Tag Archives: DIY

Someone Built a Handheld PS4 Twice Because Sony Never Will

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Sony’s PlayStation has always been a home console first and only. The PlayStation Portal, which came closest to answering the demand for a portable PlayStation, streams games from a PS5 rather than running them on the device itself. That gap, an actual PlayStation that plays its own library locally, has stayed open long enough that at least one person decided to fill it themselves, twice.

The PS4P v2 is the second version of a DIY handheld built around a real PS4 Slim motherboard, trimmed and modified to fit inside a 3D-printed shell. The first version, completed earlier this year, was a functional proof of concept that came in at around 1.5 kg and looked more like a prototype than a finished product. This second build is a step up in almost every meaningful way, and the jump in refinement between the two is obvious from the build photos alone.

Designer: wewillmakeitnow

The core remains a cut-down PS4 Slim board, but the second version draws less power than the first, which helps push the battery life a bit further. Six 21700 cells, each rated at 5,000 mAh, power the whole thing for anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours depending on what’s being played. It can also run off external power for longer sessions, and HDMI output means the whole unit can connect to a television with a real DualShock controller attached.

PS4P V1

The display is a 7-inch 1080p OLED panel, which puts it in a different category from most handheld screens at this scale. Cooling is handled by a fan pulled from a retired GTX 750 graphics card, mounted on the rear of the unit. A removable guard sits over the fan, and pulling it off improves airflow when the game demands it; leaving it on protects the fan from dust and impacts during storage or travel.

The finished unit weighs 1.3 kg, which is heavy by any commercial standard. A Steam Deck is considerably lighter. But the honest comparison isn’t really with a Steam Deck, which runs PC games through an x86 processor. This runs the PS4’s actual hardware, which means native execution of the PS4’s library without emulation, streaming, or compatibility layers getting between the player and the game.

The build sits closer to a real commercial product than most DIY console conversions manage. The 3D-printed shell holds everything together cleanly enough that, at a glance, it reads as something you might actually find in a store. That it came out of a single person’s workshop rather than an engineering team with a production budget makes the result even harder to dismiss.

For now, it remains a one-off. Making it smaller, lighter, or more energy-efficient would require changes to the PS4 Slim’s motherboard that go beyond what any single modder can reasonably achieve. The constraints are baked into the hardware. But as a demonstration of what dedication to a specific piece of gaming hardware looks like when Sony won’t build it themselves, the PS4P v2 makes its point clearly.

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This $19 Module Solves the Hard Part of Building a Custom Smartwatch

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The consumer smartwatch market has become a fairly predictable place. Most wristwear from major brands covers health monitoring, notifications, and a tightly controlled app ecosystem, with little room for deviation. Tinkerers and developers who want something outside that formula have traditionally had to cobble together components from different sources, which is more a test of patience than a creative process and rarely results in something worth wearing.

Elecrow’s CrowPanel Watch Display is a ready-made starting point for building something more personal. It’s an all-in-one development module built around the ESP32-S3 microcontroller, packaged as a wrist-sized board complete with a 2.01-inch touchscreen, a microphone, a rotary encoder, and expansion contacts. The idea is that most of the hardware problem is already solved, leaving you with the more interesting part: deciding what the device should actually do.

Designer: Elecrow

The IPS panel has a resolution of 240×296 pixels, capacitive touch, and a 178-degree viewing angle. Navigation doesn’t depend on touch alone. A rotary encoder functions like a traditional watch crown for scrolling and selection, and a dedicated side button rounds out the physical inputs. Both keep the interactions familiar to anyone who’s worn a watch before.

Under the hood, the ESP32-S3 runs a dual-core Xtensa LX7 processor clocked at up to 240MHz, with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5. That means the watch can pull weather data, push notifications from a paired phone, or interact with a smart home network from the wrist. The Wi-Fi capability also makes it a viable control panel for home automation, a secondary identity the hardware handles just as comfortably.

The built-in microphone and speaker add voice control to the mix, allowing spoken commands to trigger actions on the device or interact with connected services. That’s a feature most entry-level wearable modules skip entirely, and it opens up a range of hands-free interactions well beyond setting a timer. For anyone building a smart home companion for the wrist, that’s a significant difference in day-to-day usability.

A gyroscope handles motion sensing, and a vibration motor is on board for haptic feedback. The package doesn’t include a heart rate sensor or GPS, which rules out the health-tracking and location features that define most commercial smartwatches. A battery isn’t included, but the board provides the necessary contacts to connect one, giving builders control over form factor and battery capacity from the outset. For a DIY module at this price, that tradeoff is expected.

The module sells for $18.99 as a bare PCB, without an enclosure or strap. That part of the build is left entirely to the maker, which is the point. For engineers, hobbyists, or students who’ve wanted a genuinely custom wearable without sourcing a dozen individual components, it’s a reasonably priced foundation that does far more of the groundwork than most development boards at this size and cost.

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The $8 Steam Cartridge Every PC Gamer Has Always Wanted

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PC gaming has never had a proper physical media equivalent. Console players have always had something tangible to hold and shelve, a disc or cartridge that represents one specific game. On PC, games live in a library on a platform that’s only yours as long as the platform stays up. It’s convenient, but a lot of PC gamers quietly miss the ritual of picking something physical off a shelf.

A post on Reddit recently took a direct swing at that gap. A gamer picked up a handful of secondhand 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, each 128 GB and priced at around €7 ($8) a piece, and built a cartridge system for Steam. Each drive holds a single game alongside a script that auto-navigates Steam to that game’s page once the drive is plugged in. Auto-launching the game directly is also possible.

Designer: Jibril-sama (images courtesy of Tom’s Hardware)

What really sells the effect is the presentation. Rather than leaving the drives as bare hardware with labels stuck on, each SSD sits inside a colorful protective case with custom game art on the cover. The result looks genuinely like a cartridge collection, not a pile of storage drives. It’s the kind of detail that makes the idea land visually rather than just functioning as a clever technical trick.

The system runs on Linux. When an SSD is plugged into a SATA dock connected to the PC, a udev rule detects the mount event and triggers a systemd daemon, which finds the script on the drive and executes it. Valve’s Steam URL Protocol handles navigating to the game’s page or launching it. The hardware side requires nothing more unusual than a standard SATA dock.

There are genuine practical limits. Steam still needs to be installed, and the game needs to be in your library, so this isn’t a workaround for ownership or a way to share games. Updates are the bigger friction point, since multi-gigabyte patches push regularly even to older titles. The creator’s approach is to keep cartridges for games worth replaying occasionally rather than live-service titles that need constant updating.

The reaction ran heavily nostalgic, with comparisons to NES cartridges, Switch game cards, and the general ritual of pulling a game off a shelf. Some commenters want the system extended to GOG libraries. Others are already planning their own versions, with several suggesting 3D-printed cartridge shells to push the aesthetic even further.

What the project surfaces is how much the ritual of physical media matters, separate from convenience or ownership. These drives don’t give you anything you couldn’t already get by clicking a game in your Steam library. The Linux requirement narrows who can replicate it directly, but at €7 ($8) per drive, the cost to build a collection of ten or fifteen games is still less than a single new release.

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This elastic band-powered car proves you don’t need an engine to experience real mechanical thrills

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Kinetic energy is a fascinating thing, a fact I first realized after becoming obsessed with pull-back toy cars as a child. The simple act of rolling the car backward to store energy before watching it shoot forward at surprising speed felt almost magical. I didn’t understand the physics back then, but I knew there was something immensely satisfying about turning stored energy into motion.

Tell that to James Bruton, and you’ve got an engineering challenge rather than a toy. The inventive YouTuber is back with another delightfully unconventional experiment, this time asking whether a vehicle can be powered entirely by elastic bands. Not the thin rubber bands you’d find in a desk drawer, but heavy-duty resistance bands designed for fitness training, capable of storing far more energy than their humble appearance suggests.

Designer: James Bruton

Bruton begins by building a test rig from industrial 4040 aluminum extrusions to understand how much energy these bands can store when twisted rather than stretched. The setup uses inexpensive Lazy Susan thrust bearings to let the mechanism rotate with minimal friction while a single resistance band is wound tighter and tighter. The initial tests prove surprisingly encouraging, with the band accepting dozens of twists before reaching its limit, hinting that there may be enough stored energy to propel a person.

Turning that potential into useful motion, however, proves far more complicated. A pair of 3D-printed bevel gears delivers a 2:1 reduction to increase torque before driving a set of lightweight wheels. The prototype manages to move Bruton, but only for a couple of meters before the band eventually snaps under excessive winding. Rather than dismissing the concept, he treats the failure as valuable data, redesigning the drivetrain with an additional reduction stage that increases the overall ratio to 6:1. The improvement isn’t dramatic in terms of distance. Still, it delivers smoother power without permanently deforming the elastic band, confirming that gearing plays a bigger role than simply storing more energy.

The next logical step is to increase the amount of stored energy itself. Instead of making the vehicle impractically long with one giant elastic band, Bruton develops an ingenious routing system that sends multiple bands back and forth through the chassis using intermeshing gears. CNC-machined aluminum brackets, industrial extrusions, custom 3D-printed components, and dozens of modified bearings come together to create a rigid frame capable of containing the enormous twisting forces generated by the growing elastic drivetrain.

Experiments with six bands connected in series reveal an unexpected lesson in physics. While the system stores more energy, it doesn’t produce a proportional increase in usable torque, leaving much of the stored potential untapped. Rather than forcing the design to work, Bruton completely rethinks the layout by arranging eighteen resistance bands into three parallel columns, each feeding a common output shaft through bevel gears. The configuration increases available torque while preserving a useful amount of unwinding time, striking a far better balance between power and efficiency.

After countless iterations, careful winding, and more than a few anxious moments trying not to snap another band, the elastic-powered machine finally delivers the result Bruton had been chasing. The vehicle carries him almost 10 meters on nothing more than the energy stored in twisted resistance bands, with a best run measuring just under 9.9 meters before a final all-out attempt stretches that distance beyond 12 meters. It may not be replacing electric drivetrains anytime soon, but that’s hardly the point.

 

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Wake Up, Neo. Your Ring Is Playing the Matrix.

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Look at the Digital Rain Ring when the screen is off, and you might not immediately clock what you’re looking at. A clean silver bezel. A flat black face. Bold, architectural proportions that sit somewhere between a modern signet ring and a minimalist sculpture. It reads as jewelry, completely and confidently. Then the animation starts.

That double life is arguably the most deliberate design decision Daniel Idle made. The OLED display, sitting recessed behind a polished silver frame, does something that most tech-forward jewelry fails to pull off: it disappears when it’s not in use. The black glass of the screen at rest looks remarkably close to a dark stone setting, the kind of graphic, monochromatic face you’d expect on a considered piece of contemporary jewelry. It’s only when the Matrix rain animation loops across it that the object reveals its other identity.

Designer: Daniel Idle

The physical form took real thinking to get right. Looking at the CAD model, the ring measures approximately 21mm by 18mm across the face, with a total height of just over 25mm. Those proportions matter. The face is large enough to hold the display at a readable scale, but the tapered body connecting it to the band keeps the overall silhouette from reading as clunky. The geometry is almost architectural, widening from the band up toward the face in a way that gives the piece visual weight without making it feel like you’re wearing a small appliance on your finger.

The band itself is an open C-shape rather than a fully closed ring. It’s a practical call given the electronics that need to live inside the body, but it also lands well aesthetically, softening what is otherwise a very hard-edged, geometric form. From the side, the two components sit in good proportion to each other. Nothing feels like an afterthought.

The custom PCB is worth pausing on. It’s tiny, densely packed, and clearly built to exact dimensions to fit within the ring body. A flexible ribbon cable connects the board to the OLED display, and a USB-C port is integrated for charging. The fact that all of this infrastructure lives inside something you wear on your finger is genuinely impressive engineering, but Idle’s judgment was to make sure none of it is visible in the finished piece. That restraint is what separates this from a hobbyist build.

The prototype stage used a white resin body, which actually shows the concept quite clearly in a raw, honest way. You can see the display sitting flush with the face, the green animation already doing its work against the matte surface. But the shift to polished silver for the finished version was the right call. Silver gives the piece the visual language of jewelry rather than a prototype, and the contrast between the warm metal bezel and the deep black of the OLED screen is genuinely considered. It has the graphic confidence of a piece that was thought about as an object first and a technology project second.

The animation choice suits the form well too. The Matrix rain, those cascading columns of green katakana-inspired characters, fills a small square display naturally. It loops cleanly, it doesn’t demand to be read in detail, and its cultural weight does a lot of communicative work in a very compact space. “Wake up, Neo” appearing in green pixels on a silver ring is a complete sentence in the language of pop culture, and Idle clearly knows that.

What makes the Digital Rain Ring worth paying attention to is not the novelty of putting a screen on a ring. It’s the evidence that someone thought through the design consequences of doing so. The proportions hold up. The material choices are intentional. The off-state is as considered as the on-state. Most tech jewelry gets the technology right and the jewelry part wrong. This one seems to have gone in the other direction, starting with the object and working inward from there. That’s a harder problem to solve, and it’s the one that actually matters.

The post Wake Up, Neo. Your Ring Is Playing the Matrix. first appeared on Yanko Design.

Five Years, One Bowl, and a Woodturner Who Refused to Quit

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Most of us abandon a project after a few weeks of frustration. Olivier Gomis sat on one for five years, then came back and finished it. The Bowl Curved Pursuit is Gomis’s latest release, a handcrafted woodturning that looks, at first glance, like it was generated by some algorithmic design software rather than made by two hands in a workshop. The curves twist and rotate in a way that feels almost mathematically precise, each wood segment following the one before it in a pattern that spirals elegantly around the bowl’s body. It’s the kind of object that makes you look twice, then a third time, trying to work out how it was actually made. That’s kind of the point.

Gomis, a French woodturner and furniture maker, has been building a reputation for designs that sit right at the edge of what woodworking is supposed to look like. His work doesn’t whisper “rustic” or “farmhouse.” It says something closer to “sculpture” and means it. His portfolio spans coloured pencil vases, massive segmented bowls, and geometric pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary design gallery. But the Curved Pursuit feels like a moment of arrival, a design he clearly couldn’t let go of until he got it right.

Designer Name: Oliveri Gomis

The process is deceptively methodical. Gomis built the bowl by gradually stacking and rotating wood pieces before cutting them on a table saw, then mounted the entire structure on a lathe and carved it into its final form. That sequence, stacking, rotating, cutting, turning, sounds simple enough until you consider how much precision is required at every stage. A miscalculation in the rotation angle and the whole pattern collapses into something ordinary. The five-year gap between conception and completion makes a lot more sense once you understand those margins.

What gets me about this bowl is how visible the thinking is. You can trace the logic of the design just by looking at it. The segments aren’t decorative afterthoughts, they’re structural decisions, each one informing the curve that follows. For a piece of functional decor, that’s a rare quality. Most objects in this category are either beautiful or interesting. The Curved Pursuit manages to be both, and does it without trying to explain itself.

The price sits at $372 USD, available to order on commission. That number might give some people pause, but I’d argue it’s almost suspiciously reasonable for what you’re getting. This isn’t a production piece pulled from a conveyor belt. It’s a hand-built object that required five years of problem-solving to even exist. Commissioning one means you’re essentially getting a slice of a very specific creative obsession, which is not something that ends up on most people’s shelves by accident.

There’s also a broader conversation happening here about craft in the age of mass production. We live at a moment when almost anything can be printed, extruded, or manufactured at scale, and yet the appetite for handmade objects keeps growing. Not out of nostalgia exactly, but out of a genuine desire to own something that carries a human fingerprint. Gomis’s work taps directly into that. His YouTube channel documents every step of his process with no shortcuts hidden, which is both a smart move and a generous one. Watching him work makes the finished objects more meaningful, not less. You come away from his videos understanding not just how a piece was made, but why it matters.

The Bowl Curved Pursuit is the kind of design that rewards attention. It doesn’t immediately give everything away. The more you sit with it, the more the geometry reveals itself, the precision, the patience, the particular stubbornness it takes to return to something after five years and finally decide it’s ready. Somewhere between design and craft, between art object and kitchen counter, Gomis has made something genuinely hard to categorize. If that sounds like a compliment, it is.

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This 60Hz E Ink Game Boy emulator refreshes retro gaming with an ESP32-powered handheld

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Retro gaming has inspired countless handheld recreations over the years, but most focus on replicating the original hardware with faster processors or modern conveniences. Wenting Zhang’s latest experiment takes a completely different route by pairing a classic Game Boy emulator with an E Ink display, an unlikely combination that overcomes one of the technology’s biggest limitations. Instead of accepting the sluggish refresh rates typically associated with E Ink, Zhang engineered a solution capable of delivering gameplay at a remarkably smooth 60Hz, creating a handheld that feels far more responsive than its paper-like screen would suggest.

The DIY project dubbed PaperBoy S3 is built around the discontinued M5Stack PaperS3 development kit. The compact board combines an ESP32-S3 dual-core microcontroller with a 4.7-inch 960 x 540 E Ink touchscreen, hardware originally intended for smart home controls, electronic labels, and educational projects rather than gaming. By transforming this inexpensive development platform into a functional Game Boy emulator, Zhang demonstrates just how much untapped potential still exists in low-power embedded hardware.

Designer: Wenting Zhang

Achieving playable performance required much more than simply running emulator software. Traditional E Ink displays rely on slow waveform updates that prioritize image quality over speed, making them unsuitable for fast-moving graphics. Zhang bypassed this limitation by taking advantage of PaperS3’s raw row-and-column display interface, allowing him to implement a custom driver that performs rapid partial screen refreshes. Instead of refreshing the entire display every frame, only the active gameplay area is updated, dramatically reducing latency while maintaining recognizable grayscale visuals.

The original Game Boy’s modest 160 x 144-pixel resolution also works in the project’s favor. Rather than driving the display at its full native resolution, the emulator scales the Game Boy image while processing only a small portion of the screen. Multiple frame buffers fit directly into the ESP32-S3’s SRAM, enabling much faster rendering than would otherwise be possible. Zhang also applies intelligent dithering techniques to recreate the Game Boy’s four shades of gray, preserving the familiar look of Nintendo’s iconic handheld on an E Ink panel.

The ESP32-S3’s dual-core architecture plays an important role in maintaining performance. One processor core is dedicated to Game Boy emulation while the other handles video rendering and audio tasks, pushing the inexpensive microcontroller close to its limits. Despite the constrained hardware, classic titles such as Pokémon Blue, Super Mario Land, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remain highly playable, proving that smooth retro gaming does not necessarily require powerful silicon.

PaperBoy S3 also includes several thoughtful quality-of-life features. Bluetooth controller support offers an alternative to touchscreen controls, while quick-save and quick-load functions make it easier to jump in and out of games. Audio remains the biggest compromise because the development board lacks dedicated sound hardware, forcing Zhang to rely on the built-in piezo buzzer to approximate the Game Boy’s music and sound effects. The results are far from perfect, but they remain recognizable enough to complement the nostalgic experience.

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This Solar Smartwatch Ran 9 Months on Battery, Then the Panel Kicked In

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The smartwatch category has a battery problem it can’t seem to shake. Despite years of incremental improvements, most wearables still need to be charged every day or two, which is exactly the opposite of what a watch is supposed to be. A watch is supposed to be on your wrist and working, not sitting on a charging pad because you forgot to plug it in before bed.

The LightInk is an attempt to solve that problem by going back to a design philosophy that worked decades ago: solar. The concept mimics the 90s solar digital watches that ran more or less indefinitely, but brings it into the present with an E-Ink display, an ESP32 microcontroller, WiFi, Bluetooth, LoRa radio, and a custom power management system built from scratch over several years.

Designer: Daniel Ansorregui

The project started in 2019 with a simple goal: build a solar-powered watch that could send LoRa packets to a receiver at home. After experimenting with early hardware and contributing display optimizations to the open-source Watchy project, the creator hit the limits of what off-the-shelf hardware could manage and built a custom PCB around a TPS63900 buck-boost converter, running the watch at 2.7V.

The biggest technical hurdle turned out to be the microcontroller itself. The ESP32 takes 28ms to boot, consuming around 1mA of current in the process, and that cycle was responsible for about 60% of the watch’s total power draw without contributing anything to the actual display update. The solution was to skip normal boot entirely and run code directly from the ESP32’s RTC memory via a wake stub.

That required reimplementing SPI communication from scratch within the RTC memory constraints, since no code outside that space can run during the stub phase. The payoff was significant: the entire boot, data send, and display update sequence now completes in under 1ms. Once the display is refreshed, the ESP32 immediately returns to deep sleep, saving an additional 1mA that would otherwise be consumed during light sleep.

The result is a watch that runs for six to 10 months on a 100mAh battery, which is already an unusual number for a device this capable. Add the solar panel, similar in type to the kind found on pocket calculators, and the power equation starts to tilt toward indefinite. One hardware revision ran for nine months on battery alone before being retired for a newer build.

The 1.54-inch E-Ink display helps keep those numbers achievable. Electrophoretic displays only draw power when changing states and hold their image indefinitely without any power at all, which makes them an obvious fit for a watch face that updates once per minute rather than 60 times per second. Touch controls via the ESP32’s built-in capacitive touch capability handle navigation, making physical buttons unnecessary and allowing for a more compact case.

The watch supports WiFi, Bluetooth, and LoRa via a Wio-SX1262 radio module, and GPS can be added as an optional component, though the creator notes it wasn’t a particularly good idea given the space and power it consumes. The case is 3D printed in two pieces and accepts any standard 22mm wristband. Everything, including the firmware, PCB schematics, and case files, is open source and available on GitHub.

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The Piano Key Holder Where Every Press Clicks Out a Hidden Brass Hook

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Key hooks by the door are one of those things that somehow manage to be both boring and insufficient. The options range from plain metal rails to the kind of decorative wooden boards that start out charming and quickly fade into background noise. Nobody has really questioned whether a key holder can be interactive, or whether hanging your keys could actually be the best part of coming home.

This wooden piano key holder turns that mundane act into something that rewards the hand that does it. Built primarily from solid wood and mounted on the wall, it looks like a short section of a piano keyboard, down to the contrast between pale white keys and raised dark notes. Each white key hides a brass hook inside, and pressing one causes that hook to click out from the bottom.

Designer: Inventive Robin

The mechanism inside is the centerpiece. Each latching unit is machined from sheet acetal and assembled with metal dowels and standoffs, translating the vertical press of a piano key into the outward extension of a brass hook. Press the same key again, and the hook retracts with another click. That tactile feedback is what separates this from any peg or rail that simply sits on the wall, doing nothing memorable.

Three materials carry the weight of the aesthetic. The base and outer frame are cherry, machined on a CNC router to house the acetal mechanisms inside. The white keys are individually shaped pieces of maple, and between them sit the raised black notes in a contrasting darker wood. The hooks are small, architectural brass clips, machined separately and fitted to the mechanism that drives them up and down.

The piano keyboard format is a natural fit for a key holder, and not just because of the pun. A row of regularly spaced, independently pressable keys maps almost perfectly onto a row of hooks, and the visual language of a piano is familiar enough that anyone walking past it understands what those keys do, even without being told there’s a mechanism hiding underneath.

What makes it work as wall decor is how cleanly the materials read together. The warm cherry frame, the pale maple keys, and the dark raised notes create a contrast that fits comfortably in a living room entryway without demanding too much attention. The brass hooks, small and architectural in their proportions, don’t look like hardware until you know what to press.

Key holders have always had a quiet design problem. They ask you to form a new habit, redirecting an automatic reach toward something deliberately placed on a wall, and there’s usually nothing to make that effort feel worthwhile. Giving the hook a mechanical click is a small but effective way to make the ritual feel intentional, which is the kind of encouragement that actually makes the habit stick.

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A Solo Korean Maker Just Built the Writing Device Your Phone Isn’t

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There’s a whole category of people who want to write but can’t quite get there on the devices they already own. The laptop opens, and the browser tab is there. The phone unlocks, and three notifications are already demanding attention. Writing apps exist on every platform, but so does everything else, and that proximity makes sustained focus harder than it should need to be. The answer that the market usually offers is another app, which is the same problem wearing a different hat.

The Micro Journal Rev.6.1 comes at that problem from a different direction entirely. It’s a handmade, clamshell writing device built by a solo maker in South Korea, designed for exactly one purpose: opening the lid and writing. There’s no operating system to navigate, no notifications to dismiss, and no browser to wander into. The device boots instantly and drops you directly into a writing canvas, the way a paper notebook would if notebooks could sync to Google Drive.

Designer: Un Kyu Lee (Background_Ad_1810)

The origin story matters here. The Rev.6 that preceded this model was built in response to a playwright from New York who wanted a device compact enough for cafés and distinctive enough to be proud of. The Rev.6.1 takes that same concept, the same 48-key hot-swappable keyboard and color IPS display, and folds it into a clamshell form that closes flat and slips easily into a bag. Community members who received early units called it a “beautiful final evolution” of the Rev.6 concept, which says something about how iterative this product line actually is.

The keyboard uses Kailh hot-swap sockets compatible with Cherry MX switches, which means you choose the switches that match how you like to type and swap them whenever that preference changes. The 48-key layout ships with two additional hidden layers available for remapping, giving far more input flexibility than the key count alone would suggest. It’s a small but considered detail that treats the physical act of typing as something worth getting right.

Files sync to your personal Google Drive over Wi-Fi, with no subscription fee and no middleman service to depend on. An 18650 rechargeable battery handles power, charging over USB-C, which covers the same standard you’re already carrying everywhere else. The whole device is assembled by hand after each order is placed, which adds a few days to the delivery window but also means each unit comes with a degree of personal investment that mass-produced products rarely carry.

The Rev.6.1 sits in a growing ecosystem of writerDeck devices, which are purpose-built writing machines that the community around them treats more like tools than toys. Compared to polished products like the Freewrite, the Micro Journal is more openly a handcrafted object, with visible maker-culture DNA in its design and ethos. That’s not a limitation; it’s the point, and for anyone who already feels the appeal of a mechanical keyboard or a distraction-free tool, the logic lands fairly quickly.

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