What a truly beautiful and elegant design. This is so reminiscent of the hacker ethos in how it captures the potential and love of technology. How can a project this creative not be more famous? I have seen many of these kinds of 'small, powerful computer projects' before and I've never felt inspired by any of them. But this project really captures the imagination with the potential of modularity / expanding capabilities.
This is honestly so creative. It makes me filled with that childish sense of wonder I initially had with coding. What things could you make if you had a whole box of snap-ins and a few Pockits? This is frigging insane. If you're an angel investor consider throwing this guy a bone!
As far as I can tell, this is a single individual that has done all of this work. I am floored at the design and intricacy of this project.
Really, truly blown away. I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases to correct for but I haven't gotten so excited by a demo in a long time. I've obviously signed up to learn more.
Hey HN, Solder_Man here. I am the guy behind Pockit. Thrilled to see this modularization effort has the support (and useful criticism) of so many deep thinkers in this thread.
First, a clarification: Since people have brought up the topic of "hard to believe one guy handled all aspects", I want to state that while this is my concept and my project (and I've devoted nearly every waking hour since 2020 to it), I'm no jack of all trades.
In the last two years, for example, I've gotten occasional but much-needed help (and knowledge) from two freelancing developers for some aspects that I don't have expertise with, including Linux intricacies, DMA-based firmware programming, UI design details, and some other subtleties. A more experienced PCB designer (colleague from past) has also helped me, particularly with the recent 6-layer PCB layouts. Plus, an assistant in the past has aided with the soldering of some tightly packed boards.
Last but not least, my SO has contributed graphics + Adobe Premiere effort for my videos; her equally important contribution was being a frequent listener, and sometimes a much-needed boundary, to my evolving thoughts through this project's journey.
As the project evolves to its next phase, I do hope to get more people into primary development of this modular ecosystem, in the form of both team members and eventually custom Block designers from the community, once I organize and release the necessary files + documentation for everyone to work with.
I'm perhaps late to the party, but I'll try to answer as many questions as I can on this thread now, including hopefully the ones posted several hours ago!
If you need help with getting it manufactured in volume (Molds, DFM, QA, Management), I can help / put you in touch with people that make Teenage Engineering products in Malaysia.
Appreciate the disclosure of other people on it. But, to be honest, even if the 5 additional people you listed were on the project full time, I'd still be impressed. Well done.
The UI of the dashboard alone would be an impressive feat for a single person.
The algorithm that chooses the most likely/useful application for infinite possible combinations of modules would be an impressive feat for a single person.
The multidisciplinary coding required to get all of these pieces to work together in a hot-swap way would be an impressive feat for a single person.
The design and implementation of a single physical connection interface that can adapt or carry all these different protocols (USB, HDMI, etc) would be an impressive feat for a single person.
Not to mention the PCB design, 3D enclosure design, machine learning proficiency, aesthetic product design chops, and on and on.
All together, this is unbelievable. This is 0.01% level stuff. Mozart, Musk, Melville. Somewhere in that neighborhood.
However, the most complex and costly part is the PCB and circuit design. The PCBs used in the blocks are absolutely awesome.
Thanks to 3D printers that are cheap, the casing and other plastic materials are easy to make.
All that being said, this has very low chance of becoming a real world product. Real world is messy, dirty, wet and an absolutely shitty place for snap on electronics.
What would work, is better connector technology. It is obvious that even with all this simplification, this will still be a hobbyist product, rather than a serious mass market product.
I don't see why the contacts on the demonstrated devices would be any more vulnerable to the real world than the port on an iPhone. I'm not sure these devices would be mass market since some skill is required to understand and use the software but they would absolutely have a good run at serving the same size market as 3D printers. They could even work hand in hand with 3D printers by providing the 'brains' for prototyped projects.
The way to that cyberpunk world that lives in collective imagination is to make electronics work in messy, dirty, wet environments, not try to shield them from it.
Hobbyist isn't necessarily bad though. Look at where boards like the raspberry pi/Arduino were and look at where they are now. There was an image floating around a few weeks back of a major screen at a train station that had crashed... with the raspberry pi logo at the top. It will take time, sure, but it could become much bigger than one might expect.
Connector reliability and mechanical strength is a big problem here. If the baseplate had screw holes with threaded inserts, so you could screw everything down, it would hold together better. Also, the animation looks cool, but there is no power source, and no external connections.
Google tried this in 2015. It was called Project Ara.[1] A similar click-together system, with the same problems. Plus the problem that there's no good reason to make a phone that way. Google acquired that from Phonebloks and killed it.[2]
It's not a bad idea if you solve the mechanical problems and have the components produced in sufficient quantity to be very cheap. A little bigger, a lot more rugged, with a good wire management solution, and you'd have something useful.
Depending on how inexpensive these things will be, I can see myself basically putting together a few of these throughout my house, with some framing, and probably never touching them again for a year or more. However having a few kits for my kids and I to play with is more likely. In the latter case, we’ll do exactly what we did whenever playing with game cartridges: blow them off, wipe them, and try again. I think it’s part of the fun, really.
1 person? Man it's an absolutely incredible feat. I'm also blown away, and I want to play around with it. I would love to try and automate parts of the house and such.
Pockit is just one of the small parts needed to automate parts of your house. All your devices have to cooperate smoothly and this will require a standardized IoT API from manufacturers.
Sometimes the point of a technology is not its direct utility but to
carry forth or promote an idea.
Because of what's happening with climate, pollution and e-waste, the
future is modular. Modular phones, computers, cars and even nuclear
reactors.
Having this kind of thing in schools helps kids get used to the idea
that technology is configurable at the physical level without
electronics skills.
Strong interoperability legislation should be a part of technology
going forward. Industry will welcome and adapt to it because it's
ultimately a better compromise than tougher regulation and export
controls.
> Because of what's happening with climate, pollution and e-waste, the future is modular. Modular phones, computers, cars and even nuclear reactors.
Sounds cool, but the reality is that in order to get the best efficiency, you often want a purpose-built, specialized design. In the case of electric cars, you need your car to be very light and to have a very integrated design in order to maximize energy efficiency. I'm not sure what you mean by a modular car design, but you definitely can't fit any motors with any battery in any frame, that will just make for a car with terrible performance.
That being said, we should be designing things to maximize lifetime, and we should probably ban certain materials or construction techniques that make recycling difficult. Maybe we need to ban or heavily tax non-recyclable materials. We could also do more to build a legal framework around right to repair.
> Having this kind of thing in schools helps kids get used to the idea that technology is configurable at the physical level without electronics skills.
Kids is probably the best use case. As someone who makes things I look at this product and I think it's necessarily going to be more expensive and less flexible compared to alternatives. For kids though, this can be a gateway to make electronics less scary.
> Strong interoperability legislation should be a part of technology going forward. Industry will welcome and adapt to it because it's ultimately a better compromise than tougher regulation and export controls.
I agree. We should be strongly promoting (and maybe legally mandating) open, documented standards for everything.
> I'm not sure what you mean by a modular car design, but you definitely can't fit any motors with any battery in any frame, that will just make for a car with terrible performance.
Not any in any, but some in some is already possible, some Renault cars share parts for example with Dacia. But other companies tweak their design each yer, they change how the head lights look, shapes change, then some other inside parts shape needs to change so you got people having to redesign, re-test each year new filters and piping/hosing (this is the ones I am familiar with), Other shitty thing that happens is patents, some company gets a patent for some pretty obvious thing, now if you want to make spare parts for those cars you need to work around dose patents - a lot of work and expenses to be able to offer a different choice to the consumer.
The reason the engines and other parts can't be share is design and recently DRM, for sure you won't be able to install unofficial wheels on your fancy car without breaking some DRM protection(but is for your safety /s).
The project has taken so much focus that I haven't had the time nor skill to heavily improve the website's CSS/aesthetics. Or if you mean just the content, any suggestions for what I could consider adding now (besides the existent timeline posts)? I'd love for the site to not feel 'empty'!
So cool. Anyone criticizing the real utility of one of these (e.g. calling it a toy) is not thinking long term. Over time a single unit could be repurposed for any number of distinct and serious usecases (home automation being the most natural fit, but many others), and this and its software are important steps toward a more robust and useful devices and less waste. Minitirized, waterproofed, secure and many more modules and "apps", standardized and mass produced. This is huge. Keep going!
A very cool toy, a very sophisticated toy, but a toy nonetheless. There were in the past, and I think still today, electronic sets that let you click together modules with magnets to make circuits. It was a very handsy, easy way to play with electronics. But, in the end, that's what it was -- play and exploration.
The beauty of the concept is the easy interchange of the parts and such, and that's it downfall when you desire to render something down in to a "production" item. And by production, I mean something you're going to handle with any frequency. The ease of composability is counter to the hardening necessity for everyday use.
I supposed you could glue the parts together, but by that time whatever you made is now made of rather expensive components. Or they could offer an alternate mechanic to "realize" systems built for the longer term.
Until then, it's a wonderful toy. And that's not a bad thing.
To me it feels more like, being the thing for home computing/automation, that the PC was for computing in general. A PC has not a clear single purpose, but is very modular and you have to spent some time to adjust it to your use-cases.
Similarly, the pockit has not that single use-case and you have to spent some time to adjust it to your use-case. However, especially with the Pockit-to-Pockit communication you can build so many cool things.
Maybe a PC is just a toy too, but IMHO it depends on how you use it.
>And by production, I mean something you're going to handle with any frequency. The ease of composability is counter to the hardening necessity for everyday use.
Let's remind ourselves that this is a highly advanced proof-of-concept. If the issue really is simply the integrity of materials, that can be improved, and should not be considered a long-term limitation of the underlying technology: which is frankly too sophisticated from a design and software perspective to be set aside as a toy.
After all, the difference between a "Fisher-Price" drill and a "De-Walt" drill is the integrity of materials and underlying software. It is arguably a toy aesthetically, but (in accord with your argument) it is a few carbon fiber pieces away from becoming a useful generalized personal computing tool, the same way a drill is a useful generalized power tool.
The problem with this idea is that it assumes we have to make trade offs: case in point, remember pre-smartphone? I had a PDA which didn't have a camera, didn't have wifi - just a hardwired connection.
Now I have sitting next to me a smartphone which has 5 cameras, GPS, wifi, bluetooth, NFC, 128GB of storage and 4G.
Basically on a mass production scale it is always going to be cheaper just to put every feature in one device and build a billion of them.
EDIT: Which is not to say the system doesn't have some possibilities - at the right price point I'd replace every light switch in my house with a plate of this, and have them remotely control relays so I could remap everything. For task-specific physical applications you might want to remap/customize to taste, there's a lot of potential.
> Basically on a mass production scale it is always going to be cheaper just to put every feature in one device and build a billion of them.
When it comes to physical widgets, there's a limit to how many you could practically have on one device. I think the real value here is that it could be open to market to allow a real diversity of physical augments allowing people to improvise devices that are unlikely to be manufactured into a single form factor, but might be perfect for their niche use case.
What I like about platforms like this is the possibilities they open up for major players to experiment with weird form factors again. Basically the cost of software development, mostly.
I loved some of the insane designs prior to manufacturers deciding that the iPhone form factor was the way forward.
That said, Moto/Google did try something like this once, "Project Ara" which never really went much of anywhere. It led to a few modules being released for the Moto G and that was it. (IIRC)
> have them remotely control relays so I could remap everything
No need for relays – you can replace the bulbs with smart lightbulbs that can be controlled via Zigbee. Ikea smart bulbs are high quality and good value.
I kind of would like to call this a toy, but by that I mean -- wow, on top of any other application he can think of, this would be an amazing educational toy for a kid who isn't quite ready for Arduino or Raspberry Pi (or who might never be, not everybody interested in STEM wants to do circuits).
Whatever it was — a lie, the truth, or, most likely, their mixture — that caused me to make such a decision, I am immensely grateful to it for what appears to have been my first free act. It was an instinctive act, a walkout. Reason had very little to do with it. I know that, because I've been walking out ever since, with increasing frequency. And not necessarily on account of boredom or of feeling a trap gaping; I've been walking out of perfect setups no less often than out of dreadful ones. However modest the place you happen to occupy, if it has the slightest mark of decency, you can be sure that someday somebody will walk in and claim it for himself or, what is worse, suggest that you share it. Then you either have to fight for that place or leave it. I happened to prefer the latter. Not at all because I couldn't fight, but rather out of sheer disgust with myself: managing to pick something that attracts others denotes a certain vulgarity in your choice. It doesn't matter at all that you came across the place first. It is even worse to get somewhere first, for those who follow will always have a stronger appetite than your partially satisfied one.
I think @roughly provided a good balance of practicality + optimism in their answer.
My thoughts: Not immediately, but yes, eventually. Humans have an innate willingness and desire to tinker+make things. Those qualities have gone into hibernation due to the vast array of mass-manufactured, off-the-shelf devices in the last decade. But many (have and will) come to realize that the satisfaction ceiling is so much higher when you build something yourself, getting your hands dirty, and looking at the product of your efforts.
Just that reason is enough to give rebirth to the experimental/inventive attitude that pervaded the 20th century. But there's also the fact that a personalized something can allow you to do stuff that a typical consumer product couldn't.
Pockit just aims to enable and accelerate the above realization for hardware, the way that libraries and frameworks have done for the programming world.
If you're asking aspirationally, I agree - I'd prefer a world in which this was what people expected and wanted from their technology. I think the ongoing success of Lego gives me some hope here for a mass market for tinkering.
If you're asking more practically - the success of Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Seeed, and others suggests there's at least potentially a market here sufficient to sustain a moderately sized business for long enough to be worthwhile.
Agree about the demo, too - there's some serious wizardry on display there. I think it's one of the projects that just gets more impressive the more time you've spent trying to do what they're showing off.
Readit News
This is honestly so creative. It makes me filled with that childish sense of wonder I initially had with coding. What things could you make if you had a whole box of snap-ins and a few Pockits? This is frigging insane. If you're an angel investor consider throwing this guy a bone!
Dead Comment
Really, truly blown away. I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases to correct for but I haven't gotten so excited by a demo in a long time. I've obviously signed up to learn more.
First, a clarification: Since people have brought up the topic of "hard to believe one guy handled all aspects", I want to state that while this is my concept and my project (and I've devoted nearly every waking hour since 2020 to it), I'm no jack of all trades.
In the last two years, for example, I've gotten occasional but much-needed help (and knowledge) from two freelancing developers for some aspects that I don't have expertise with, including Linux intricacies, DMA-based firmware programming, UI design details, and some other subtleties. A more experienced PCB designer (colleague from past) has also helped me, particularly with the recent 6-layer PCB layouts. Plus, an assistant in the past has aided with the soldering of some tightly packed boards.
Last but not least, my SO has contributed graphics + Adobe Premiere effort for my videos; her equally important contribution was being a frequent listener, and sometimes a much-needed boundary, to my evolving thoughts through this project's journey.
As the project evolves to its next phase, I do hope to get more people into primary development of this modular ecosystem, in the form of both team members and eventually custom Block designers from the community, once I organize and release the necessary files + documentation for everyone to work with.
I'm perhaps late to the party, but I'll try to answer as many questions as I can on this thread now, including hopefully the ones posted several hours ago!
Contact in the HN profile.
How are you planning to commercialise this?
Awesome and Inspiring work!
The algorithm that chooses the most likely/useful application for infinite possible combinations of modules would be an impressive feat for a single person.
The multidisciplinary coding required to get all of these pieces to work together in a hot-swap way would be an impressive feat for a single person.
The design and implementation of a single physical connection interface that can adapt or carry all these different protocols (USB, HDMI, etc) would be an impressive feat for a single person.
Not to mention the PCB design, 3D enclosure design, machine learning proficiency, aesthetic product design chops, and on and on.
All together, this is unbelievable. This is 0.01% level stuff. Mozart, Musk, Melville. Somewhere in that neighborhood.
Deleted Comment
However, the most complex and costly part is the PCB and circuit design. The PCBs used in the blocks are absolutely awesome.
Thanks to 3D printers that are cheap, the casing and other plastic materials are easy to make.
All that being said, this has very low chance of becoming a real world product. Real world is messy, dirty, wet and an absolutely shitty place for snap on electronics.
What would work, is better connector technology. It is obvious that even with all this simplification, this will still be a hobbyist product, rather than a serious mass market product.
Google tried this in 2015. It was called Project Ara.[1] A similar click-together system, with the same problems. Plus the problem that there's no good reason to make a phone that way. Google acquired that from Phonebloks and killed it.[2]
It's not a bad idea if you solve the mechanical problems and have the components produced in sufficient quantity to be very cheap. A little bigger, a lot more rugged, with a good wire management solution, and you'd have something useful.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/project-ara-everything-we-k...
[2] https://www.onearmy.earth/project/phonebloks
As solo founder this is really motivational - I hope my upcoming project garners even half the interest once launched! So many hats.
Because of what's happening with climate, pollution and e-waste, the future is modular. Modular phones, computers, cars and even nuclear reactors.
Having this kind of thing in schools helps kids get used to the idea that technology is configurable at the physical level without electronics skills.
Strong interoperability legislation should be a part of technology going forward. Industry will welcome and adapt to it because it's ultimately a better compromise than tougher regulation and export controls.
Sounds cool, but the reality is that in order to get the best efficiency, you often want a purpose-built, specialized design. In the case of electric cars, you need your car to be very light and to have a very integrated design in order to maximize energy efficiency. I'm not sure what you mean by a modular car design, but you definitely can't fit any motors with any battery in any frame, that will just make for a car with terrible performance.
That being said, we should be designing things to maximize lifetime, and we should probably ban certain materials or construction techniques that make recycling difficult. Maybe we need to ban or heavily tax non-recyclable materials. We could also do more to build a legal framework around right to repair.
> Having this kind of thing in schools helps kids get used to the idea that technology is configurable at the physical level without electronics skills.
Kids is probably the best use case. As someone who makes things I look at this product and I think it's necessarily going to be more expensive and less flexible compared to alternatives. For kids though, this can be a gateway to make electronics less scary.
> Strong interoperability legislation should be a part of technology going forward. Industry will welcome and adapt to it because it's ultimately a better compromise than tougher regulation and export controls.
I agree. We should be strongly promoting (and maybe legally mandating) open, documented standards for everything.
Not any in any, but some in some is already possible, some Renault cars share parts for example with Dacia. But other companies tweak their design each yer, they change how the head lights look, shapes change, then some other inside parts shape needs to change so you got people having to redesign, re-test each year new filters and piping/hosing (this is the ones I am familiar with), Other shitty thing that happens is patents, some company gets a patent for some pretty obvious thing, now if you want to make spare parts for those cars you need to work around dose patents - a lot of work and expenses to be able to offer a different choice to the consumer.
The reason the engines and other parts can't be share is design and recently DRM, for sure you won't be able to install unofficial wheels on your fancy car without breaking some DRM protection(but is for your safety /s).
What are the alternatives? Is there something like this I can get my hands on now?
>we should be designing things to maximize lifetime
The duality between these two competing (and defensible) positions is the crux, isn't it?
With this video my jaw kept dropping every couple of minutes.
Deleted Comment
A very cool toy, a very sophisticated toy, but a toy nonetheless. There were in the past, and I think still today, electronic sets that let you click together modules with magnets to make circuits. It was a very handsy, easy way to play with electronics. But, in the end, that's what it was -- play and exploration.
The beauty of the concept is the easy interchange of the parts and such, and that's it downfall when you desire to render something down in to a "production" item. And by production, I mean something you're going to handle with any frequency. The ease of composability is counter to the hardening necessity for everyday use.
I supposed you could glue the parts together, but by that time whatever you made is now made of rather expensive components. Or they could offer an alternate mechanic to "realize" systems built for the longer term.
Until then, it's a wonderful toy. And that's not a bad thing.
Similarly, the pockit has not that single use-case and you have to spent some time to adjust it to your use-case. However, especially with the Pockit-to-Pockit communication you can build so many cool things.
Maybe a PC is just a toy too, but IMHO it depends on how you use it.
Let's remind ourselves that this is a highly advanced proof-of-concept. If the issue really is simply the integrity of materials, that can be improved, and should not be considered a long-term limitation of the underlying technology: which is frankly too sophisticated from a design and software perspective to be set aside as a toy.
After all, the difference between a "Fisher-Price" drill and a "De-Walt" drill is the integrity of materials and underlying software. It is arguably a toy aesthetically, but (in accord with your argument) it is a few carbon fiber pieces away from becoming a useful generalized personal computing tool, the same way a drill is a useful generalized power tool.
Deleted Comment
(This message brought to you by the society for people tired of Jony-Ive-esque bullshit being passed off as the One True Design Paradigm.)
Now I have sitting next to me a smartphone which has 5 cameras, GPS, wifi, bluetooth, NFC, 128GB of storage and 4G.
Basically on a mass production scale it is always going to be cheaper just to put every feature in one device and build a billion of them.
EDIT: Which is not to say the system doesn't have some possibilities - at the right price point I'd replace every light switch in my house with a plate of this, and have them remotely control relays so I could remap everything. For task-specific physical applications you might want to remap/customize to taste, there's a lot of potential.
When it comes to physical widgets, there's a limit to how many you could practically have on one device. I think the real value here is that it could be open to market to allow a real diversity of physical augments allowing people to improvise devices that are unlikely to be manufactured into a single form factor, but might be perfect for their niche use case.
I loved some of the insane designs prior to manufacturers deciding that the iPhone form factor was the way forward.
That said, Moto/Google did try something like this once, "Project Ara" which never really went much of anywhere. It led to a few modules being released for the Moto G and that was it. (IIRC)
No need for relays – you can replace the bulbs with smart lightbulbs that can be controlled via Zigbee. Ikea smart bulbs are high quality and good value.
What a wild achievement. Well done.
- Joseph Brodsky
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ta85ql/my_small_modu...
Shorter demo (7:30) submitted to Reddit:
https://v.redd.it/3wfbkleb4dm81
https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/dj7ilc/so_ive_been...
all posts about this project (around 30):
https://www.reddit.com/user/Solder_Man/posts/
I find it hard to believe that one individual plus a small community of hackers have built all of it. Amazing, amazing work.
The one question I kept asking myself as I was watching the demo:
Is there a mass market for such a beautiful, elegant, modular computing device?
My thoughts: Not immediately, but yes, eventually. Humans have an innate willingness and desire to tinker+make things. Those qualities have gone into hibernation due to the vast array of mass-manufactured, off-the-shelf devices in the last decade. But many (have and will) come to realize that the satisfaction ceiling is so much higher when you build something yourself, getting your hands dirty, and looking at the product of your efforts.
Just that reason is enough to give rebirth to the experimental/inventive attitude that pervaded the 20th century. But there's also the fact that a personalized something can allow you to do stuff that a typical consumer product couldn't.
Pockit just aims to enable and accelerate the above realization for hardware, the way that libraries and frameworks have done for the programming world.
If you're asking more practically - the success of Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Seeed, and others suggests there's at least potentially a market here sufficient to sustain a moderately sized business for long enough to be worthwhile.
Agree about the demo, too - there's some serious wizardry on display there. I think it's one of the projects that just gets more impressive the more time you've spent trying to do what they're showing off.