Hacking excitement

I'm excited. It'd be an understatement to say that things have shifted with technology in the last few years. The whole world has changed. And those of us who build software for a living have seen the ground shift under our feet.

As with many designers, I've long dreamt of designing physical things. Product design, after all, is focused on building great products.

But my career has involved the digital space, only occasionally drifting out of ones and zeroes.

Last week, I got inspired by an idea. I ordered the Index 01 months ago, and it arrived. It's a great device. Hold down a button and talk, and 100% of the time it captures your words. Then, with an LLM on your phone, it transfers into a digital note or reminder.

I love what Pebble is doing. Resurrected and back in business, and making really cool stuff. And the more I study the Index 01, the more I'm grasping the tradeoffs they made in creating what is, frankly, an amazing piece of hardware.

They chose a device with a battery that can't be replaced or recharged. That sounds like a user-hostile act; until you wear the device on your ring finger and realize it's one of the smallest, most elegant ways to capture quick thoughts and know they'll be saved. In short, this thing is a miracle. And a decade ago, it would have been impossible.

So I went on a journey over the last few days. I wanted to understand how it worked. Now, I'm not on the level of Brian (the guy who made Pebble). I'm not a hardware person. I barely understand how it works. But I love products, have invested a lifetime into understanding them, and built a lot of software for those products we all hold and use on a daily basis.

I was curious if it'd be possible for me, a designer, to build something this ring.

The short answer is no, and the long answer is probably not. But there's something else I could design. Hardware devices that capture audio and do something with it abound. It seems a dozen startups pop up every week announcing some voice recorder in the form of a pen, a blob, a pendant, or whatnot. And they all do roughly the same thing: a microphone in a nicely designed container that syncs data to your phone.

That got me thinking about the state of hardware today. Yes, it's bleak with the costs of RAM and flash memory. But if you're not looking for the bleeding edge, frankly, there's a lot you can do with off-the-shelf parts.

So I went sleuthing. With the help of ChatGPT, I took a multi-hour deep dive into all the parts necessary to replicate this functionality: a computer that captures sound via a microphone, stores that, and sends it to your phone via Bluetooth, all at the press of a button. That functionality, though magical and the stuff of spy-craft when I was a child, is rudimentary these days.

So I started hunting for where I could buy the parts. And, wouldn't you know, it's pretty much all available as off-the-shelf pieces on sites like DigiKey. For $50, I bought all the pieces needed for this contraption, and they'll be arriving later this week.

Then I spent hours reading over each piece and asking ChatGPT to explain their functionality to me. I've been reading about radios, crystals, oscillators, receivers, transmitters, computer chips—all things I grasped at a basic level before but haven't ever spent time truly understanding.

I don't know it well now, and I definitely couldn't teach it. But I understand, from a user perspective, what each piece is supposed to do.

And this is where the excitement comes in.

I've bought hardware like this before. I've owned several Raspberry Pis. I love the idea of tinkering with small electronics to do interesting things. But I didn't have a definite use case in mind. Now I do. I want to carry a device on me that captures to-dos, then puts those into my Reminders app. That's it. Yes, there's a lot of magic to that, a lot of moving pieces, but at its most basic level, this has been done a million times.

The difference is I want to own the hardware. I want to own the firmware, the software stack. Not because I have some super-secret stuff to say, but rather because it's a fun thing to tinker with and learn. And that's where I'm so excited. I barely understand how most of this works, but with a chatbot (and occasional hallucinations), I'm able to dig into each piece and learn, and maybe pull it all together.

Maybe I'll report back that it's been an abject failure, but I don't think so. I think I'll manage to put these pre-bought pieces in place and get something working. That's fun. That's where the geek culture of old comes in. We like to tinker and build stuff, and it's easier than ever before to do just that.

And if this goes extremely well? I'll probably give some to my friends and see if they like it. I don't think I can ever get it down to the size of the Index 01, but I could probably get it into a watch band, and for me, that'd be enough.