What do you think is unique in Pokitto?

What makes it different and better than e.g. Raspberry PI or other similiar devices? What is the most important feature in your mind?

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Raspberry Pi is a Linux single-board computer. Pokitto is a Microcontroller development kit.

Pokitto is “Arduino on steroids”: not only you can easily blink a led or control a servo etc, but you also have a powerful display and sound output. This allows you to easily build a gadget that has a human friendly UI that will tell you what is going on.

Edit: we have some really cool ideas on how to demonstrate this easy hardware expandability.

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Many people think that RPi is similar to modern IoT devices. Not true. Real-time, battery-powered IoT devices typically have an ARM Cortex core with Bluetooth LE, Lo-Ra, Zigbee or sometimes Wi-Fi connectivity to a router. Locks, lamps & other remote control IoT devices work this way. This is because of 3 things: 1) cost, MCUs don’t need anything external to run (like external RAM) apart from power supply 2) battery life, properly coded MCUs can run for months even years with a battery that RPi or similar will drain in a few days 3) real-time reaction: MCUs can react to events almost immediately and at very precise times (eg. heart pacemaker) whereas Linux is not, and will never be, a low-latency real time os

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Pokitto is actually very very close match to what IoT devices like Google Thread (Nest) have in them. If you learn to code Pokitto, you will notice that you have no problems at all in moving to other ARM Cortex devices. This was the original reason why Pokitto was made, not to be just a fun retro console!

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I like that Pokitto is a cheap self contained retro-gaming device, which has nice and friendly looking casing. The fact that gaming HW is limited by memory, graphics, etc. is good for the same reasons than Pico-8 is good as a virtual console: It makes game development (gfx, sfx, logic) more manageable and boosts creativity.

The challenge in the future HW versions is that those limitations should not be changed ! Instead the areas of improvements could be: even lower price, still better casing, etc. That’s my 10 cents.

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Having said that game development aspect is most important for me, I very much like the fact that there are whole new world of IoT features, which has huge potential for innovation too. Maybe even combine gaming and IoT :wink:

Well, I want to be absolutely clear that the gaming aspect is important to us also. Pokitto was born because I was trying to teach programming and electronics to my kids. It was difficult to keep their enthusiasm up with “blinking leds”. But when we started building our own game consoles they got really interested.

This video, which you may not have noticed before, summarizes the whole “reason” for the Pokitto: we build something that is quite simple in less than 30 min and is also fun (2-player pong). This in my experience is the way to motivate kids to learn more.

That is cool! I have two daughters, now 12 and 15 years old. For some years ago I was teaching them some programming (with Scratch) and we made a simple game together. But that did not lead them to learn more by themselves.

Not all children should become programmers, but I could imagine that this kind of courses (at schools etc.), like on the video, would really motivate children to learn more and make own experiments.

Its appearance is a big plus, my 8 year old daughter had seen the pink one and now she wants one. :smile:
But for me its the idea behind it, you can do anything you would like with the pokitto just write the code and connect it.

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Everything, size portability expandibility, it is like a happy little game console for your pocket that’s just waiting to trick you into learning something. And honestly I like the pink one too @Rakkachi , it would match my pocket chip

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I think the fact that it is a games console with accessible I/O pins and that the creators intend for people to learn to use hardware expansion. Much like the old 8-bit home computers in the 70’s and 80’s.
Personally I am looking mostly looking forward to the gaming aspect, but I will have to try some some sort of ‘hat’ at some point.