Picture a cafe at 7 a.m.: laptops glowing, phones buzzing, and one person quietly typing on a pocket-sized slab with a matte, paper-like screen that never once flashes a notification. That device is the PocketMage, and its creator, YouTuber Ashtf, just took it from a workbench prototype to a live crowdfunding campaign.
A PDA built to do less, on purpose
The PocketMage revives the late-90s personal digital assistant and strips out the distractions. No social feed, no notification badge, nothing pulling your eyes off the cursor. What you get instead is a full tactile QWERTY keyboard, a capacitive touch bar for scrolling, and a folding shell that genuinely fits in a pocket. Out of the box it runs a Markdown editor, calendar, journal, dictionary, and a terminal, so it handles writing, note-taking, and light coding without ever booting a browser.
What sits under the shell
The brain is an ESP32-S3 with 16 MB of flash and 2 MB of PSRAM, plenty for text work while sipping battery. The clever part is a dual-display setup: a 3.1-inch, 320 x 240 E Ink panel carries long-form reading and writing, while a slim 1.8-inch OLED takes over menus and anything that needs a fast refresh. A 1,200 mAh battery, USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a microSD slot, and a real-time clock round out the hardware. For tinkerers, an expansion connector breaks out GPIO, I2C, SPI, and UART, so you can solder on your own sensors or add-on modules.
Open from silicon to source code
Everything runs on a custom FreeRTOS-based OS that is fully open source, and both the hardware and firmware ship under the Apache-2.0 license. You can sideload third-party apps, write your own, and push changes back upstream. A kit costs $185, an assembled unit $235, with the full breakdown on the Hackster writeup and the Crowd Supply page.
For an ECE student or a school robotics club, the PocketMage is a working reference design for a real product: a dual-screen embedded device with power management, a keyboard matrix, and a bus expansion header you can study and copy. Want to try the idea on your own bench? Wire a 320 x 240 SPI E Ink panel to an ESP32-S3 dev board, get text rendering over SPI working first, then hang the OLED off I2C for menus.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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