DIY Pokitto?

Pokitto Hardware
1

One of the things that made developing on the Arduboy a little bit saner was building a clone of the hardware on an Arduino shield I could then plug into a Leonardo. No issues about power being on or off, battery usage, plus I had the ability poke at the guts of the hardware directly without disassembling the thing.

While I suspect the sim will make this less useful for the Pokitto, seeing that the LPCExpresso card used in mbed has Arduino headers makes me wonder if a similar thing could be done for the Pokitto. Are the BOM and schematics available for such a build?

2

I think the question here is, Is pokitto open source ? I did not hear @jonne mention this before and as far i can see it is not stated in the Kickstarter.

3

I think the intention is for everything to be open source at some point.
The screen is custom made, so unless they sell the screens separately we won’t be able to make Pokitto clones…

4

Everything will be open source eventually. This is yet again more a question of limited time than wanting to keep secrets.

LCDs will be available separately and cheaply. But we probably need to prowide a connector breakout also, because soldering it is not easy, unless you have really good skills.

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5

I thought the Pokitto was all open source (wasn’t that mentioned in the kicstarter?), but yeah, that’s the first step. Even if not, much of the information needed is in the PokittoLib sources, since the goal is to build hardware that will run on. But pulling all that together into working shield design is still a lot of work. For the Arduboy shield, I translated someone else’s wiring diagram into shield connectors, and I didn’t find that exactly easy (but I’m a software guy).

The custom LCD might be the real sticking point. I recall hearing that before, but I’m not sure of the details. Is it custom packaging of a standard LCD screen/driver combo in order to meet packaging/PCB/construction/power/? requirements, or is the driver hardware so custom that the software won’t work with any off-the-shel driver chip? A DIY version doesn’t have those same requirements, so could use an off-the-shelf part if one would otherwise work.

6

I think the LCD is based on an off the shelf part but the pokitto version has an 8 bit parallel interface instead of a serial interface.

I guess someone could build a pokitto clone by using the standard chip and rewriting the driver software, but it would be slower than the pokitto.

7

Well, if you’re going to rewrite the driver software, you might as well use an off-the-shelf part with a parallel interface. Probably not as easy, but it at least wouldn’t be slow.

8

Basically it comes down to every manufacturer having almost identical glass & controller - but - different kind of flex connector. I am not kidding. Thats the crux of the problem.

We specced a certain kind of cable & made a custom tool for that cable in order to make sure we can maintain the price and availability for several years.

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