Pocuter – A coin-sized micro computer with WiFi and BLE | Hacker News Reader

Pocuter – A coin-sized micro computer with WiFi and BLE

kickstarter.com

142 pointsdirkk034 comments

Impressive! Congrats! How did you manage to integrate ESP32's WiFi antenna into that space? Specially in this image [1], it seems the pins of the esp32 is very close to the SD card...Wouldn't it cause interference?

[1]: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/034/323/339/1a68f2cee050491...

I’m not 100% sure it answers your question about the antenna, but FTA: “Some people are asking themselves where the antenna is. We are using a chip antenna - It is the blue component in the corner!”

The small blue chip on the bottom left corner of the side of the board with the SD card is the antenna. We isolated it with ground plane stitching and placed it as far from the SD card as we could in order to avoid interference, and we haven't seen any thus far!

Seems similar to the M5Stack (https://m5stack.com/), which is a good thing, if only to have more competition.

...only much smaller. You can't make a watch out of M5, you can only make a clock.

"Micro computer". There's a phrase I haven't heard in a while. Back in the day it referred to computers the size of my desktop.

I've already got something just like this, only its better: the m5StickC:

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/stick-c

It is truly dee-lightful to sit and play with this environment, made even more awesome by the depth of the PlatformIO library system.

See also, PineWatch, similar ..

Interesting, but the price is a bit too high for what it is IMO. You can get a pinewatch or M5stick for much less. For me the appeal of such boards is that they cost negligible money so you can use them everywhere.

I know they're not the same this and have some different specs, but they are in the same class. This is not something I'd buy as easily.

However I hope it does well, after all scaling up will bring prices down.

I like it! The name is especially cute.

I carry a PQI Air Card in my pocket to use as an SD->WiFi->iPhone adaptor, and this could complement it nicely. I've also carried a CoreWind WiFiG25 for USB host, so I could mount other people's phones using MTP or libimobiledevice. The CoreWind stopped working, so I've been trying to replace it with a VoCore, but I haven't got that to work yet either. Does the Pocuter have USB host ports?

Having battery power management circuitry is really wonderful - I'm usually having to use a Third Rail battery and microUSB M - USB F mini adaptor and microUSB M - USB M rotating adaptor to power the pocket computer, and then I can't use the same wire for plugging in other devices. Screen support is also very impressive - and with an ESP32 on board then it should be able to bit-bang VGA out too!

This looks super awesome. I got excited until I saw it was a Kickstarter and not delivering until December. I guess I'll wait until they actually start shipping in case there's something better by then ...

If they could ship one in a week I'd totally buy one now.

Thanks! I also wish we could ship immediately. We figured we'd better set a conservative delivery date in case regulatory approvals and the chip shortage caused havoc but we're looking to fulfill all of the deliveries as early as possible so we can move on to branching out with derivatives.

32KB SRAM with up to 512GB of microSD storage.

That's just wild.

Does this actually exist? I'm weary of kickstarters.

It sure does! I am directly involved with Pocuter. We are already organizing production for backer fulfillment. We'd like to upgrade to the ESP32-C3 since it isn't as affected by the chip shortage as the SAMD21 and ESP32 are (and offers more favorable performance/security)

That is fantastic to hear, tech hardware might be one of the hardest things to create. Congrats!

Could something like this be leveraged for a physical representation of crypto currency? So that you could spend it like cash.

Sure, but it would more likely be a reader for the keys you hand to someone on the SD card.

Unlikely though - the physical representation of crypto has been tried several times, but trust and key ownership is hard.

Maybe nitpicky but why is the ESP32 (dual core @ 240MHz, 300kb+ memory, options with megabytes of flash and memory integrated in package) relegated to coprocessor for a 48MHz microcontroller with 256kb flash and 32kb memory?

Almost certainly because of better tooling and probably better peripheral support.

Pretty much! :D

Hi! I am actually directly involved with Pocuter. Amazing to see it posted here! The ESP32 alone doesn't have enough pins to handle all of the features of the Pocuter, so the SAMD21 was selected as the main MCU to supplement this. We are looking in to upgrading to the ESP32-C3 in the near future.

That's quite reasonable.

Agree that C3 would be a good 'upgrade' here. There's no need for a fully featured ESP32 and C3 will save some cost.

The security features on the ESP32-C3 are great!

> Secure Boot, Flash Encryption, Digital Signature and HMAC Peripheral, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) / DRM

That could open up new use cases. Strange its RSA only (no ECC).

https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32_C3?0

And it's RISC-V based too.

Not nitpicky at all. Some ideas.

1. I believe that there are some microcontrollers that have irreversible settings, such as a setting to permanently disable writing to flash memory.

Is the ESP32 such a processor?

If so, maybe they want to have WiFi on a coprocessor that they can write protect so that they can get certification to sell their modules in jurisdictions that require that WiFi has protections against people reconfiguring it to use channels that are not part of the WiFi bands in those jurisdictions.

2. Their software, Pocuter OS 1.0, the SDK, and the 3D and physics libraries seem to be a big part of their pitch.

Maybe they already had these, or a large part of them, for ARM before they decided on how they would do WiFi and BLE. Later they picked ESP for WiFi and BLE and could run everything on that, but porting their OS and low level libraries from ARM to Xtensa or RISC-V (depening on which ESP32 they are using) might be a lot of work.

3. Power savings? If WiFi and BLE aren't being used they can completely shut down the ESP32.

This is probably not it though, because I believe that ESP32 provides very fine grained control over power. They could run everything else on the ESP32 and still completely shut down WiFi and BLE when not in use.

4. I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that they are doing it for the next reason I'm going to name. I'm just including it because I'm sure at some point someone on Kickstarter or Indiegogo is going to try it.

Use a coprocessor for WiFI and BLE that is ridiculous overkill if that is all at does, and use all that extra power to run something of interest to you such as mining crytocurrency.

Edit: oh well, none of these guesses turned out right.

1- AFAIK, Espressif uses closed binary blob for WiFi so the channels could not be tampered with. Still, they need FCC regulation for their whole product in some jurisdictions.

4- I don't think any kind of crypto could be reasonably mined on these MCUs.

Wouldn't changing the locale settings defeat 1-?

locale? If you mean some config, I think the binary blob should handle WiFi protocol to the spec (BTW, It's a freeRTOS application IIRC)

Different territories have different channel restrictions. As a result, some countries have access to channels that other countries do not. Setting your wifi up as if it is in Japan gives you a couple of channels you are not legally allowed to access in North America, for example.

The topic of mining crypto on microcontrollers something I see so often, and it drives me crazy. Mining crypto takes a ton of energy, so why would you do that on a battery powered device? ffs

Same reason people do cryptomining via JavaScript malware on web pages: it is using someone else's resources.

I mean, have you done much embedded systems dev? What good is crypto mining when the device dies in an hour?

They support native USB and ESP32 doesn't have that.

A lot of powerful computers were built by bunging in a powerful CPU, perhaps with extra RAM, as a coprocessor to an already-existing weak computer, whose weak CPU then serves as a sort of front end processor, or FEP. An example is the Tandy Model 16, which was the second line of desktop Unix workstations ever released (and arguably the first affordable one, for multi-kilobuck values of "affordable"). It was basically a Tandy Model II Z80-based computer with a daughtercard carrying a 68000 processor and up to 512 KiB of RAM. The 68000 actually ran the Unix (Microsoft Xenix), and delegated I/O to the various peripherals to the Z80.

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