Mecha Comet – Open Modular Linux Handheld Computer | Hacker News Reader

Mecha Comet – Open Modular Linux Handheld Computer

mecha.so

270 pointsRealman7898 comments

So... what's the OS situation? From a glance at https://github.com/mecha-org/linux -> https://github.com/mecha-org/linux/commits/imx/lf-6.12.20/ it looks like they're starting from a 6mo-old kernel (6.12.20 vs current LTS 6.12.67 and current stable 6.18.7). Is there any reason to expect upstreaming or even just consistent updates, or is this yet another device that will ship with an old-ish kernel and never get updated again?

This is why I went with a Hackberry Pi CM5 [1]. I insert the CM5 I want to, and there's that.

It comes with a good, proven BB keyboard. No option for GPIO pins or gamepad module, but I don't need such anyway. Instead, what I have in it is a USB hub which fits nicely in the side.

Unfortunately, the RPi CM I had lying around were CM4 with eMMC or CM5 w/o WiFi/BT. So I bought a new CM5, with 16 GB RAM. That was end of last summer. I'm not sure I'd bother now, given the RAM prices which surely affected CM5 prices. Actually, I should probably sell those for profit, since they're not doing anything.

[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5

Yep, I use these too; they are nice and fun to use imho. It's limitations keep me focused.

For what its worth the kickstarter page states: > Our software support will be officially available till 7 years, our SOC is supported till 2036. Community support could last even longer.

I'd take that claim by Mecha with a huge grain of salt.

How are they going to fund 7 years of support for a device that sells maybe a few thousand units? How are they going to guarantee they will still be around, and interested in maintaining the device drivers in 2033?

The Linux kernel project will remove the device drivers from the mainline kernel if they are no longer actively maintained and in use. So it is very likely that the support will be dropped from the mainline kernel way before 2033, as there probably won't be any users of this device remaining, and the original developers long gone.

Call me negative, but I expect that this company wil just vanish after some time. The team will just move on, maybe even start again under a different name, but there will be nobody to be held responsible for promises and claims they made in the past.

2033 is not that far away. If they sell a few thousand items there would still be users, so the kernel would usually not remove the drivers if not defunct.

You might very well be right about the company, it is the likely outcome after all for all companies. But if the kernel support is seeded properly there should be a bit more time than predicted even then.

Also, positively: They did the communication on the website really well (I stumbled over the comet before), extended it nicely and the kickstarter campaign seems to be a big success. They have a good chance to stick around.

Creator here.

I can completely understand the skepticism, any startup today releasing something and promising to support will be taken with a grain of salt. I cannot guarantee that Mecha will not run out of business in 7 years. But at the very least we have the confidence to commit to 7 years of support, if we are able to keep the show going.

Why we are confident of extending this support -

1. The SOC from NXP is widely used in automotives and industries. Their support is listed till 2036, https://www.nxp.com/products/nxp-product-information/nxp-pro... which means their downstream will keep seeing updates. In above comment I mentioned that they follow 6 months+LTS release dates. To give an example, IMX6 that were released in 2011 are still actively supported in 2026. You can even buy SOMs and are still deployed in production.

2. The WiFi chip we are using is NXP IW612, again has longevity till 2038, which means it will still see its driver being updated and maintained.

3. Our audio codec is from Analog (MAX98090) again widely used and in production.

4. Most of our usb and power controllers are from TI, which can be expected to be around in the kernel for a long time.

5. None of the parts we've used are not recommended for new design or obsolete or come from unknown vendors. A lot of care has been taken in choosing the right parts?

From my point of view our work in supporting is to ensure we pull changes, run our test suites, see if everything works and repeat. What am I missing? There are no device drivers built that are exclusive to the Comet at this stage. You can review our device trees on our repos.

Also, we have a longer roadmap ahead of us - selling few thousand units in 5 days is no indicator of how things will be in the future. We are betting on this hardware and more hardware that we release later.

You can sit on the fence and keep expecting us to fail, that is your prerogative. But that doesn't automatically imply that we are ill-prepared.

(edit: formatting)

Is there any 'keys'/signatures required to get any of the parts working ?

No absolutely not, everything is uncomplicated intentionally. Plus it is open hardware.

As someone who works on a device that was initially released in 2020 and uses a SoC from the same family (i.MX 8M Quad), 7 years of support is not unbelievably long (provided that the company stays afloat at all).

You’re probably right. Seems these appear every couple of years with much hype and then the business behind them conveniently goes out of business.

I learned my lesson with this niche market after CHIP: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Exploring-the...

These clowns didn’t even tell anyone they went out of business, it took someone going to their listed address in person who found the office had been completely gutted to get ready for the next tenant.

Creator here, thanks for highlighting this.

We are currently following the NXP IMX downstream kernel, that is why you can check the 'imx-' prefix on our branch, their releases follow 6 months after the LTS release. NXP IMX 6.18 will release roughly by end of March, when it does you will see us updating to 6.18 as well. By the time we ship, we mostly likely will be shipping 6.18.

Now we do intend to upstream, we've even got mainline u-boot to start working with the device albeit the display. We were waiting for the hardware configuration to be stabilized before we submit the device trees and start actively working on mainline support. It won't happen overnight but you will see our documentation clearly defining how far we are from the mainline. Also to add here, compared to other SOCs, NXP already has very good mainline support.

Thanks for this. When I first saw this I was expecting to find it was a dead-end Chinese SoM with an ancient kernel - so the fact it's an iMX (which has great support from NXP) is great.

I had a poke around the u-boot and linux repos they share, and it looks like the changes from mainline are pretty minimal - mostly related to device trees and configuration. That's to be expected for any custom board.

Obviously if the company died before this stuff was mainlined, then someone would need to maintain it. But from what I've seen everything you'd need is out there already.

Stumbled across this thing a while back and thought it looked really cool but I have never been able to come up with an idea for how I would use it so I haven't pledged.

I want to want it but I fear it would just sit on my desk. Does anyone have cool ideas for uses?

On the bottom of the website, several use cases are mentioned. It is a fairly robust list of examples.

Anything with USB-A is neat with this type of device. For example, a LimeSDR USB would work (even a uSDR for M.2, though I'd wait for the successor).

For Kali, I sport a GPD Pocket 2, and that works well, but I'm in the process of switching that to my Hackberry Pi CM5.

Still, I bought that end of last summer. I honestly would not buy any computer right now. The RAM prices are simply insane.

It’s not exactly cool but mobile media server and tool box. Knowing I have tools I can trust in my pocket is nice. Being able to travel and watch my shows without setting up a vpn is double nice.

I made a really cool cyberdeck. It sits on my desk.

Lol, Cyberdeck aka high effort paper weight.

There are so many cool vaguely scifi tech projects one could build these days but almost none of them have actual utility. : (

Well, that depends on your use-cases. Your profession, hobby, etc.

If you perform pentests or red teaming, a mobile device with CLI access is very useful (whether a smartphone is suffice I leave up to the reader). If you are using the device non-mobile, you could attach an external screen and keyboard to it (and perhaps pointer device, I like the Apple Magic Trackpad, even on Linux it works well these days). That way, you could for example write your pentest report on the machine while not fscking up your eyes. Also remember: if you got WLAN or 5G you can get access to more horsepower. It is not as if you were going to run hashcat on these devices locally. You can also run SSHd (and even remote desktop, I guess) on the machine and admin it like that from a fully blown computer. You could also use it with SDR, or for example for reverse engineering (which you could do in a VM as well, if you prefer).

Personally, I think this device would be pretty cool for a kid to learn Linux on (better than the Hackberry Pi CM5 which I got). The UI is neat, there's a CLI, and they can game on as well as explore on it. Pretty good deal a ~250 EUR machine to learn Linux on, as well as game. Remember: if it is ARM, it can run all the Android apps via Waydroid. No emulation or x86-64 Android versions necessary. I see it as a successor to Clockwork Pi GameShell [1] in that regard, as even the 2 GB RAM version is more powerful. That device had only 1 GB RAM, and:

> Introducing new Clockwork OS, based on Debian 9 ARMhf and Linux mainline Kernel 4.1x. You can run PICO 8, LOVE2D, PyGame, Phaser.io, Libretro, and many other game engines smoothly.

There's the Clockwork uConsole [2] as well, and you can put a RPi CM 3 or 4 in it. The A-04 variant specifically seems akin to the Mecha Comet i.MX 8 variant.

> A-04 ARM64-bit Quad-core Cortex-A53 1.8GHZ 4 Mali-T720 2GB DDR3

The RISC-V variant only has 1 GB RAM, the other variants got 4 GB DDR4.

Both the uConsole and the Mecha Comet are candybar format. Compared to Clockwork Pi's Devterm and GPD Pocket series which are clamshell. The Mecha Comet however allows you to easily swap the keyboard with a gamepad. The Clockwork devices don't allow this; they're tailored for either keyboard candybar, keyboard clamshell, or gamepad (candybar).

[1] https://www.clockworkpi.com/gameshell

[2] https://www.clockworkpi.com/home-uconsole

I kinda wish it could be used like a smart phone with a GSM module.

You can buy attachments in step 2 of the checkout. They mention having cellular as an option on the description:

> LTE or 5G Modems

> Add mobile data and calling support to your Comet. Bring your own modem and antenna or use our standard LTE upgrade kit.

That's cool!

I notice they haven't developed a dialer app for it yet which seemed a bit weird.

One of the people on discord came up with a dialer concept!

https://discord.com/channels/1163379146106359858/13975741030...

Creator here,

We haven't because it isn't primarily a phone. But we will eventually. But the folks at PlaMo are testing their dialer app and it works fine.

It looks sick! good luck with the project

I’d love to see a click wheel attachment for input, then it could become a neo-iPod.

Or just a touch sensing pad attachment that serves different purpose based on the app.

Same.

Looks rad, but I have a Legion Go which I can play any game I want and tinker on. This seems like it would be a worse version of that, but also not a useful phone replacement.

Added this y'day to make it easier to understand use-cases,

https://mecha.so/comet#use-cases

I'll add pictures/videos of the examples we've internally tested in a bit!

Thank you! I genuinely think its an awesome project and will probably end up supporting.

I didn't realize I could potentially use it as a highly hackable phone. Whats the battery life like?

EDIT: I just went ahead and pledged my support. I wanna see you guys succeed.

looks like it would be great for making calls, texting, and emails, taking pictures, and looking at web sites, listening to music, and watching video, when not creating the software for a lunar lander.

Small gimmicky computers seem to attract so much attention and people who can’t help themselves but buy it, play with it for a while, then toss it into a drawer and never use it again.

I feel personally attacked!...

You are right though, ive loved tinkering especially some if the cool linux based handhelds but i always come back to mobile/tablet because my limiting resource is time and android/ios kinda just works.

Took 12hrs, but I got my PocketChip updated to Debian Bookworm recently.

Isn't that still a major release behind? Trixie (Debian 13) came out last August.

Too late backed it at maximum tier all extensions....

No idea what I'm going to use it for, possibly as a mobile Kali setup or something

Or at least a cool paperweight

A powerful-enough pocket computer that can run a "real" OS with good input is the holy grail. Specialized types (gaming platforms mostly) seem to be converging on a few specific designs, but full general-purpose computers with keyboards etc still haven't really produced a "good enough" model. I used my GPD Win 2 daily when I was traveling often and frequently found myself in situations where it wasn't convenient to carry or use a full laptop due to weight/size, and even that thumb keyboard is 10000x better than a touchscreen keyboard in termux etc. There's definitely a niche to be served by either a better design or reimagining of the interface.

Any screenshots or videos of it running? All I'm seeing are renders. As someone who has been burned by crowdfunded "engineering" (where something seems good on paper, and then there's a year or two of posts about all the challenges that were "unforeseen" before a heartfelt postmortem) I feel like that's a requirement.

They showcased it at CES 2025 and it looks like here's a hands on review of it at that state - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oQ0l2ghmcc

Creator here,

There are a bunch of them added to the Kickstarter page, check them out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...

We are updating them on Kickstarter

Added a bunch to Overview and Use Cases;

https://mecha.so/comet#hardware

https://mecha.so/comet#use-cases

Bunch more are incoming as do more tests, will add them in soon

This reminds me of Phonebloks from 13 years ago.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks

Or Project Ara

Or Moto Z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_Z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara

Or Pockit

https://pockit.ai/

> Websites prove their identity via certificates, which are valid for a set time period. The certificate for pockit.ai expired on 12/13/2023.

I remember that!

Reminds me also of Motorola's attempt to have a hardware-expansible phone a few years ago, the Moto Z range and Moto Mods.

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/gadgets-computers-software/25...

Obviously this is much more open than the proprietary moto-z stuff.

Jolla's TOH (The Other Half) which is back in their latest reincarnation [1].

I have to say though: I like the communication of the Mecha Comet team here (and the UI). I wish them the best.

[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/the-other-half-returns-commun...

I wish we can have the low power Intel or AMD chip rather than ARM :( the distro fragmentation in ARM and my distaste for uboot makes me hard to press the buy button.

Can you please elaborate on what kind of problems you have faced with uboot?

Website's a bit weird. The app icons highlight when you hover over them, but don't seem to do anything.

They've got a grab-bag of unrelated Linux etc. org icons - Nix, Debian, postmarketOS, Node, Kubernetes… You could argue that someone _could_ run Nix or Node on it, but Debian is just nerdbait. It's not relevant to the product they're selling, unless you're gonna wipe the disk and support it yourself.

The OS for it was entirely based on Debian stable. They recently switched to a fedora build. I think the whole idea is you can put any OS on it you want!

Ah, sorry, that's on me; some of the links are still not active. (It's been a mad week!)

Could you tell me which section it was? I'll fix it

#software

Fixed!

https://mecha.so/comet#software

Nice!

Screenshots are broken on the Files app though.

You the best; getting it fixed

Any chance you can prevent the left hand navigation floating widget of 10 bubbles (no idea what it's called) from rendering on top of the actual content? It obscures the text that I want to read, very irritating. [Edit: I see, it works at 100%. But my default zoom is 110% or 120%. Zooming seems to break your layout.]

This project is currently seeking funds (and is funded) on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...

(and the super early bird rewards are all gone)

I might be interested if I weren't still waiting on the Soulcircuit Pilet to ship....

I’m planning to build something like this over the next few months. Think Nintendo 3DS-sized, but as a tiny laptop. The goal is extreme portability while still being able to program on it reasonably well.

I travel a lot and manage servers, so I’ve been wanting a dedicated “SSH machine” that I can always carry with me. With how good AI tooling has gotten, doing real work on a tiny device is suddenly very viable. The other day I SSH’d into a box from my phone while I was at the gym and just told Claude Code to fix a Kubernetes manifest issue. It was fixed and deployed in under two minutes.

I mentioned this idea at work and a few coworkers immediately said they’d buy one if it existed. Curious what others think.

I’ve been looking at some tiny laptops. The GPD Micro PC2 is one of my favorites so you can take inspiration from it.

I saw that. Cool, but very expensive. It has a bunch of features that jack up the price but are not worth it for me.

I was doing the same recently and came to the conclusion that i would just get a new small macbook when needed. If I was worried about losing it or damage, I also got a netbook for 20 bucks on eBay the other day and installed Debian on it and as a thin client is more than you need, performance wise.

Nice throwback. I like the idea of 20 dollar netbooks, ordering one for sure! However, the form factor of the product I'm building is smaller than an iPhone XR (that's the only one I have for measure lol), only thicker because it will open up. The point is that I can fit it in my pocket or in someone's fanny pack. With that for factor, you will have to type with thumbs, but I don't mind that. Also, taking inspiration from the Mecha Comet, I could add in a detachable component (keyboard, joystick, etc.)

Also, the netbooks are old now. A new chip with an optimized linux distro will be a joy to work with.

I own a GPD Pocket 2. Terrible support from this company. First of all, my screen had an issue (immediately apparent on first boot) and they refused to solve it. So if you buy such from outside of Europe, buy from Amazon instead of directly, not KS/IGG.

Second, their BIOS is a beta version of a commerciel BIOS, lol. As such, it doesn't have Intel SGX enabled.

That said, it served me as cyberdeck before cyberdecks were all the rage, and before they were easy and cheap to build. It stems from a time when ARM64 wasn't still as powerful as the current (approx) decade. Of course the machine has some downsides for 2026 standards. 2x USB-A, 1x USB-C, for example. I'd rather have 2x USB-C, since you use one for power. I also modded the device for better thermals, and have replaced the battery. The machine sits behind 8 philips screws.

One cool thing the GPD Pocket 3 and GPD Pocket 4 have, is similar to what Framework has: a modular port, where you can keep the form factor but gain KVM, RS232, etc.

The base variant of the Mecha Comet comes with very little storage and RAM:

> This is the base variant with 2GB RAM and 64GB Storage.

And a relatively slow i.MX8. If you want to go with the quicker i.MX95 you're better off with:

> This is the base variant with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage.

But that one is 50 EUR more, and still comes with only 64 GB storage and 4 GB RAM. My GPD Pocket 2 in 2018 came with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage (which isn't much nowadays).

As for the screen in that machine, compare:

> 6th generation Corning Gorilla Glass, AF anti-fingerprint coating, 10-point touch, 500 nits brightness

with

> 3.92" AMOLED Display (550 nits), Capacitive Touch

The screen of this machine, while small (4") seems quite decent.

And if you want to emulate any Android apps which are ARM (which you could with Waydroid, if you have pref. 8 GB RAM on your machine), then you better run ARM. You can emulate x86-64 on ARM with decent performance (tried recently with Qemu on a RPi 4, and my daily driver is a MBP M1 variant) but the other way around is not feasible.

My first and last Android phone was the Motorola Atrix, which at the time was supposed to be quite good. One of its benefits was the idea that you could pop it into a laptop type dock and have it act as a terminal of sorts.

You can also slap a keyboard onto an existing phone. I have tried vibe coding via ssh from my iPhone and honestly it’s not terrible at all. Instead of doom scrolling I can build things.

I've been wanting to build something similar, but can't shake the feeling I'd just stick with the SSH client on my phone.

Any reason really to have a separate device for this?

Buyers beware: 4-core A53 is genuinely unusable (original Pinebook/PinePhone specs), A55 is better but I still wouldn’t recommend buying. You may expect performance similar to 15+ years old desktops.

User of Librem 5 phone with this CPU here. It works fine as a daily driver. Firefox with Noscript works fine in desktop mode. See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

Off-topic but curious if you experience this issue my Librem5 exhibits - I use my L5 mostly just to play mp3s. Regardless of being powered over usb-c or running on battery, it frequently has audio blips reminiscent of some old laptops briefly going in and out of deeper sleep states long enough for an audio blip.

Have you noticed something similar? do you listen to music on your L5?

Edit: I should also mention it does this regardless of audio out the internal DAC+3.5mm TRS, or over a USB MBox attached to a dock. It seems to be something quite low-level disabling interrupts for too long, something like that.

I do not experience any problems while playing music (except initial buffering on Bluetooth). I recommend to ask for advice on https:/forums.puri.sm

And what’s wrong with a 15+yo desktop? Light OS, get stuff done. Are we trying to run a Switch emulator on this thing?

First time I heard about this project what's wrong with the CPU? I mean what makes it unusable?

It's only unusable if you try running bloated modern apps on it.

Creator here,

For the IMX8MP - The pinephone was 1.2 GHz, this is 1.8 GHz on all four cores. As far as geekbench goes it hits between the Pi 3 and Pi 4, faster EMMC and LPDDR4 gives it a bigger boost compared to the Pi 3. The PCIe 3.0 is also there. Yes it is not equivalent to a desktop use, but for a phone sized usecases, the processor has not been a bottle neck. The advantage you get is a battery life that goes 7 hours on idle with the display on, and on sleep it can go upto 8D and wake up instantly.

The IMX95 is 6x A55 at 1.8GHz but you can check the geekbench below, it matches the single core performance of Pi 4 and beats it at multi-core performance while offering LPDDR5. But at the same time, is only 15% more power hungry than the 8MP.

So the way we see it -

Pi 3 < Comet 8MP < Pi 4 < Comet 95 < Pi 5

Ref: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/15259040?baseli...

Edit: The IMX95 is 6-cores A55 and not 4-cores

I backed this on Kickstarter and have been following for a while. I am after a gadget to tinker with but still on the fence a little bit. It's about 300€ all in so I will see.

It's really cool but I just wish the display had a touchscreen.

I'll buy it when I see it working as a phone. Looks like phone support is an option here, but after I bought the pinePhone, I am wary it's not going to work.

Strange to have this posted on Kickstarter and not on Crowdsupply or another open source hardware crowdfunding platform. But I suppose Kickstarter does have more reach.

Open Hardware + Open Software is good enough for me to hit the buy button. Seems like a good toy, I hope I don't lose interest within a month of buying.

I am planning to build something similar as a hobby project except my idea is that Claude Code runs everything on the device for you.

will it have a screen?

Yes, I have 2 candidates so far: - A 7-inch OLED (that's 1920 by 1080) - A much cheaper but still nice IPS display. Again, 7-inch I'm not sure where I'm going with this yet, but if other people want one, I want to have some flexibility in the specs and pricing for people to select from.

I've been meaning to make a post about this on X for some time, so I went ahead and did it tonight. If you want to head over there and see the renders of what I'm thinking: https://x.com/TroyCherasaro/status/2016767340457980403

Dude it would be so great to have a little device and you text it SMS messages as prompts. Then it just sits there and thinks away probably getting really hot lol.

If this thing had a 5G modem it would be the perfect device .

A phone where I can install applications without asking Google for permission.

I'm a bit confused about if it does calls. It doesn't mention it for most of the page, but then says:

> DIY Phone

> Use the Comet and the Linux stack for calling*, messaging and mobile data as an alternate to your walled and closed smartphone. Contribute to the Linux ecosystem for mobiles.

So I guess this means it can, but it's not supported and you need to contribute the software. So perhaps it has the hardware, and perhaps it might work.

Without any mention of 5G capability, I'm forced to assume this doesn't have it.

Or course you can attach a USB stick with a 5G modem in it. To be fair, this makes things really difficult. Not all modems support all bands. Different countries use different 5g bands, etc

Creator here

We are currently testing with LTE modem (Quectel EM05). We are yet to test with 5G Modems but similar sized 3042 (M.2) are available albeit expensive.

So is the LTE modem included ? Or would I need to buy it later ?

I'd still probably carry a main phone, but this could be a cool backup

The LTE modem will be available on the Pledge Manager. We are currently testing with Quectel EM05, works really well - calling, messaging, data all have been tested. PlaMo dialer app already works, there is a demo somewhere on the KS page. We need some time to design the internal flex pcb antennas but provisions have been made already.

Also, you are free to bring your own modem too - and only opt for the antennas pre-assembled in your unit.

Esim or physical SIM ?

You've pretty much sold me on the device, but I might wait for retail.

This makes me feel good. Aching for a portable computing future where daily driver needs can be fully met via open tech.

so i see a nix logo on the website...

interesting would be if i can put nixos onto it but keep using their launcher...

So it’s a Raspberry Pi except now I can type Unix commands with my thumbs on a blackberry keyboard……ouch.

LOL exactly! That's why I want to build something like this: https://x.com/TroyCherasaro/status/2016767340457980403

Same!

My goal is to use it to control this Quad-legged walker, possibly ROS.

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