Funded within 5 minutes, soulscircuit are clearly onto a winner here with their upcoming Pilet open source modular mini computers powered by the Raspberry Pi 5.
Yeah, wish they were a bit more upfront about that. In their defense it is in the FAQ and somewhere at the bottom of the "about this project" page. Battery is also an add on unless you want to source your own.
So for $200 USD they’re selling an 80’s retro version of a GameboyPi case ($50 on amazon, includes battery) with a slightly larger screen and fewer buttons. For $10 more, they’ll add in a keyboard that they haven’t developed yet.
Seems like an overpriced stepping stone between a flipper and a steam deck.
The emotional part of me yells “shut up and take my money”, but the rational part of me tells me that it will be another useless piece of junk on my shelf
Yeah, I sort of wanted a computer I can carry around with me (and I kind of like the Inspector Gadget vibes), but then I remembered I have a smart phone so I already do.
Yeah I've seen this thing before and think it's a neat design but not really worth funding tbh. In the end it's just a Pi with a screen too small to be useful and a keyboard that would be terrible to use. Do we really need to fund more plastic crap? They could just put the designs online so people can 3D print them themselves, and put it on a service like pcbway for people that want a high quality version. People already do that all the time.
If they would design an interface for it as well, that would be really cool. Then it could be a useful thing definitely worth funding. But with a vanilla Pi Linux the user experience would be terrible.
I feel this way every time something is made like this. Like, you're not reinventing the wheel in any meaningful way. Is it cool? Of course! Is is something that makes the task easier and/or better? No, not really.
You'd be better off using SSH into a VPS and using a CLI editor from your phone. Better perf, can use any keyboard you care to bring, and no extra cost to you.
Just to add to what others are saying, check out The Phawx on YT, reviewing these things is kind of his schtick (not Linux focused, retro handheld focused).
Making prototypes is easy. Actually producing things is hard. Just cuz a KS has something working to show, doesn’t mean you should trust they can make enough of them for everyone.
Touchscreens have their place (and are overused in places like cars, to be sure) but their emergence combined with a minimalist trend sure has made things boring.
This looks like a copy paste from clockwork with their DevTerm and uConsole. I have a uConsole and really like it. Despite that it had a small year needed to ship it. It is now running stock Debian Bookworm and the community is growing. Its running on a CM4 and CM5 is almost done as well thanks to a very active community user. Software support is shit, but the hardware and software are open source so there are already a couple. Of expansion boards (4G, GPIO, USB hub, Pico2040, and GPS/LoRa in the making)
I was looking for something just like this,
A small, battery powered system with an integrated display. Started my search for a pi case but quickly realized an N100 x86 device with higher specs than a pi can be purchased for significantly cheaper. let’s just hope I can get Debian on it.