u/Environmental_Ad_282

Been building a handheld console, and drone control ended up being one of the apps on it — wasn't originally the plan, but the hardware made it possible.

One thing that tripped us up: sending gamepad, mouse, and keyboard as one combined BLE HID report seemed fine at first, until iOS started acting up. Had to split them into separate reports to fix it — small thing, cost real debugging time.

Anyone else hit weird platform-specific quirks like that with BLE HID?

Been chipping away at this for months: 9 keys, rotary encoder, ESP32-S3, BLE. Started as a weekend idea, turned into a real rabbit hole.

Two things ate most of my time — hot-swap contacts going flaky from plate flex (took a couple PCB revisions to fix), and tuning BLE HID latency to feel as snappy as wired.

Anyone else dealt with hot-swap reliability or BLE latency issues on similar builds? Curious if there's a cleaner way than what I stumbled into.

https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/penengineering/keyapad-every-key-your-rules

Started building AkiraOS a while back for our handheld console (AkiraConsole), and somewhere along the way realized it could actually run a whole smart home setup, not just one gadget.

LifeSync is our first step there — a little 24V RGB controller, still 3D-printed/prototype, screw terminals for the LED strip in/out. Nothing wild yet, just the first piece.

Plan is AkiraOS ends up being the backbone for a bunch of these, all talking to each other instead of five random apps like every other smart home thing out there.

More devices coming. What's the most annoying part of your current smart home setup?

A few of us have been wanting a "face" for our lab for a while — not a logo, something with actual personality. So we made one.

Meet Cat-Skull. Green eyes, floppy disk in hand, red Converse. Went from a sketch to a 3D render to an actual hand-finished physical figure.

Made two versions just to see which one felt right — one in a denim jacket with a little patch, one in a grey hoodie with a pixel heart. Both came out raw on purpose, white base with red splatter, nothing too clean.

It's a small thing, but it was genuinely fun to design something that's just weird instead of corporate. Felt right for a lab full of people who build hacker consoles and write our own OS for fun.

This is edition 001 — first time we've made something purely for the love of it rather than to ship.

Curious what people think — jacket or hoodie?

At some point I thought, why not actually finish one properly.

So we built AkiraConsole. Custom PCB, wrote our own OS from scratch (WASM-based, sandboxed apps), then wrote a NES emulator because why not. Currently playing Zelda and Prince of Persia on it. OSHWA certified, fully open source.

Does things my Flipper Zero can't.

Still rough around the edges but I carry it every day.

Pre-launch on Crowd Supply: crowdsupply.com/pen-engineering/akiraconsole

What would you build on something like this?