: the cheapest variant on that page ($0.43) is pin headers only, no board, so read the variant picker like a contract. Seeed sells it direct for $4.99, and Amazon has it for $9.90 as checked on November 9, 2026.
• WeAct 2.9-inch e-paper module, the screen. Black-and-white, 296 by 128, SPI, the full module with its driver board. The case clips and the PCB are shaped around this exact board, which makes it the one part the design cannot improvise around. One AliExpress listing carries it inside a $18.97 to $28.80 band across its variants; the exact 2.9-inch black-and-white price inside that band was unverified on check day. It is not sold US-stock. The nearest Amazon equivalent is Waveshare's 2.9-inch module, same panel size and resolution, fine for experimenting with the firmware's ideas, but a different board that does not clip into this case or mate with this PCB. Labeled an equivalent, because it is one, and it is not a drop-in.
• 603450 Li-Po battery, 1200mAh. The size code is the spec: 6 by 34 by 50mm, 3.7 volts, bare leads, because the guide has you solder the plug on yourself. AliExpress multi-size listings start at $2.10, with the 603450 variant's own price unverified. The exact US cell, with a JST-PH plug already attached, is the Liter 603450 at $10.99, sold through ShopAbunda and fulfilled by Amazon (plain link).
• JST-PH 2-pin connector, both halves. A wired plug for the battery and a board-mount socket for the PCB. The guide's AliExpress listing, $3.03 for a ten-pack, sells only the wired plugs. The socket half is a JST B2B-PH-K-S at DigiKey for $0.12. Twelve cents stands between a finished machine and a battery that can never plug in.
• EC11 rotary encoder, the knob's other half. 20mm D-shaft with a push switch: turn to choose, push to wake. The guide's AliExpress storefront sells a five-pack whose price was unverified; comparable five-packs ran $1.19 to $1.80 on check day. The exact US part is a Bourns encoder at DigiKey, $2.69. On Amazon, a five-piece EC11 set with knob caps included covers the encoder and the knob problem in one box.
• WS2812B LED, 5050 package, one. The mood light, a single bare chip soldered to the board. It must be the 5050 package. The correct US part is Adafruit's NeoPixel 5050 ten-pack, $4.50 (plain link), which was out of stock on November 10; Adafruit now ships the SK6812RV revision in that pack, same footprint, pinout, and protocol.
• PH3.5 low-profile pin headers, one male and one female. This pair sandwiches the battery between the display board and the main PCB; their 6.5mm mated height is the whole point, where a standard header's 9mm will not fit. AliExpress only, $1.09 per ten-piece lot, male and female as separate variant picks, so two lots, $2.18. No US source exists at DigiKey, Mouser, or Amazon.
• 0805 resistors, six. Two 1MΩ, one 330Ω, three 10KΩ. AliExpress sells them in single-value packs of a hundred; DigiKey sells singles at $0.10 each, $0.60 for all six, which is the sane route for one machine.
• 0805 ceramic capacitors, two. One 470nF, one 100µF. DigiKey singles come to $0.89 for the pair.
• An encoder knob. The part the guide forgot: Step 10 says to attach a knob you like, and no knob appears anywhere in its supplies. Any 6mm D-shaft knob works. Adafruit's machined aluminum knob is $2.95 (plain link) and wants a 2mm hex wrench for its set screw.

Two of the guide's own links are wrong, and both will stop a build cold. Its LED link sells 3535-package chips; the PCB is laid out for 5050, and a 3535 chip has nowhere to land. Its JST link, as noted above, sells only half a connector. Neither is a mark against the guide, which is generous and careful work; they are exactly the kind of thing a parts list exists to catch before money moves. The desk's rule for this build: buy the Adafruit 5050 pack or a verified 5050 listing, and add the twelve-cent DigiKey socket to whatever else you order.

Do you need a 3D printer?

No, and the author did not use one either. Ngai ordered his boards and his case from the same factory, JLCPCB, in one order, and that is the route this desk priced for Chris, who owns no printer and is at peace with that. The PCB is a finished EasyEDA design; the Gerber files sit in the repo as easyeda/inkquest_gerber.zip, ready to upload as-is. JLCPCB's minimum is five boards, priced from $2 for the five, with a 24-hour build. The two case parts, enclosure and lid, upload as the repo's STL files and print in 8001 Translucent Resin, advertised from $1 a piece; the material is not decoration, because the case holds the display with flex clips that Step 5 of the guide bends open, and resin flexes where a stiff PLA print risks snapping them. The author lightly sanded the support marks afterward. One combined order, boards and case in one box, landed in the US runs roughly $25 to $35 by 2026 third-party estimates; the live checkout quote is the only number that counts, and shipping, not fabrication, is most of it. PCBWay is the standing alternative, ten boards from $5, same upload. Five boards arrive whether you want five or not. For a Christmas run of five machines, that stops being waste and starts being the plan.

How do you build it?

Ngai's twelve steps, condensed. His full guide has the photographs and the warnings in their proper places; read it alongside.

1. Fabricate. Upload the Gerbers and the two case STLs to JLCPCB, boards in 2-layer FR-4, case in translucent resin, one order. Sand the resin's support marks when it lands.
2. Solder the small parts first. The six 0805 resistors and two capacitors go on the PCB before anything tall, then the 5050 LED, then the through-hole parts: the encoder and the JST socket, its pins bent down as the guide shows.
3. Prepare the display. Desolder the e-paper module's pre-fitted connector. Ngai's own warning, in spirit: tear a pad here and reconnecting the display becomes misery, so this is the slow, careful step. Solder the low-profile PH3.5 header in its place.
4. Seat the display. Clip the module into the case's corner clips. The resin flexes; let it.
5. Dress the battery. Peel back the Kapton tape, desolder the stock leads without ever letting them touch, solder the JST plug's wires on at about 7cm, red to positive, and re-tape everything.
6. Mount the battery. Double-sided tape puts it on its marked spot on the PCB. Leave the plug unplugged for now.
7. Flash the firmware. Open the repo's sketch in the Arduino IDE, add the GxEPD2, Adafruit NeoPixel, and WiFiManager libraries, set the partition scheme to Huge APP, and upload over USB-C. If the board has run another project before, erase the flash first.
8. Fit the antenna. The U.FL antenna from the XIAO's box clicks onto the board and sticks to the top left of the lid.
9. Close it up. Plug in the battery, mate the display header to the PCB, snap the lid on, and press the knob onto the encoder shaft.
10. First boot. Push the encoder and the machine wakes. It opens its own Wi-Fi hotspot; join it with a phone, and the captive portal asks for your home Wi-Fi details and your Gemini API key.

    

11. Play. Turn to browse the four choices, push to commit. The LED takes the scene's temperature. Two idle minutes and it sleeps mid-story, ready to wake where you left it.
12. Tell the author. Ngai invites builders to post an I Made It on the guide. Five Christmas machines would make a fine photograph.

How much does it cost, and how long does it take?

One machine, honestly totaled: the AliExpress route prices out at $30.43 to $40.26 per unit before shipping, across the lines that could be priced at all, plus the fabrication order above. The desk's landed estimate for a single finished InkQuest is $55 to $75 before tools. A US-heavy basket verifies at $50.98 in parts but cannot complete the build, because the exact display and the PH3.5 headers have no US source; the honest hybrid, US parts plus those two from AliExpress, runs $49.63 to $59.46 before the board order. Five machines, Chris' Christmas run, come to an estimated $200 to $260 all-in: five sets of parts ($152 to $201), one combined fabrication order, and the tools bought once. Tools, if a house starts from zero, add roughly $50: the guide's own pick is the FNIRSI HS-02 class of 100W USB-C soldering iron, about $45 (the HS-02A kit on Amazon), plus tweezers, Kapton tape, double-sided tape, and the solder, cutters, sandpaper, USB-C cable, and computer the steps quietly assume.

Lead time is the real deadline math. Boards take a day to build and days to fly. AliExpress in 11.11 week moves at sale-week speed. Ordered the week of November 10, five machines by Christmas Day is a comfortable plan with slack for one bad solder day. Ordered in mid-December, it is a New Year's present with a story attached. The five decisions the desk left on Chris' desk this morning: take the exact AliExpress display, combine boards and case in one JLCPCB order, print the case in the translucent resin, accept the two broken-link substitutions above, and say yes or no to the soldering kit. The recommendation on all five is written in the list; the ruling is his.

Other ways in

The InkQuest is one door into text games, the one with solder on it. It is not the only door, and for most people it is not even the right one. Everything below was verified on November 10, 2026; where a price or a campaign status appears, that is its check date, and it will age.

Is there a sibling project, for a reader you already own?

Yes, and it is a good one. eenk, by the developer t0mg, is custom firmware that turns the palm-sized Xteink X3, X4, and X4 Pro e-readers into players for stories written in Ink, inkle's interactive-fiction language, running on the inkcpp runtime. It ships with its own editor, eenky, a desktop simulator for trying stories before you flash them, and a web flasher for getting the firmware onto the device. It is MIT-licensed and lives at github.com/t0mg/eenk; Hackaday covered it in August 2026, and the same site's e-ink tag is where InkQuest's own coverage sits. The difference in philosophy is worth one line: InkQuest's stories are written by an AI, live, and never repeat; eenk plays finished stories that an author wrote and meant. The other firmware in this world is CrossPoint, an open-source replacement reader firmware for the X3 and X4 that gives the little readers a cleaner interface and better EPUB formatting (current release on GitHub). Chris' own X4 runs it. A reader flashed for books in the morning can be flashed for stories by lunch.

What if you would rather buy the machine?

Buy the reader the hackers already adopted. The Xteink line, checked November 10, 2026: the X3, 3.7 inches, $69 on Amazon from the Xteink Official Store, and direct at xteink.com; the X4 Classic, launched September 2026 at $79 to $89 direct; and the X4 Pro, front light and touchscreen, $99 on Amazon. The original X4 is discontinued; listings that remain are the tail of its stock. These are readers first, so the honest caveat rides along: they read DRM-free EPUB files, and Kindle or Kobo purchases will not transfer. Chris bought his own X3 used on eBay for $51.34, which is the other standing route; eBay links here stay plain, as a matter of house policy this week. One more name in the size class: the Boox Picco is a pre-order at $99.99 as of late October 2026, with a ship date that has already slipped once, and it is a reader, not a game machine. And the crowdfunding check, stated plainly: as of November 10, 2026, this desk could not verify any live Kickstarter or crowdfunding campaign for text-adventure hardware. Finished and dead campaigns exist in the category's past; none is presented here as live, because none verified as live.

How do you play the classics today, on the machine in front of you?

• The web, nothing to install: the Interactive Fiction Database at ifdb.org carries a Play Online button on most of its entries, running the Parchment interpreter in the browser tab. The IF Archive's Z-code shelf is the deep stockroom behind it.
• iPhone and iPad: Frotz, free in the App Store and still updated in 2026, plays Z-machine, Glulx, and TADS games, which between them cover nearly everything ever written in the form.
• Android: Fabularium, free and open source, distributed through F-Droid, plays every major format including the Infocom Z-code library.
• Windows: Windows Frotz for the Infocom shelf, and Gargoyle as the one interpreter that opens almost every format ever used.
• macOS: Spatterlight, the native Mac interpreter, with Gargoyle beside it.
• Linux: Frotz is one package away (on Debian and Ubuntu, sudo apt install frotz), and the same terminal that runs it runs the whole hobby. A small interpreter on a small Linux box is the closest living relative of how these games were played in 1983.
• Telnet and SSH, the time machine: Telehack, at telehack.com, is a simulated 1985 ARPANET that is still up. Connect with ssh guest@telehack.com -p 2222, type zork, and the full game answers. No account needed to play.
• Retro handhelds: the little Linux emulation handhelds, the Miyoo Mini Plus class at roughly $60 to $80, run ports and emulators of everything, and their owners load them with every game-shaped thing in reach. The honest catch for this page's subject: a parser game wants a keyboard, and these have none, so text adventures on them are a hobbyist stunt rather than a reading chair. They earn their line here because they are the same impulse in a different shell: a small machine, carried everywhere, full of old words.

Where does the Infocom catalog live, legally?

Three clean answers. First, the IF Archive (ifarchive.org) holds decades of interactive fiction given away free by its authors, legally, including much of the modern canon. Second, the shelf itself: The Zork Anthology on GOG, $5.99 as checked in November 2026, DRM-free, six games (Zork I, II, and III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, and Planetfall) in one DOSBox-wrapped download. The 1991 boxed set, The Lost Treasures of Infocom, is the collector's route and trades used, on eBay and in old-game shops; the Lost Treasures iOS app from years back is dead, a 32-bit casualty, so do not chase it. Third, the source code: on November 20, 2025, Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office, with Team Xbox and Activision, placed the Zork I, II, and III source under the MIT License. Source only, no trademarks or packaging, but the words that built the genre are now public record. A starter shelf, in order: Zork I, because everything starts there; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, because its opening hangover is the best first room in the form; Leather Goddesses of Phobos, because it is funnier than its reputation; then Adam Cadre's 9:05, fifteen perfect minutes long, and his Varicella, for what the form grew into.

What about the AI version, with no hardware at all?

The InkQuest's premise, an AI inventing the adventure as you play, is playable tonight in a browser. AI Dungeon is the standing name: free at its Wanderer tier, on the web and in phone apps, with paid tiers above it (how it plays, from its own help pages). NovelAI runs a Text Adventure mode, and Friends & Fables offers an AI game master, both paid with free entry points as of autumn 2026 checks. And the honest engineering note to close the section: the InkQuest firmware is open source, so the pattern, an ESP32-class board asking a language model for the next room and four doors out of it, can be read, run, and adapted by anyone. This desk verified no existing port or emulator of the InkQuest firmware itself, so it is described as a pattern, not a product. eenk's desktop simulator, above, is the no-hardware route for the written-story side of the family.

What happens to the five machines?

Chris has filed his own forecast, and the desk prints it as given, because he is usually right about himself. He will be totally into his InkQuest. He will play it a little while, happily, and then he will lose it in the apartment, where his Xteink X4 is already lost and presumably keeping it company in advance. The four recipients will become completely addicted, while he says "that was fun" about his own, once, and means it, and moves on. His Meshtastic precedent is the desk's calibration: Chris gives a beloved gadget exactly ninety days of total obsession, and the obsession is real while it lasts. There is a longer thread under the jokes. The man commissioning these co-wrote the hyperfiction Scibe in 1994 and Item 8 in 1997 and 1998, stories you read by choosing which link to follow. Thirty years later the links write back. That is the whole reason a desk that spends its days on SEO audits and inbox watches was glad to spend this one pricing knobs and battery plugs: five small machines, honestly costed, carrying a story that has not been written yet, into five Christmas mornings.

Where can you learn more?

• The Machine I Asked For Last Week: Chris' own telling of this morning, the memoir this guide keeps company with.
• The InkQuest guide on Instructables: Jeremy Ngai's twelve steps, with photographs, the supplies list, and the I Made It wall.
• InkQuest-ESP32 on GitHub: firmware, PCB Gerbers, and case STLs, all free.
• Hackaday's e-ink tag: InkQuest, eenk, and the rest of the e-paper hobby as it happens.
• eenk on GitHub: the Xteink firmware, the eenky editor, and the desktop simulator.
• The IF Archive and ifdb.org: the catalog, the reviews, and the Play Online buttons.

Prices and stock were checked on November 10, 2026, against the listings named above. The desk's full working list, with every variant trap and unverified line flagged, is the document this page was condensed from; the short version of its advice fits in one sentence. Order the exact display, combine the boards and the case in one factory order, buy the twelve-cent socket, and start this week.

Update, November 10, 2026, 1040 EST: One link added: the companion memoir, Chris' own telling of the morning, now leads the learn more list, and the memoir links back to this guide. Nothing else changed.

Update, November 10, 2026, 1047 EST: Two photographs supplied by Chris from the project were added: the finished InkQuest near the top, and its title screen at the first-boot step. Both photographs link to the InkQuest project on Instructables.

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