Tag Archives: DIY

RHYTHM Is the Walkman the Smartphone Era Forgot to Build

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Smartphones turned music into just another notification competing for attention, a song interrupted by a text, an album broken up by a calendar alert. RHYTHM exists to undo that arrangement entirely, building a dedicated listening device from real audio components instead of borrowing a phone’s guts and bolting on a headphone jack. It’s a from-scratch digital audio player designed around one job: playing music properly, without a screen demanding anything else from you.

That commitment starts with what’s actually driving the sound. Rather than leaning on an all-in-one audio codec chip the way most budget players do, RHYTHM routes music through a genuine ESS SABRE DAC, the same category of chip found in dedicated hi-fi gear, paired with a discrete amplifier stage rather than a shortcut solution. An ESP32-S3 handles the file parsing and processing, but the actual sound reproduction runs through hardware built specifically for that job alone.

Designer: Mithilesh Gupta Konda

The headphone output makes the clearest case for why any of this matters. Instead of splitting one internal signal across a single jack, RHYTHM runs two completely independent, actively buffered 3.5mm outputs, each driven by its own dedicated amplifier chip. Two people can plug in two entirely different pairs of headphones, and each gets a full, uncompromised signal, no shared circuit quietly degrading whichever connection came second.

Keeping that signal clean required rethinking the power supply as much as the audio path. RHYTHM physically separates its digital logic and high-frequency switching lines from the analog circuitry that actually shapes the sound, regulating each side through its own dedicated, ultra-low-noise power regulator. It’s an unglamorous decision that never shows up in a spec sheet screenshot, but it’s exactly the kind of choice that determines whether quiet passages in a recording stay quiet.

Physical control gets the same attention. A precision mechanical rotary encoder handles navigation alongside a set of tactile buttons, giving the whole interface a hands-on quality that a touchscreen simply can’t replicate. Paired with a compact 2-inch color display, the device reads less like a shrunken phone and more like a purpose-built instrument, something meant to be operated by feel in a pocket or a bag without needing to look at it.

A microSD slot rounds out the practical side, storing lossless files locally rather than depending on a streaming connection or app ecosystem. That local-first approach extends the project’s entire philosophy: RHYTHM isn’t trying to replace a phone’s convenience. Instead, it’s opting out of that convenience on purpose, trading constant connectivity for a listening experience built around a single, uninterrupted task.

The post RHYTHM Is the Walkman the Smartphone Era Forgot to Build first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pocket Traveler Is the Fitness Tracker That Thinks It’s a Tamagotchi

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Fitness trackers love to reduce your day into cold numbers, steps counted, calories estimated, none of it particularly fun to look at. Pocket Traveler takes the opposite approach, hiding all that data tracking behind a tiny pixel-art character named Milo who reacts to your movement the way an actual pet might. Walk, and Milo walks. Sit still too long, and Milo drifts off to sleep. The gamification isn’t bolted on afterward; it’s the entire point.

Milo’s design borrows directly from 16×16 pixel Tamagotchi sprites, each frame hand-drawn before being converted into code the device’s Raspberry Pi Pico can actually render. That authenticity matters more than it sounds. A pixelated character built with genuine sprite-work reads as a character with personality, not just an icon standing in for a progress bar, and that distinction is what makes checking in on Milo feel like checking on something rather than checking a stat.

Designer: Nigel Weiss

Underneath the charm sits a genuinely clever technical decision. Rather than pairing an accelerometer with GPS to track actual distance and location, the device relies purely on motion data from a single ADXL345 accelerometer, estimating activity from acceleration patterns instead of exact movement. It’s a simpler, cheaper sensor setup that still manages to capture the rhythm of a day, walking, resting, and the long stretches of stillness in between.

That data feeds two separate systems running in parallel. A leveling mechanic tracks lifetime progress, calibrated so a first milestone arrives within a week while a much higher level takes roughly a year to reach, giving the device both short-term payoff and something to chase over months. Layered on top, a rotating status system, chud, pleb, or nomad, reacts specifically to your last three days of activity, giving Milo an entirely different look depending on whether you’ve been sedentary or genuinely active lately.

The status thresholds shift depending on direction, meaning the bar for leveling up sits higher than the bar for dropping back down. That asymmetry keeps someone hovering right at the edge of a tier from bouncing between statuses every few minutes, a small design choice that prevents an otherwise satisfying system from feeling glitchy or unstable during normal daily fluctuation.

Pick the device up after it’s been sitting untouched for a while, and Milo occasionally has something to say, brief, handwritten lines hinting at what he’s supposedly been up to. Some are mundane, some genuinely funny, all of them injecting a bit of narrative into what would otherwise be a purely functional interaction. It’s a detail that costs almost nothing computationally but adds real texture to an otherwise mechanical relationship between a person and their step count.

Built from a handful of accessible components, an OLED screen, an accelerometer, a small battery, and open enough that anyone curious could build their own version, Pocket Traveler proves that turning movement tracking into a bit of digital company doesn’t require expensive sensors or polished manufacturing. Sometimes a hand-drawn character and a little personality do more to keep someone moving than a spreadsheet full of numbers ever could.

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This DIY Scanner Turns Any Printed Book Into a Screenless Audiobook

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Most accessibility technology for reading assumes you’ll eventually need a screen somewhere in the chain, even if it’s just to select a file. This Raspberry Pi book scanner throws that assumption out the window. It photographs an open printed book, converts the text to speech, and hands control over to a handful of tactile buttons, no display, no menus, nothing to see because nothing needs seeing.

Two 16-megapixel cameras with wide-angle lenses sit below the book, one trained on each page, capturing both sides of an open spread in a single pass. Custom LED boards flank them, casting light across the paper at a shallow angle rather than straight down, a small optical decision that spreads illumination evenly while keeping reflections off the glass panels pressing the book flat from below.

Designer: Ludwin (lhm0)

That glass matters more than it looks. Printed books rarely lie perfectly flat, and any curve near the spine can blur or hide text right where two pages meet. The design accounts for that by requiring text to sit at least 0.35 in from the gutter, a real constraint for tightly bound paperbacks, but one that keeps recognition accuracy high across the kind of ordinary books people actually own.

Once the cameras capture a page, OCR converts it to text and text-to-speech reads it aloud immediately, closing the loop between printed page and spoken word almost instantly. But the more interesting decision shows up in how it handles longer reading sessions. Pages get grouped into chunks of roughly 10 to 20, generally ending wherever a chapter break falls naturally, and each chunk gets summarized automatically.

That summarization unlocks something a straightforward page reader can’t offer: a spoken recap of everything read so far, on demand, whenever someone needs to pick a book back up after days away from it. Rather than forcing a rereading of prior pages to reorient, the device just tells you where the story currently stands, treating memory the same practical way an audiobook app’s chapter markers do.

Multiple books coexist inside the same device through a surprisingly simple trick: an NFC tag stuck to each one. Scan a book’s tag and the system knows exactly which internal record to attach new pages to, meaning a stack of half-finished books can sit on a shelf indefinitely without their scanned pages ever bleeding into each other. Pick one up months later, tap its tag, and continue exactly where things left off.

Every part of it, the bill of materials, PCB layouts, 3D-printed enclosure files, and full software stack, is published openly for anyone to replicate or improve. That openness turns a single accessibility device into a template other builders can adapt, refine, or scale toward whatever specific need their own version needs to solve.

The post This DIY Scanner Turns Any Printed Book Into a Screenless Audiobook first appeared on Yanko Design.

This ROG Ally X Mod Snaps On a 120Hz Second Screen, Then Off Again

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Dual-screen handhelds usually mean buying an entirely new device built around that gimmick from the ground up. This ROG Ally X mod skips that purchase entirely. It bolts a second 120Hz display onto a standard x86 handheld using nothing more exotic than a budget portable monitor, a pair of magnetic phone mounts, and some carefully angled USB-C cables, then lets you rip the whole thing off when you don’t need it.

The secondary panel is a 7-inch 1080p IPS screen that happens to match the Ally X’s own 120Hz refresh rate, an important detail most cheap add-on monitors get wrong. Pairing a 60Hz panel with a 120Hz handheld usually introduces visible stutter between the two screens, but matching refresh rates here means both displays feel like they belong to the same machine rather than two devices awkwardly duct-taped together.

Designer: ETA PRIME (mod), ASUS Republic of Gamers

Magnetic MagSafe rings adhered to the back of both the handheld and the monitor handle the actual attachment, while a dual-sided magnetic phone holder in between provides the hinge points. That arm lets the top screen fold flat against the assembly for storage or tilt up to a comfortable viewing angle during play, essentially borrowing a phone accessory to solve a handheld gaming problem nobody’s shipped a proper solution for yet.

Where this setup actually earns its keep is in the software pairing it unlocks. Dual-screen emulation for Nintendo DS, 3DS, and Wii U titles finally makes sense on PC hardware, with the top screen handling the main view while the Ally X’s built-in display takes over as the touch-enabled bottom screen exactly the way Nintendo intended those games to be played.

Flight and driving sims benefit just as directly. Popping instrument gauges and flight panels out to that second screen in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, or pushing telemetry readouts to it in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and various F1 games, turns a single handheld into something closer to a cramped cockpit setup. Even a Fallout 4 Pip-Boy overlay finds a natural home up there instead of cluttering the primary display.

None of this comes free of friction. Windows defaults the panel to 60Hz on first connection, so getting the full 120Hz and FreeSync experience means digging into display settings manually every time. The monitor also draws power straight from the handheld itself, meaning battery life takes a real hit exactly when you’re asking the system to drive two screens instead of one.

The real achievement isn’t the display itself; plenty of budget portable monitors exist. It’s the decision to make the whole assembly modular using parts nobody designed specifically for this: magnetic phone mounts and right-angle adapters repurposed into a hinge system that snaps on for a flight sim session and comes right back off for the commute home.

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Someone Just Built a Digital Camera That Ejects Photos Like Real Film

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Every digital photo you’ve ever taken lives the same way, buried in a folder, scrolled past, forgotten within the hour. The Camera with Digital Film refuses that fate for its images. It captures a scene digitally, then commits that single shot to a small e-paper cartridge you can pull out, prop up, and actually look at, closer to a printed photograph than anything living inside a phone.

The trick sits in the cartridge itself. Slide it into a slot at the top of the boxy 3D-printed body, press the shutter, and a Raspberry Pi with a 5-megapixel camera module does the capturing. The e-paper screen inside that cartridge then flickers and settles into a finished image built from just four colors, black, white, red, and yellow, giving every photo the flattened, graphic quality of a screen print rather than a snapshot.

Designer: Jens (Strange Inventions Lab)

That four-color limit isn’t a technical shortcoming so much as a deliberate constraint. Before the image locks in, a script reduces the raw capture down to that palette while letting contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness, and dithering get tuned until the picture actually looks intentional on a screen that small. The result rewards patience over speed, closer to darkroom fussing than instant gratification.

Pull the cartridge free afterward, and the photo doesn’t disappear. E-paper holds its image even with the battery removed, so that little rectangle becomes a physical object you can lean against a monitor or stick to a fridge door, exactly the kind of permanence chemical film offered and most digital cameras never bothered to replicate. Slide it back in later, though, and the same cartridge accepts a brand new shot, erasing the old one entirely.

That’s the real design move here: film that behaves like film until you decide otherwise, then behaves like a hard drive instead. No single cartridge is precious in the way a Polaroid frame is precious, since nothing is technically lost by overwriting it, yet each one still holds its picture with enough physical weight to feel worth keeping around for a while first.

The build itself skips screws entirely, relying on header pins to hold the cartridge snug against its contacts, with a small grab tab added later so removing a used cartridge doesn’t turn into a fight. It’s a minor detail, but one that matters for a device whose entire personality depends on how satisfying that swap feels in the hand, less like ejecting a memory card and more like pulling a photo out of a machine meant to produce them.

There’s a quiet argument buried in this project about what digital photography gave up along the way. Endless storage solved scarcity but erased the ritual of a photograph actually existing somewhere outside a screen. This camera doesn’t try to out-spec anything on the market. It just asks what happens when a picture has to earn a place in a slot before it’s allowed to disappear.

The post Someone Just Built a Digital Camera That Ejects Photos Like Real Film first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Cyberdeck Trend Went Viral and Raspberry Pi Just Made It Official

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A cyberdeck, as Raspberry Pi defines it in its freshly published official build guide, is something you make to solve a problem that a conventional tablet or laptop simply can’t, or just to build something entirely your own for no reason beyond the satisfaction of doing it. That definition is broad on purpose. The cyberdeck trend has been all over social media and the Internet for months now, and Raspberry Pi has finally stepped in with its own version.

The concept traces back to William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels, where cyberdecks were the portable hacking tools of futuristic underground operators. What people are building now is less dystopian but arguably more interesting: compact, custom computers assembled from parts, housed in whatever enclosure the builder can imagine, running whatever software fits the project. Briefcases, mint tins, old pocket computers, wooden boxes, purses, prop replicas, and more have all served as cyberdeck enclosures.

Designer: Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi’s reference build keeps things approachable for first-timers. The brain of the whole thing is a Raspberry Pi 5 board paired with Raspberry Pi flash storage. The keyboard is the Rii RK302, a low-profile Bluetooth model small enough to fit inside the chosen case. Audio comes from the Pimoroni Picade Max USB Audio, a compact USB-C sound card with a 3W stereo amplifier that handles everything through a single connection, leaving the 40-pin GPIO header completely free for other uses.

Power comes from a LiPo battery tucked underneath the keyboard plate, a small but deliberate detail that keeps the layout clean while making the computing stack accessible whenever needed. The whole assembly sits inside a black Pelican-style hard case, which is weatherproof, carries a handle, and is widely available at various price points. It’s an unassuming container that happens to hold a working personal computer inside.

The guide is structured around four decisions: brains, peripherals, power supply, and case. Each section walks through the considerations that matter most, power consumption, processing power, fit, and form, without prescribing a single right answer. The Pelican-style case gets the most airtime because Raspberry Pi says the case is what defines a cyberdeck. Pick a different container, and you get a fundamentally different machine.

Customization is built into the concept from the start. A Raspberry Pi Pico can be added as a secondary processor to drive a smaller auxiliary display, control LEDs, or monitor the battery level in real time. The guide notes this explicitly and frames it as just the beginning of what you can bolt on. For anyone who wants a project that never really finishes, that’s part of the appeal.

The timing connects to something real. The viral wave of cyberdeck content on the Internet has pulled in creators who’ve built these machines into everything from jewelry boxes to rehabbed thrift store bags. Some have attracted millions of views. Raspberry Pi’s social team admitted it “hasn’t been able to get away from” the trend, which makes the official guide feel less like a product launch and more like the company finally joining a conversation it had been watching for a while.

The post The Cyberdeck Trend Went Viral and Raspberry Pi Just Made It Official first appeared on Yanko Design.

Watti Is the Robotic Desk Lamp That Wants to Know What You’re Doing Before You Ask for Light

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The desk lamp has been, essentially, a solved problem since Edison. A light source, a shade to direct it, and a switch. Every design evolution since then has adjusted the aesthetics or added a dimmer; the functional premise, that a lamp sits passively until pointed and switched, has remained largely untouched for more than a century. Watti is an attempt to challenge that premise at every level, simultaneously and on purpose.

At first glance, Watti reads as a robotic arm that happens to have a light on the end. Five independently motorized axes control the base, shoulder, elbow, neck, and head, each driven by a RobStride motor that reports its position back to the computer. That range of motion gives the lamp the articulation of a traditional Anglepoise-style design, except it can get there on its own with measured precision.

Designer: Nikolay Tyulkin

A ring of 45 individually addressable WS2812 RGB LEDs provides the actual light output, and a Raspberry Pi 5 running ROS 2 coordinates the whole system. The camera is what separates Watti from a sophisticated motorized fixture. An Orbbec Astra Mini S captures both color and depth data at 640×480 resolution and 30 frames per second, giving the system a three-dimensional view of whatever sits in front of it.

Those streams are visible in the companion software but not yet acted on in a meaningful way; the lamp can see the desk without fully understanding what’s happening there. That gap is precisely what the project is working to close. Hand tracking, automatic work-area illumination, and 3D scanning are all on the development roadmap, which would let the lamp decide where to point itself based on where hands are positioned and what is being worked on, without any manual adjustment.

Even before those features arrive, Watti is already more programmable than most dedicated lighting tools. Watti Studio, a browser-based visual editor, lets users compose scenes that coordinate motion and light on a shared timeline. A virtual model of the five-axis lamp renders in the editor so poses and LED configurations can be arranged, previewed, and refined without a physical unit present. When a scene is ready, it’s packaged and transferred to the Raspberry Pi, which runs it locally without a continuous connection back to the browser.

The prototype runs on an external 24 V, 10 A power supply and uses approximately $700 worth of parts. That puts it firmly in research and enthusiast territory for now. Plans to release hardware files, the bill of materials, electrical diagrams, the communication protocol, and example scenes would eventually make it a fully buildable project for others who want to take the concept further.

What Watti points toward is a lamp that treats lighting as a spatial and contextual problem rather than a manual adjustment. A light that can track where work is happening, adapt its position in real time, and coordinate color and intensity without interrupting the task at hand is a fundamentally different object than a lamp with a flexible neck. The premise sounds obvious once stated, which is usually a sign that someone should have built it sooner.

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The Alarm Clock Built for People Who Lose 20 Minutes to Phone Alarms

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There’s a specific failure mode that most bedside alarms share. You reach for your phone to set an alarm, and by the time you’re done, you’ve also checked your messages, scrolled through something you didn’t mean to read, and lost twenty minutes of wind-down time to a screen that was already too bright. The phone isn’t bad at being an alarm; it’s just not designed to stop there, and that distinction costs more than most people acknowledge.

The CinderClock was designed with exactly that failure mode in mind. It’s a multi-purpose standalone desktop clock built to handle the things a bedside table needs without handing those tasks back to a phone. The device runs entirely on itself: no app, no cloud connection, no subscription, and WiFi that stays off at boot unless deliberately switched on to push a firmware update. What it does, it does without outside assistance.

Designer: Aqnazar Arysbek

The feature set covers the practical range of what a desk clock might reasonably be asked to do. Alarm history holds ten entries, a countdown timer runs while you navigate elsewhere in the menus, and the stopwatch tracks four laps with centiseconds. The fast-changing stopwatch display can be hidden, because a rapidly updating number on a desk is a distraction rather than information. Two Pomodoro presets store work and rest periods from 1 to 999 minutes, each phase signaled by a distinct jingle. Local temperature and humidity are monitored continuously, and sunrise and sunset times are available for anyone whose schedule tracks natural light rather than a fixed shift.

The physical form follows the logic of something designed to live on a desk permanently. The face is raked at an angle chosen for legibility whether the clock sits low on a nightstand or higher on a shelf. Navigation uses four keys and a joystick, with one move from standby opening a quick menu for alarm, timer, and stopwatch. The 3D-printed enclosure integrates the speaker grille into the same shell. The processor sleeps between seconds to work toward a two-week battery target, though the actual runtime won’t be published until measured.

The repairability case is where the design earns a different kind of attention. The bill of materials, PCB design files, and enclosure models are all published at launch. The firmware is already on GitHub under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Every module position is labeled on the back of the main board. The preference for common, well-documented components isn’t primarily about cost; it’s about sourcing availability, which is what keeps a device repairable years from now, when original sellers may no longer be around.

Most alarm clocks are priced to be replaced rather than fixed, and their design reflects that assumption. The CinderClock treats longevity as a design value rather than a bonus, and it makes that case consistently, from the open-source firmware down to the labeled circuit board that any careful owner can understand and service. It’s a more demanding thing to build, which is probably why it’s rare.

The post The Alarm Clock Built for People Who Lose 20 Minutes to Phone Alarms first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $99 Trackball Has Gesture Controls That Work Without Any Software

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The computer peripheral market has always been more experimental at its edges than in the mainstream. Ergonomic trackballs, in particular, have attracted a devoted following among power users, but the options tend to cluster at two extremes: consumer-facing products with locked-down firmware, and niche open-source hardware that trades polished finish for deep customizability. Finding something that genuinely does both has rarely been straightforward.

Ploopy’s Adept trackball made a compelling case for the latter category, earning a loyal following with its open-source, 3D-printed design and QMK compatibility. But it always felt like it had more to say. Its circuit board had always reserved space for two more switches that never made it to production, and the base had slots for a wrist rest that never materialized. The A+ is that unfinished story, now finished.

Designer: Ploopy

The most visible addition is the button count. The Adept had six; the A+ has eight, two of which also function as knobs. Out of the box, the knobs handle high-resolution vertical and horizontal scrolling, but both are fully reprogrammable for other functions. That dual-purpose approach keeps navigation and control within a single hand without needing a separate scroll wheel or accessory sitting alongside it.

The gesture system is arguably the more interesting addition. Hold a button and flick the ball in any of eight directions, and the device fires a command. By default, the left knob activates cut, copy, paste, desktop switching, and media controls. For someone who lives inside a browser and a text editor all day, that’s a significant amount of functionality without ever lifting a hand off the device.

Layers add another dimension. The A+ has two: a navigation layer for everyday use and a control layer accessed via the right knob. The control layer handles on-device configuration, covering left-hand mode switching, toggling between high-resolution and stepped scrolling, and other adjustments. It’s the first trackball to bring this kind of layered behavior, working entirely without any software running on the host computer. There are also two bright LEDs that can be used to visually tell you what layer you’re on without having to rely on some embedded screen.

The detachable wrist rest is another long-promised feature that finally arrives with the A+. It slots in or out during use and can be screwed on permanently if preferred. The device stays ambidextrous throughout, and its 3D-printed shell means the community can print modified bodies, alter the layout, or swap in custom colors. That kind of adaptability isn’t an afterthought; it’s part of how the whole thing is designed.

The Pixart PMW-3360 sensor carries over from the Adept, running at a 1,000Hz polling rate with the tracking accuracy that has made it a standard for performance-oriented pointing devices. Omron D2LS-21 switches handle the physical buttons. The firmware remains QMK, configurable through VIA, with all design files, firmware, and assembly instructions freely available on GitHub. Kits start at $99 CAD.

The post This $99 Trackball Has Gesture Controls That Work Without Any Software first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Maker Spent Months Building a Pokéball That Jumps and Shoots Smoke

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Pokémon has always sold us a very specific fantasy: a compact sphere you can throw into tall grass, watch shimmy three times, and hear that satisfying click. The wiggle is practically cultural shorthand at this point. So when maker Kiara’s Workshop decided to skip the wiggle entirely and build the far stranger, far older Arceus ball instead, the resulting creation landed somewhere between prop design, mechanical engineering, and sheer stubbornness. The kind of project that sounds manageable until you’re three failed prototypes deep.

For context: the Arceus ball comes from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a game set in a much earlier era of the Pokémon world. This isn’t the sleek, mass-produced Pokéball most of us grew up clicking in handheld games. It’s a more primitive artifact, made from Apricorns and Tumblestones in the game’s lore, with an aesthetic that leans ancient and earthy rather than factory-fresh. And its in-game behavior is notably different too. Instead of the classic wiggle sequence, the Arceus ball shoots into the air during a catch and releases a burst of smoke. It’s more dramatic, more theatrical, and a far more interesting design brief.

Designer: Kiara’s Workshop

Kiara’s Workshop had already built functional Pokéballs before, putting out a V1 and V2 that earned a loyal following and a comment section full of people asking when she’d make more. The V3 of the standard Pokéball was still on her list when she decided to take a detour and come back to Pokéballs a different way. The Arceus ball seemed like the simpler bet. It doesn’t have the same intricate mechanical catch sequence as the modern version, so how hard could it be? The answer, as it turned out, was very hard. The build required research, iteration, and a willingness to start over.

Getting a physical object to jump on cue and simultaneously release smoke on command is not exactly a weekend project. The ancient aesthetic of the ball adds another layer of complexity: it can’t look like it came out of a clean resin mold. It needs texture, weight, and a certain handmade quality that actually complicates production rather than simplifying it. Every element Kiara worked through pointed back to how much thought went into the original game design, even for something that appears on screen for only a few seconds at a time.

Here’s the thing about maker culture that doesn’t get enough attention: it forces a kind of reverse-engineering that’s deeply respectful of the original design, whether that original designer was a game developer or a prop team. When you have to physically build something that only existed as a rendered animation, you start noticing all the decisions that went into it. Kiara’s build is less about having a cool collectible on a shelf (though it would absolutely win any shelf) and more about understanding how design translates, or refuses to translate, between worlds. That’s a genuinely underrated form of design criticism.

Pokémon as a franchise has always been smart about its own mythology. The progression from handcrafted Apricorn balls to industrially manufactured ones mirrors real-world design evolution, from artisanal craft to mass production. What Kiara’s Workshop did was reverse that arc entirely, going from the pixel back to the physical, from the streamlined modern version to the awkward, jumping, smoke-releasing ancient one. It’s a move that requires understanding both the fiction and the fabrication. The result is genuinely impressive, not because it’s a perfect replica, but because it functions on its own terms. It jumps. It smokes. It exists in a way it never was supposed to.

Plenty of makers are building Pokéballs right now, probably on multiple continents simultaneously. But most are going for the one everyone recognizes. Choosing the Arceus ball, with all its mechanical demands and its ancient visual language, says something about what excites Kiara’s Workshop: not the familiar, but the forgotten. And for anyone who’s ever quietly preferred the stranger corners of a franchise over its most iconic pieces, that’s a choice worth appreciating.

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