8 ms·

The Age of Personalized Hardware Is Coming

100 points by arbayi 3mo ago

vladsiu 2mo ago
[dead]
zkmon 2mo ago
While personalization is definitely the trend, I don't think people are going to build code just to personalize. A tiny few of all who bought the device could do that. A few more could flash the device with some open firmware that gives more features and personalization and most will stick with the range of the personalization provided by the vendor. For the most people, the risks outweigh the desire for tinkering. Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering, not in the hands of customer. People don't even have the time to cook their own recipes. People have their own chores to worry about. I'm talking about bulk of the customer base, not the geeks.
- Arainach 2mo ago
  I'd include the geeks in that. I've been programming computers and tinkering with all sorts of hardware for more than 30 years. I first used FreeBSD in.....2001? and Linux not long after that. I've programmed OS code, I've grudgingly written VHDL, I've assembled a sound card for the Apple II I still have running - all this to say that I believe I'm in your tiny few. And I'm so tired. Tired of having to debug all the things. Tired of having to pay attention to them. Tired of setting them up "just once" and then months later having to reverse engineer my own work because something failed. So I don't. I leave nearly all my devices stock. I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues. And I don't want personalized hardware with any electronics in it (bespoke wooden objects, those I love and make).
  - graemep 2mo ago
    > I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues. Lost me there. The rest is reasonable but other OSes (MacOS, Linux) also rarely have driver issues. Its not like Windows never needs fixing (these days more than Linux). These days you can buy computers with Linux pre-installed and compatible hardware. My biggest problem with technology is with very stock stuff. Mobile apps that everyone pushes you to use that clutter up your phone and are often crap. Every time an app I use updates I wonder "what have they broken this time?".
    - Arainach 2mo ago
      I'm tired of having this debate over and over. I still use Linux devices regularly at work and have a T420S and various RPi-like devices that run it, so it's not like I'm going off memories of 2010. I owned a Framework Laptop (designed to run Linux) and got rid of it in no small part because the battery life was so much worse on Linux than it was in Windows. I've worked at Google who (circa 2019) had an incredible team of IT specialists and specifically selected hardware and still struggled to get Bluetooth on Linux to work reliably for everyone. I don't want to have to carefully pick hardware for compatibility. I want first class support for pen and touch. I value thin, light, and long battery over the ability to run a custom bootloader. Here's a thread where I ranted with specific examples 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463982
      - graemep 2mo ago
        I am tired of arguing about this as I do not not have these problems and have not in many years over multiple machines. Looking at your specific examples they are not a like for like comparison. Two are Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi issues (so on a device designed for experimentation, and not even running the usual distro). One is a bug in the GUI for True NAS. One is unhappiness with the default installed command line packages for Debian on WSL. When I used Windows I had just as many irritants. It was very noticeable when I was using Linux at home and Windows at work (and is one reason I switched to Linux). it is definitely not true that Windows always works flawlessly for everyone in all circumstances. If you count every irritation you find with every Linux distro on a wide range of hardware it will add up to more than Windows on typical hardware. Have your tried Windows on your Pi? Have you replaced your TrueNas server with a Windows equivalent?
  - duttish 2mo ago
    I get where you're coming from, though I'm not quite at 30 years yet. I like building stuff, I don't like configuring, debugging or troubleshooting my OS or computer. I just want it to work and get out of the way. For me this has translated into a slightly different outcome: stock ubuntu with basically just zsh/powerlevel10k, I add component assembly when I buy a new desktop, I'm about to probably replace my home server with a NAS etc.
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      Yeah I don't care how exactly my Linux laptop gets two finger scrolling going the right direction, all I know is that I can tell AI what I want and it'll go and change the setting for me.
- willtemperley 2mo ago
  > Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering I think so. There will be a short period, like now, where many will attempt to build their own products and the five good ideas out of five thousand will be incorporated into products built by those who know what they’re doing. An absolutely technophobic friend asked me what agentic AI was today. I think Charlie Munger said “When even your barber is talking about it, sell and run”
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    I'd bet Charlie Munger and his barber talk about cars and don't run. When we're talking random stock tips that's one thing but if it's possibly a foundational society changing technology like plastic, maybe your barber talking about it isn't the "get out now" signal that neat little story purports to be.
    - willtemperley 2mo ago
      Nobody is questioning the longevity of AI. The internet itself wasn’t affected by pets.com but a lot of retail investors got burned. It’s going to happen again, I think perhaps in a different way. For example many are treating vibe coding like slot machines and the app monetisation gamble is unlikely to pay off.
Abishek_Muthian 2mo ago
With hardware/computers becoming locked, thin clients and unaffordable we're already forced to customize our devices cyber punk style. You're lucky if you're in a region where these open-hardware companies sell their wares, even though many of them will go under in the current market.
sasaf5 2mo ago
"So the interesting question isn't whether personal hardware is coming. It's who gets to write the software that runs on it." It's not that I don't like your point of view. It's that I can't stand AI slop.
dominotw 2mo ago
well my phone can do almost everything
- tejtm 2mo ago
  anything but be owned by you
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
    No, by reasonable definitions that's doable too. My phone runs an OS I chose, that I have admin access on, that runs any app I tell it to run. And, y'know, it's my property that I bought with my own money, but that's probably aside your argument.
    - xikxp1 2mo ago
      One can say that he chose iOS by buying iPhone. I don't see any strong argument here
      - qup 2mo ago
        One of them can change the OS, one of them can't.
mapontosevenths 2mo ago
I don't think people have realized it yet, but AI can do hardware too. That's what I had hoped this was about. I had Claude design an entire 4 layer rp2040 based PCB from scratch and PCBWay build it. It worked on the first go, other than some silkscreen overlapped, which doesn't hurt anything. That was before Fable. Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print. Also worked the first go, but with minor cosmetic issues. People have yet to even BEGIN to appreciate what these things can do with the right harness.
- javchz 2mo ago
  Im surprised by how bad LLMs are with SVGs but somehow are oke-ish with CAD and other weird files.
  - utopiah 2mo ago
    For circuits then can be simulated. They have a of constraints that might make the problem space a lot smaller. Maybe there are also a lot of text on what makes a good design. I also believe most design related to a physical object have documentation justifying the choices.
  - DoctorOetker 2mo ago
    An SVG is like a cartoon, and throws away a lot of information, a "good SVG" of some subject chosen to be familiar to both animals and humans might look good to one but not the other. The cycling flamingo is a kind of art curation test. Functional PCB "artwork" is actually not intended for visual consumption, it must meet constraints and advice scattered in documentation, prior "art" in the training corpus, etc. It doesn't need to be surprising at all A good static SVG cartoon can be viewed as a multispectral photographic video, with a lot of information thrown away and distorted or oversimplified. Different species will disagree about what information should have been kept vs thrown away. A bee would "complain" it can't see any of the plant's UV markers when presented with plant imagery. Many animals depend on motion or movement to identify predator or prey. At a certain point culture and personal life experiences start conflicting even within the human subgroup, and we see people argue why this or that flamingo is better than the other.
Losenok 2mo ago
I do agree that hardware gap starts to shrink, similarly to what Software gap once used to be. It is much easier to avoid spending time loading the right drivers and looking up what error message on that tiny device you are working on means. Especially if AI could run in terminal itself. I tried building a health device few years ago and got completely lost in how to setup camera and touch display with a raspberry PI. Would imagine, with AI running in a command line, it would be much easier.
pugio 2mo ago
AI + hardware has really helped my wife and I get more sleep. I had an esp32-box-3 lying around from a lapsed "voice agent" project from a year or two ago. Had a baby. Baby moved to another room, sleep trained. Baby either: 1. wakes up a few times a night, babbles for a bit, goes back to sleep OR 2. baby wakes up and fusses for N (=10) minutes, at which point parents need to go in and settle (that's the sleep training routine we use). In either case, we do NOT want to wake up every time the baby does. Baby can go back to sleep easily, we adults have a harder time. A few rounds with Claude and the esp32 is now our new baby monitor. It tracks cry/fuss duration and publishes an audio stream (via a web UI or direct with, say, VLC). The audio only comes through AFTER N minutes of fussing have elapsed. It also posts notifications (to ntfy) after 30s and N minutes. My log says baby often wakes up 1-2 times a night and resettles almost immediately. We only wake up if the audio comes through, after N (10) minutes. Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on. It's fun to keep improving and adding features to this. Never would have had the time/energy to get this done without a coding agent. I ordered a set of 10 more of the esp32-box-3s to give them out to my friends (well, some are for other projects... so much potential). (EDIT: Yes, I know this isn't AI designing hardware, but even writing code for embedded off the shelf stuff feels like a huge new potential.)
- thatsit 2mo ago
  This is one of the killer use cases of AI, build personalized stuff for your life, that no company does. It is kind of generalized „intelligent stuff“ that one can use. Like minecraft your life
- petra 2mo ago
  This actually feels like something that could be a popular app on a baby monitor.
- pardon_me 2mo ago
  Baby monitors fundamentally need to be safe and allow parents peace of mind. Knowing they can constantly hear the baby and communicate verbally to soothe, as if you were in the room with them, allows this. It already means you only have to respond and/or get up to tend if they are still unsettled after a period of time. Monitors also have volume control so you can stay alert without being constantly disturbed. The traditional baby monitor system had three states (ON and functional, ON and non-functional, OFF). It provides a constantly available and instantaneous test for "functional" - as long as you can hear sound from the other unit, it's almost guaranteed to currently be in a safe condition. Monitoring is constant, human-first, and all human. The system is relatively fail-safe. Your design replaces this with a multi-state system and algorithms (adding ON in listening mode, ON in delay mode with output off, ON and partially-functional etc.). It removes any reliable method to prove an obviously "functional" state at any given time. Monitoring is non-constant (for the human), machine-first, and human as last resort (like corporate customer services). The system is not fail-safe despite being machine-first and at higher risk of error or malfunction due to complexity. The risks include a few failed notifications or incorrect delay timing leading to early developmental trauma, such as fear of abandonment. It doesn't take much. We are still learning to deal with this human-human, before adding invisible unknowns. If nothing else, what are babies likely to learn in a pre-verbal state where the days are spent sensing and observing their environment to develop the brain? It'll probably be how to game the baby monitor algorithm. > Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on. If you are going out of earshot of the baby by doing this, you are fully relying on the technology being functional. That would seem unnecessarily risky, and not nice for the baby (they can sense this stuff). The odds of a catastrophe are low in a singular environment, but still enough to worry. Almost inevitably it would end badly if this were scaled to a mass consumer product. The idea is interesting from an engineering view, but from a human one it feels dystopian to insert a machine between parent and baby to this extent. It removes/replaces a layer of human-human connection. Where does engineering the natural human experience out of life end? Automated feeding? AI nannies and teachers? Then onto AI therapist? My suggestion would be to do a lighter version of the features in a system which focuses on safety (always being able to monitor no matter what, for example on the ESP32, you could have the second core independent and direct-output the feed if the first core hangs or crashes). Feature-wise, rather than not alerting for 10 minutes, you could apply a DSP algorithm which reduces harsh frequencies for this period, whilst slowly increasing the output volume of the monitor. I like the idea of alerts because it expands the base features without risk, and crucially makes the babies life better, as alerts could be sooner for important things that do need attention quickly. As an experiment, you could add an SD card and record snippets of cries which ended up in alerts, tag them with an ordered list of what you did to soothe or what was wrong, and see if AI can make anything of the data. Maybe certain cries can trigger alerts sooner, or cries over an extended period may indicate fever.
hakfoo 2mo ago
The keyboard enthusiasts got to "personalized hardware" pretty early, so there might be some lessons there. There's a whole continuum from "Buy an off the shelf unit" to "here's a barebones case you can slide ready made switches and caps into" to "mix and match custom PCBs and cases" to designing your own PCBs and/or cases. There are pretty clear pipelines and even some levels of tooling for "draw up the layout you want and get a bunch of files you can send to production houses" Takeaway 1: A lot of this is grounded in economic realities. I did the full bespoke route (custom PCB, custom 3-D printed case) and figured it probably cost me about $500 all inclusive to get what I wanted, and that's honestly a lot of money for a keyboard. AI won't solve any of the economic problems. They can't fix "the minimum PCB order is N units, so now you have a drawer full of spares you paid for". They can't make the expensive part you needed cheaper, especially if you're an individual buying quantity of 1/5/10 instead of an OEM buying reels and containers-full. They can't change the fact that a case for a large widget will be expensive to mill/3-D print/mould/etc. Takeaway 2: Customers may have surprisingly limited imagination for bespoke gear. There are galleries (and even coffee-table books) full of exotic keyboards. But Micro Center is full of $50 interchangeable "tenkeyless with RGB lighting" boards; throwing on a random set of "custom" keycaps, and that's enough for a large part of the audience. Will these customers want or benefit from more tools, or will it just give them rope to hang themselves on and give them an excuse to bail out of the purchase entirely? Even if you can provide them a gallery of vetted turnkey choices, there might be more choice paralysis than actual benefit. Takeaway 3: Hardware is forever (relative to software). You have a lot of small firms and group-buy products that disappeared and now the owners can't get an exact replacement or repairs. Conversely, Unicomp can gut and rebuild a 1986 Model M with new innards in large part because they've been selling the same basic design since a 386DX/16 cost as much as a Toyota Tercel. If your AI spawns a galaxy of 1-of-1 bespoke products, who services and supports them? That seems like it's only going to appeal to the enthusiast-hacker type who can keep them alive themselves, who is least likely to need AI help designing them. Design for disposability isn't a great look for anything but incredibly low-cost, limited-usecase items.
phendrenad2 2mo ago
Ehhh, maybe? I haven't heard many people wishing for devices that were within the realm of practicality (I.E. not a flying car). If someone has an actual good idea, then the cost of the components and tools and rework is the next major hurdle (soldering by hand is where cool ideas go to die). Meanwhile a commercial off-the-shelf device probably works good enough.
arikrahman 2mo ago
This reminds me of the other article posted on here, https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html Everyday more bespoke dotfiles are coming online for an audience of one. I am not surprised that this is coming to hardware as well.
witx 2mo ago
And it's probably going the same way all the personalized software we've been seeing: used as a spam "I built this" post on reddit or hacker news and to never be touched again. With hardware you get extra safety risks of fires and shocks, so let's see
KaiserPro 2mo ago
The author is missing the _hardest_ part of small hardware: power management. The reason why AR glasses are not a thing yes is because there isn't a big enough battery to allow them to function for more than a few minutes. Glasses form factor have space for about .9watt hours now, and ~2 in 4 years time (assuming current trends) Assuming a 14 hour day, that means that your have 140mwhr to spend every hour. A not very bright light on your glasses is about 30mw, a decently bright one is 90mw. Processing imagery on that kind of budget requires custom silicon, and a huge bunch of optimisations.
- rzerowan 2mo ago
  I think one of the issues is premature optimization/minimzation(?) . All the wearables so far that feature some human interactive display are essentially cramming the mobile concept into different device classes. Take the AR glasses , they are essentially a computing unit output display , input (joystiicks/sensors) all being crammed into one unit with a powerpack to drive it all. I believe the desktop concept, or in this case 'Walkman' concept would be better fit for wearables .Where one can separate the processing from the display/output and power each separately.Having a cable from your hip pack to the headunit is not so strange/difficult as previous gen of walk/discmans can attest. However the current ruling desing is wireless everything , super slim devices and all unified with the power supply.
- flerovium114 2mo ago
  The idea of "pythonizing" resource-constrained environments like embedded seems feasible to me, and even a good idea if executed well (e.g., numpy, torch, jax, etc.), but it does have me cackling imagining the first encounters of modern web devs with performance/power economy constraints
  - KaiserPro 2mo ago
    adds animation Battery life decreases by 25% Adds telemetry to see why battery life is suffering Battery lasts 10 minutes and the device gets hot to touch. Thats going to be a brutal intro into embedded hardware
K0balt 2mo ago
Mmmmmmmmmm… sort of. If you are keeping inside the LEGO level of complexity, almost. But just as with code, if the project is complex you need a real engineer herding the cats. That said, it certainly can extend the reach of an effort, and is a huge help doing board reviews and data sheet analysis, etc. but the real engineering decisions are very very hit and miss, just like with code.
hollowturtle 2mo ago
> People build their own applications now All the people that I know in tech and not in tech, don't do that, even if presented with the option they're too busy to also get into this endeavour that still requires a lot of expertise. I stopped reading there
Animats 2mo ago
> Here's the catch. To put a decent interface on a seven-dollar board today, you still need C++, a board SDK... None of that looks anything like building for the web, so the way most people build interfaces stops at the edge of the device. So they put a web browser in the device?
- socalgal2 2mo ago
  I’ve had Claude build UIs from scratch in rust. No framework. I prompted it to make its own ImGUI style Ui system and a few minutes later I had texts, icons, buttons, sliders, scrolling lists, etc.. All my experience tells me it can do it with or without a GPU meaning if you don’t have one it can easily write a software render for a UI
- dashersw 2mo ago
  Here is the author of Gea Stack. There is no browser in the device, none of these devices could run one with 512KB of RAM (+2-8MB of PSRAM). We instead transpile TypeScript and CSS into native code, so the UI you build with web technologies look and behave identical on a microcontroller.
jo-m 2mo ago
I love the slider UI element to switch between different examples on their landing page (https://geastack.com/ https://geastack.com/)... not sure if satire or real.
- dashersw 2mo ago
  It is real :)
- kps 2mo ago
  That's… good. It's a page-snapping scrollbar. Much better than the common row of dots and arrows.
shevy-java 2mo ago
I won't submit to data sniffing from corporation, so "personalized" hardware won't make it into this area here. By the way, this is not new either. In the 1990s Microsoft tried to convince people how great it is if their fridge gives data to MS so MS can order needed food etc.. Fast forward some decades - many don't want to yield any more data to private entities, no matter which alleged "benefit" this would bring.
StrLght 2mo ago
I feel like the article ignores the elephant in the room — production costs. Producing PCBs (say, 5 or 10 units) is pretty expensive, and components are also costly on such a small scale. Combining these two requires additional money or time. Beyond that, you need to consider that you probably won't get it right the first time, and every attempt multiplies the cost. It'll be a deal-breaker for many people — the risk is just too high.
- engineer_22 2mo ago
  Pcbs are basically rolling off a laser jet printer in shenzhen and they’ll do pnp for a few dollars more. Pcb cheap. Have engineer sit there to design pcb is expensive
  - StrLght 2mo ago
    Last time I tried JLCPCB, it was way too expensive on a smaller scale. Simple PCB with a cheap Nordic nRF, a few other basic components, 10cm x 5cm: ~17 euros/unit (including shipping) at 5 units which was the minimum amount to order. Do you have a different experience?
    - pardon_me 2mo ago
      Yes, raw PCBs that size are usually closer to 1EUR/unit. DHL shipping on these slightly larger than average boards would be 3EUR/unit. Are you talking about fully assembled (pcb + components + solder mask + pnp + soldering + test) at 17EUR/unit? If so, that's incredible cheap for a finished product delivered to your door. If not, you're doing something wrong.
sarocu 2mo ago
I recently grabbed a cheap e-reader and installed a fork of the firmware so I could use it as a dumb terminal for an agent. Hackable firmware lets you totally change a product
MisterTea 2mo ago
Instead of staring down at their phones in social situations people can pretend to pay attention wile looking at a screen. Can't wait for zombie stairs.

100 points by arbayi 3mo ago

[dead]

zkmon 2mo ago

While personalization is definitely the trend, I don't think people are going to build code just to personalize. A tiny few of all who bought the device could do that. A few more could flash the device with some open firmware that gives more features and personalization and most will stick with the range of the personalization provided by the vendor. For the most people, the risks outweigh the desire for tinkering. Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering, not in the hands of customer. People don't even have the time to cook their own recipes. People have their own chores to worry about. I'm talking about bulk of the customer base, not the geeks.

Arainach 2mo ago
I'd include the geeks in that. I've been programming computers and tinkering with all sorts of hardware for more than 30 years. I first used FreeBSD in.....2001? and Linux not long after that. I've programmed OS code, I've grudgingly written VHDL, I've assembled a sound card for the Apple II I still have running - all this to say that I believe I'm in your tiny few. And I'm so tired. Tired of having to debug all the things. Tired of having to pay attention to them. Tired of setting them up "just once" and then months later having to reverse engineer my own work because something failed. So I don't. I leave nearly all my devices stock. I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues. And I don't want personalized hardware with any electronics in it (bespoke wooden objects, those I love and make).
- graemep 2mo ago
  > I run Windows because I'm sick of debugging device driver issues. Lost me there. The rest is reasonable but other OSes (MacOS, Linux) also rarely have driver issues. Its not like Windows never needs fixing (these days more than Linux). These days you can buy computers with Linux pre-installed and compatible hardware. My biggest problem with technology is with very stock stuff. Mobile apps that everyone pushes you to use that clutter up your phone and are often crap. Every time an app I use updates I wonder "what have they broken this time?".
  - Arainach 2mo ago
    I'm tired of having this debate over and over. I still use Linux devices regularly at work and have a T420S and various RPi-like devices that run it, so it's not like I'm going off memories of 2010. I owned a Framework Laptop (designed to run Linux) and got rid of it in no small part because the battery life was so much worse on Linux than it was in Windows. I've worked at Google who (circa 2019) had an incredible team of IT specialists and specifically selected hardware and still struggled to get Bluetooth on Linux to work reliably for everyone. I don't want to have to carefully pick hardware for compatibility. I want first class support for pen and touch. I value thin, light, and long battery over the ability to run a custom bootloader. Here's a thread where I ranted with specific examples 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463982
    - graemep 2mo ago
      I am tired of arguing about this as I do not not have these problems and have not in many years over multiple machines. Looking at your specific examples they are not a like for like comparison. Two are Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi issues (so on a device designed for experimentation, and not even running the usual distro). One is a bug in the GUI for True NAS. One is unhappiness with the default installed command line packages for Debian on WSL. When I used Windows I had just as many irritants. It was very noticeable when I was using Linux at home and Windows at work (and is one reason I switched to Linux). it is definitely not true that Windows always works flawlessly for everyone in all circumstances. If you count every irritation you find with every Linux distro on a wide range of hardware it will add up to more than Windows on typical hardware. Have your tried Windows on your Pi? Have you replaced your TrueNas server with a Windows equivalent?
- duttish 2mo ago
  I get where you're coming from, though I'm not quite at 30 years yet. I like building stuff, I don't like configuring, debugging or troubleshooting my OS or computer. I just want it to work and get out of the way. For me this has translated into a slightly different outcome: stock ubuntu with basically just zsh/powerlevel10k, I add component assembly when I buy a new desktop, I'm about to probably replace my home server with a NAS etc.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    Yeah I don't care how exactly my Linux laptop gets two finger scrolling going the right direction, all I know is that I can tell AI what I want and it'll go and change the setting for me.
willtemperley 2mo ago
> Personalization will grow right at the vendor offering I think so. There will be a short period, like now, where many will attempt to build their own products and the five good ideas out of five thousand will be incorporated into products built by those who know what they’re doing. An absolutely technophobic friend asked me what agentic AI was today. I think Charlie Munger said “When even your barber is talking about it, sell and run”
- fragmede 2mo ago
  I'd bet Charlie Munger and his barber talk about cars and don't run. When we're talking random stock tips that's one thing but if it's possibly a foundational society changing technology like plastic, maybe your barber talking about it isn't the "get out now" signal that neat little story purports to be.
  - willtemperley 2mo ago
    Nobody is questioning the longevity of AI. The internet itself wasn’t affected by pets.com but a lot of retail investors got burned. It’s going to happen again, I think perhaps in a different way. For example many are treating vibe coding like slot machines and the app monetisation gamble is unlikely to pay off.

Abishek_Muthian 2mo ago

With hardware/computers becoming locked, thin clients and unaffordable we're already forced to customize our devices cyber punk style. You're lucky if you're in a region where these open-hardware companies sell their wares, even though many of them will go under in the current market.

sasaf5 2mo ago

"So the interesting question isn't whether personal hardware is coming. It's who gets to write the software that runs on it." It's not that I don't like your point of view. It's that I can't stand AI slop.

dominotw 2mo ago

well my phone can do almost everything

tejtm 2mo ago
anything but be owned by you
- yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
  No, by reasonable definitions that's doable too. My phone runs an OS I chose, that I have admin access on, that runs any app I tell it to run. And, y'know, it's my property that I bought with my own money, but that's probably aside your argument.
  - xikxp1 2mo ago
    One can say that he chose iOS by buying iPhone. I don't see any strong argument here
    - qup 2mo ago
      One of them can change the OS, one of them can't.

mapontosevenths 2mo ago

I don't think people have realized it yet, but AI can do hardware too. That's what I had hoped this was about. I had Claude design an entire 4 layer rp2040 based PCB from scratch and PCBWay build it. It worked on the first go, other than some silkscreen overlapped, which doesn't hurt anything. That was before Fable. Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print. Also worked the first go, but with minor cosmetic issues. People have yet to even BEGIN to appreciate what these things can do with the right harness.

javchz 2mo ago
Im surprised by how bad LLMs are with SVGs but somehow are oke-ish with CAD and other weird files.
- utopiah 2mo ago
  For circuits then can be simulated. They have a of constraints that might make the problem space a lot smaller. Maybe there are also a lot of text on what makes a good design. I also believe most design related to a physical object have documentation justifying the choices.
- DoctorOetker 2mo ago
  An SVG is like a cartoon, and throws away a lot of information, a "good SVG" of some subject chosen to be familiar to both animals and humans might look good to one but not the other. The cycling flamingo is a kind of art curation test. Functional PCB "artwork" is actually not intended for visual consumption, it must meet constraints and advice scattered in documentation, prior "art" in the training corpus, etc. It doesn't need to be surprising at all A good static SVG cartoon can be viewed as a multispectral photographic video, with a lot of information thrown away and distorted or oversimplified. Different species will disagree about what information should have been kept vs thrown away. A bee would "complain" it can't see any of the plant's UV markers when presented with plant imagery. Many animals depend on motion or movement to identify predator or prey. At a certain point culture and personal life experiences start conflicting even within the human subgroup, and we see people argue why this or that flamingo is better than the other.

Losenok 2mo ago

I do agree that hardware gap starts to shrink, similarly to what Software gap once used to be. It is much easier to avoid spending time loading the right drivers and looking up what error message on that tiny device you are working on means. Especially if AI could run in terminal itself. I tried building a health device few years ago and got completely lost in how to setup camera and touch display with a raspberry PI. Would imagine, with AI running in a command line, it would be much easier.

pugio 2mo ago

AI + hardware has really helped my wife and I get more sleep. I had an esp32-box-3 lying around from a lapsed "voice agent" project from a year or two ago. Had a baby. Baby moved to another room, sleep trained. Baby either: 1. wakes up a few times a night, babbles for a bit, goes back to sleep OR 2. baby wakes up and fusses for N (=10) minutes, at which point parents need to go in and settle (that's the sleep training routine we use). In either case, we do NOT want to wake up every time the baby does. Baby can go back to sleep easily, we adults have a harder time. A few rounds with Claude and the esp32 is now our new baby monitor. It tracks cry/fuss duration and publishes an audio stream (via a web UI or direct with, say, VLC). The audio only comes through AFTER N minutes of fussing have elapsed. It also posts notifications (to ntfy) after 30s and N minutes. My log says baby often wakes up 1-2 times a night and resettles almost immediately. We only wake up if the audio comes through, after N (10) minutes. Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on. It's fun to keep improving and adding features to this. Never would have had the time/energy to get this done without a coding agent. I ordered a set of 10 more of the esp32-box-3s to give them out to my friends (well, some are for other projects... so much potential). (EDIT: Yes, I know this isn't AI designing hardware, but even writing code for embedded off the shelf stuff feels like a huge new potential.)

thatsit 2mo ago
This is one of the killer use cases of AI, build personalized stuff for your life, that no company does. It is kind of generalized „intelligent stuff“ that one can use. Like minecraft your life
petra 2mo ago
This actually feels like something that could be a popular app on a baby monitor.
pardon_me 2mo ago
Baby monitors fundamentally need to be safe and allow parents peace of mind. Knowing they can constantly hear the baby and communicate verbally to soothe, as if you were in the room with them, allows this. It already means you only have to respond and/or get up to tend if they are still unsettled after a period of time. Monitors also have volume control so you can stay alert without being constantly disturbed. The traditional baby monitor system had three states (ON and functional, ON and non-functional, OFF). It provides a constantly available and instantaneous test for "functional" - as long as you can hear sound from the other unit, it's almost guaranteed to currently be in a safe condition. Monitoring is constant, human-first, and all human. The system is relatively fail-safe. Your design replaces this with a multi-state system and algorithms (adding ON in listening mode, ON in delay mode with output off, ON and partially-functional etc.). It removes any reliable method to prove an obviously "functional" state at any given time. Monitoring is non-constant (for the human), machine-first, and human as last resort (like corporate customer services). The system is not fail-safe despite being machine-first and at higher risk of error or malfunction due to complexity. The risks include a few failed notifications or incorrect delay timing leading to early developmental trauma, such as fear of abandonment. It doesn't take much. We are still learning to deal with this human-human, before adding invisible unknowns. If nothing else, what are babies likely to learn in a pre-verbal state where the days are spent sensing and observing their environment to develop the brain? It'll probably be how to game the baby monitor algorithm. > Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on. If you are going out of earshot of the baby by doing this, you are fully relying on the technology being functional. That would seem unnecessarily risky, and not nice for the baby (they can sense this stuff). The odds of a catastrophe are low in a singular environment, but still enough to worry. Almost inevitably it would end badly if this were scaled to a mass consumer product. The idea is interesting from an engineering view, but from a human one it feels dystopian to insert a machine between parent and baby to this extent. It removes/replaces a layer of human-human connection. Where does engineering the natural human experience out of life end? Automated feeding? AI nannies and teachers? Then onto AI therapist? My suggestion would be to do a lighter version of the features in a system which focuses on safety (always being able to monitor no matter what, for example on the ESP32, you could have the second core independent and direct-output the feed if the first core hangs or crashes). Feature-wise, rather than not alerting for 10 minutes, you could apply a DSP algorithm which reduces harsh frequencies for this period, whilst slowly increasing the output volume of the monitor. I like the idea of alerts because it expands the base features without risk, and crucially makes the babies life better, as alerts could be sooner for important things that do need attention quickly. As an experiment, you could add an SD card and record snippets of cries which ended up in alerts, tag them with an ordered list of what you did to soothe or what was wrong, and see if AI can make anything of the data. Maybe certain cries can trigger alerts sooner, or cries over an extended period may indicate fever.

hakfoo 2mo ago

The keyboard enthusiasts got to "personalized hardware" pretty early, so there might be some lessons there. There's a whole continuum from "Buy an off the shelf unit" to "here's a barebones case you can slide ready made switches and caps into" to "mix and match custom PCBs and cases" to designing your own PCBs and/or cases. There are pretty clear pipelines and even some levels of tooling for "draw up the layout you want and get a bunch of files you can send to production houses" Takeaway 1: A lot of this is grounded in economic realities. I did the full bespoke route (custom PCB, custom 3-D printed case) and figured it probably cost me about $500 all inclusive to get what I wanted, and that's honestly a lot of money for a keyboard. AI won't solve any of the economic problems. They can't fix "the minimum PCB order is N units, so now you have a drawer full of spares you paid for". They can't make the expensive part you needed cheaper, especially if you're an individual buying quantity of 1/5/10 instead of an OEM buying reels and containers-full. They can't change the fact that a case for a large widget will be expensive to mill/3-D print/mould/etc. Takeaway 2: Customers may have surprisingly limited imagination for bespoke gear. There are galleries (and even coffee-table books) full of exotic keyboards. But Micro Center is full of $50 interchangeable "tenkeyless with RGB lighting" boards; throwing on a random set of "custom" keycaps, and that's enough for a large part of the audience. Will these customers want or benefit from more tools, or will it just give them rope to hang themselves on and give them an excuse to bail out of the purchase entirely? Even if you can provide them a gallery of vetted turnkey choices, there might be more choice paralysis than actual benefit. Takeaway 3: Hardware is forever (relative to software). You have a lot of small firms and group-buy products that disappeared and now the owners can't get an exact replacement or repairs. Conversely, Unicomp can gut and rebuild a 1986 Model M with new innards in large part because they've been selling the same basic design since a 386DX/16 cost as much as a Toyota Tercel. If your AI spawns a galaxy of 1-of-1 bespoke products, who services and supports them? That seems like it's only going to appeal to the enthusiast-hacker type who can keep them alive themselves, who is least likely to need AI help designing them. Design for disposability isn't a great look for anything but incredibly low-cost, limited-usecase items.

phendrenad2 2mo ago

Ehhh, maybe? I haven't heard many people wishing for devices that were within the realm of practicality (I.E. not a flying car). If someone has an actual good idea, then the cost of the components and tools and rework is the next major hurdle (soldering by hand is where cool ideas go to die). Meanwhile a commercial off-the-shelf device probably works good enough.

arikrahman 2mo ago

This reminds me of the other article posted on here, https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html Everyday more bespoke dotfiles are coming online for an audience of one. I am not surprised that this is coming to hardware as well.

witx 2mo ago

And it's probably going the same way all the personalized software we've been seeing: used as a spam "I built this" post on reddit or hacker news and to never be touched again. With hardware you get extra safety risks of fires and shocks, so let's see

KaiserPro 2mo ago

The author is missing the _hardest_ part of small hardware: power management. The reason why AR glasses are not a thing yes is because there isn't a big enough battery to allow them to function for more than a few minutes. Glasses form factor have space for about .9watt hours now, and ~2 in 4 years time (assuming current trends) Assuming a 14 hour day, that means that your have 140mwhr to spend every hour. A not very bright light on your glasses is about 30mw, a decently bright one is 90mw. Processing imagery on that kind of budget requires custom silicon, and a huge bunch of optimisations.

rzerowan 2mo ago
I think one of the issues is premature optimization/minimzation(?) . All the wearables so far that feature some human interactive display are essentially cramming the mobile concept into different device classes. Take the AR glasses , they are essentially a computing unit output display , input (joystiicks/sensors) all being crammed into one unit with a powerpack to drive it all. I believe the desktop concept, or in this case 'Walkman' concept would be better fit for wearables .Where one can separate the processing from the display/output and power each separately.Having a cable from your hip pack to the headunit is not so strange/difficult as previous gen of walk/discmans can attest. However the current ruling desing is wireless everything , super slim devices and all unified with the power supply.
flerovium114 2mo ago
The idea of "pythonizing" resource-constrained environments like embedded seems feasible to me, and even a good idea if executed well (e.g., numpy, torch, jax, etc.), but it does have me cackling imagining the first encounters of modern web devs with performance/power economy constraints
- KaiserPro 2mo ago
  adds animation Battery life decreases by 25% Adds telemetry to see why battery life is suffering Battery lasts 10 minutes and the device gets hot to touch. Thats going to be a brutal intro into embedded hardware

K0balt 2mo ago

Mmmmmmmmmm… sort of. If you are keeping inside the LEGO level of complexity, almost. But just as with code, if the project is complex you need a real engineer herding the cats. That said, it certainly can extend the reach of an effort, and is a huge help doing board reviews and data sheet analysis, etc. but the real engineering decisions are very very hit and miss, just like with code.

hollowturtle 2mo ago

> People build their own applications now All the people that I know in tech and not in tech, don't do that, even if presented with the option they're too busy to also get into this endeavour that still requires a lot of expertise. I stopped reading there

Animats 2mo ago

> Here's the catch. To put a decent interface on a seven-dollar board today, you still need C++, a board SDK... None of that looks anything like building for the web, so the way most people build interfaces stops at the edge of the device. So they put a web browser in the device?

socalgal2 2mo ago
I’ve had Claude build UIs from scratch in rust. No framework. I prompted it to make its own ImGUI style Ui system and a few minutes later I had texts, icons, buttons, sliders, scrolling lists, etc.. All my experience tells me it can do it with or without a GPU meaning if you don’t have one it can easily write a software render for a UI
dashersw 2mo ago
Here is the author of Gea Stack. There is no browser in the device, none of these devices could run one with 512KB of RAM (+2-8MB of PSRAM). We instead transpile TypeScript and CSS into native code, so the UI you build with web technologies look and behave identical on a microcontroller.

jo-m 2mo ago

I love the slider UI element to switch between different examples on their landing page (https://geastack.com/ https://geastack.com/)... not sure if satire or real.

dashersw 2mo ago
It is real :)
kps 2mo ago
That's… good. It's a page-snapping scrollbar. Much better than the common row of dots and arrows.

shevy-java 2mo ago

I won't submit to data sniffing from corporation, so "personalized" hardware won't make it into this area here. By the way, this is not new either. In the 1990s Microsoft tried to convince people how great it is if their fridge gives data to MS so MS can order needed food etc.. Fast forward some decades - many don't want to yield any more data to private entities, no matter which alleged "benefit" this would bring.

StrLght 2mo ago

I feel like the article ignores the elephant in the room — production costs. Producing PCBs (say, 5 or 10 units) is pretty expensive, and components are also costly on such a small scale. Combining these two requires additional money or time. Beyond that, you need to consider that you probably won't get it right the first time, and every attempt multiplies the cost. It'll be a deal-breaker for many people — the risk is just too high.

engineer_22 2mo ago
Pcbs are basically rolling off a laser jet printer in shenzhen and they’ll do pnp for a few dollars more. Pcb cheap. Have engineer sit there to design pcb is expensive
- StrLght 2mo ago
  Last time I tried JLCPCB, it was way too expensive on a smaller scale. Simple PCB with a cheap Nordic nRF, a few other basic components, 10cm x 5cm: ~17 euros/unit (including shipping) at 5 units which was the minimum amount to order. Do you have a different experience?
  - pardon_me 2mo ago
    Yes, raw PCBs that size are usually closer to 1EUR/unit. DHL shipping on these slightly larger than average boards would be 3EUR/unit. Are you talking about fully assembled (pcb + components + solder mask + pnp + soldering + test) at 17EUR/unit? If so, that's incredible cheap for a finished product delivered to your door. If not, you're doing something wrong.

sarocu 2mo ago

I recently grabbed a cheap e-reader and installed a fork of the firmware so I could use it as a dumb terminal for an agent. Hackable firmware lets you totally change a product

MisterTea 2mo ago

Instead of staring down at their phones in social situations people can pretend to pay attention wile looking at a screen. Can't wait for zombie stairs.