This is the final major revision to my productivity device, the Pocket Mage PDA. [Music] I've been working really hard for the last couple months on polishing the hardware and software as well as getting this ready to become a kit. I've tried to streamline the assembly process as much as possible to make this accessible to anyone. Let me give you a sneak peek at this process. You'll start by putting the button sticker on the PCB. Then you'll put the e- in OLED on. Connect the ribbon cable. Put the nuts in the case. And then put the PCBs into the plastic and screw the plastic case together. Then you finally program the board in your favorite browser. And that's it. It really is that easy to build. No soldering, no code, and just one Allen key. If you're interested in building one for yourself and you want to be notified when the kit releases, I put a link to the email interest form down in the comment section. Let's touch on some of the new features in V3. Starting with the hardware. The most striking change is definitely this super wide OLED display. Let me turn this on. This new display looks awesome and it's twice as wide as before, allowing more text to be displayed at a time. So, for example, I can write a lot more letters across this screen. And you can see it scrolls to keep up like it did before. You may have also noticed these flashy new white PCBs. I think the white PCBs really helped sell that, you know, paper look of the device and just generally look super clean. Next, I've added a micro SD card slot where you can throw your favorite micro SD card into the device and power it on. All the files and all the apps can save to the micro SD. Now, um right now I got a 4 GB card in here which can hold quite a bit of text files, but you can put a bigger card in as well. The micro SD card can store text files, system files, and even an entire dictionary. I'll show that later. Next are the ease of assembly improvements. The dome array stickers, new captive nut designs for the case, and the screen driver integration on the PCB back here. All of these are new improvements that help make the device a lot more easy to assemble. And finally, I added a small buzzer for those nice beeps and boops. It just serves to make this little computer even more endearing. Let me put the mic close so you can hear. For software, we have a lot of general UI polish, bug fixes, and improvements that will streamline the use of the device. I'll go over the improvements in detail later in the video, but here are the main things. First is the calendar. Let's open it up. You'll see it's going to load some stuff from the SD card, but uh basically it drops you right into a month view. You can also hit week view by hitting this button and see all the different things that you have going on this week. Say I want to see what I have going on on Friday. I can type in Friday and then it'll take me to the day view. It's pretty simple. It's just used to input events. Um you can do, you know, daily events, repeating daily, monthly, weekly, yearly, whatever you want to do. And you can input a few different things like a note, duration, start time, you know, the basics. Next is a daily journal app with a kind of GitHub inspired daily tracker. So you can see the boxes here that are dark are the days that I filled in a journal. If I hit T for today, I can type what I did for the day in in a separate file for each day. So for example, today I did nothing. Let's save that. And then if I exit back to here, you can see that now we have four days filled in. So it's just a a simple journal tracker app. [Music] Next is a USB file transfer program. This is used to plug the device into a PC and back it up. um when plugging it into the PC using the USBC port, it acts just like a flash drive. So, if I plug it in right here, I'll show you what happens on the screen. As you can see, the Pocket Mage has popped up in device manager as a Pocket Mage and also in File Explorer as a flash drive, and all of our files are accessible here, too. We also have a new settings app. If I open it up here, you can use this app to fiddle with the Pocket Mage to your heart's content. So, for example, if I wanted to turn off this clock down here, just type clock false and then our clock turns off. And finally, for the major changes, we have a very simple dictionary app. If I launch it up here and see this beautiful art by a community member and then we can type in a word, for example, bird. And as it loads all the definitions for bird, um it'll pop them up here and you can see we have a noun bird. Uh if I go through have another definition for a bird, another definition for a bird. So, that's about the last very major change for this guy. Um, before I go into a lot of detail on these improvements, let's hear a quick word from the sponsor that made this project possible. [Music] JLCPCB has been there since the beginning of this project, providing me with fast, highquality, and cost-effective prototype circuit boards. They've enabled me to iterate on my designs and create the device that you see today. They're super easy to use, even for hobbyists, and I found them very reliable at delivering working PCBs since I started ordering from them. The ordering process is super easy. You just upload your PCB Gerber file, select your board settings, and you get a quote almost instantly. Setting up PCB assembly is just a couple more clicks after that. Their boards are also affordable and fast. They have 1 to eight layer PCBs that start at $2, and production happens in just 24 hours because of their large scale production facilities. I've been using JLC for years and I can honestly recommend them to anyone in need of custom boards. Right now, they're running a deal where you can get $30 off your order and highquality six layer PCBs for $5 with no extra engineering fees for their two microinch ending finish. Click my link in the description to learn more and thank you for listening to the sponsor segment. Let's get back to the video. [Music] All right, let's delve into the details of this new V3. So, essentially kind of the the first thing that strikes you is this long OLED. Um, it's it's twice as long as before, as I mentioned. Um, and the the big deal with this is that number one, I can show a lot more text across this than I could before. Twice as much, actually. So, if I start typing stuff, you can see that I I'll have a lot more space to work with here. [Music] And you could also see I've implemented uh line breaks. So, if you're not done with a word, by the time you get to the end of this, it'll throw the word down here and you can complete your sentence. And also, because of this longer OLED, I can add a little preview to when you're scrolling. So, it shows the beginning of the line um so that you can see what line you're about to scroll to. So, that's just another small feature that I added because of this longer OLED. Just a couple uh quality of life changes. Um, this OLED helps a lot with the typing experience. Um, and if I close this guy up and I take out the battery here, I can kind of show you what we got going on under the hood for that. So, before what I had was essentially a breakout board soldered to this main board here. And that breakout board housed all the electronics that drove the the OLED from before. Instead of doing that again, um, to make the device kind of a little bit more seamless and a little bit more of like a polished product, I actually put the circuitry for this OLED, this new long one, on the main board itself. So, we have kind of consolidated all the circuitry onto one board. And it also allows you to not have to solder anything because when the kit comes, all you do is put this little ribbon cable in here and then your screen is working. So, if I throw the battery back in here, we can move on to the next thing. Another little quality of life feature is this bottom bar here. So, I've moved the battery indicator. It used to be here um to down here because, you know, when it updates, you don't want the whole screen flashing. It's a little bit annoying and it's it's just not practical. So, since we have more real estate now on this uh OLED, I've added the battery indicator, the clock, and the date here. So, it's just a lot easier to read this. Um, it's pretty much available at any time and it's always up to date. Now, let's get into the calendar app. And I can do that by just typing cal. As I said before, the default is a month view. So, this is uh July 2025, the current month when I'm recording this. But, if I wanted to go to August, I could hit next. It's going to load for a second because it has to get the uh events off the SD card. But, you can see I have events on every day. These little exclamation points mean you have something on that day. If there's more than two, it'll put the number of events like three for example. You can also see here on uh the Sunday 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th, I have an event on each of these days that's actually a repeating event. So if I go to number six, I can just type in the date that I want to go to and it will go there. Okay, so this is the day view. You can see that we have that event here. uh weekly update. You can see it starts at 8:00. It's an hour long. And the repeat is weekly on Sunday. So, there's a bunch of different repeat codes that you can type in daily for every day at a certain time. Weekly on any number of days. So, if you wanted to do weekly, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, you could do that. There's also yearly and a bunch of other ones that you could do as well. So, let's create a new event here. If I type N, I get new event. So, here's my new event screen. I'm first prompted to enter a name. So, I'll just type test. It has autofilled for me the start date. Since I kind of started this new event from a certain day, I can do a start time. Let's say we want 7 a.m. And then for my duration, I'll just do 30 minutes. Let's make this repeat daily. and then add a note. And after just a second, we've created a new event. And when we load back into the calendar, we can see that event repeated on every single day because I put it daily. Um, and it does repeat after the start date. So, if I hop into um the 6th, you can see that that test right there. If I go to the next day, that's Monday the 7th. test is there. And if I hop into the week view, you can see that test is there on every day. So, this pretty much just amounts to a very simple calendar app that you can use for scheduling and stuff like that, planning your events, repeat events if you want to do those. And yeah, you can you can have a week view, day view, and month view. And that's pretty much it. It's pretty simple. Let's head into the next thing. All right, let's just go right down the line to journal. Type in journal and we'll load it up. You can see here I kind of have not been up to date on my journaling. I've been uh working on other stuff, I guess. So, I forgot. So, today is the 30th. And you can see that I did the 19th uh 20th, 21st, and 22nd of July, but I haven't done other than that. So, let's fill out the journal for today. To do that, I'll just hit T for today. And it opens the text document for that day's journal. Let's say today I recorded a video. Okay, that's what I did. Let's save it. And if I go back, we can see that now that day in here, the 30th, is filled in. So this again is very simple. You can fill in the day's journal. You can also just open whatever journal you want. Let's open July 20th for example. So if I type in 2025, July is 07 and 20th. It'll load that file and you can see that I guess on July 20th I was mostly packing. So if you wanted to, you can go back and journal on days that you missed. You don't have to only journal on that day. I can also keep typing on this. So essentially, this is just a really easy way to keep up with journaling and easily organize them and search for them. So that's pretty much the journal app. Let's head into the next thing. Right down the list again, we'll go to Lexicon, which is a dictionary app. When we open it up, we see this beautiful picture. This is made by a community member, and I'll show you more community art later as well. And to use this lexicon or this dictionary, we'll just type in a word. Let's type in wizard. It's going to search the database that's on the SD card. Basically, it's a a plain text dictionary that's that's uploaded to the SD card. So, it works pretty simple. It just goes through the text file and searches for the word. It starts with like say for wizard, there's a text file W, which contains all the the words that begin with W in the dictionary. So it basically uses the first letter of the word, goes to that file and then searches for the word and all the definitions. So you can see that we've come up with the definition now of wizard, a wise man or a sage. And if there's more than one definition, you can use the left and right arrow keys down here to go through them. So now we have another definition for wizard. Pretty thrilling stuff. So yeah, it's just a simple dictionary application. This one was mostly for fun. I wanted to see if I could make, you know, a whole dictionary on this guy and I was able to. So, it's just a cool little addition, I suppose. Speaking of cool additions, say you wanted to roll a dice. I've had a lot of people in the community who are interested in Dn D stuff like that. And so, I added this little command that allows you to roll any dice you want. So, if we go ahead and type here roll, and then D, then we can select what dice we want to roll. So, say we want to roll a d12. We just type in 12 and it'll roll it for you. The result was 11. You can do any dice at all. Say you want like a d 100, you could do that. We got 74. Say you want, you know, a coin flip, you could do a D2. And there are little messages as well. Um, if you get the lowest or the highest. So, you see we got the lowest there, one. So, we got a little frowny face. There we go. We got the highest one. So, if you get the highest, you get some exclamation points. Now, let's move on to the settings app. So, if I load that up, we can see we have a bunch of preferences here. Uh, some of them are integers or bools. For each preference, it's represented on the right side what you need to type in to change it. For luminina or timeout, for example, you'll type in an integer. The first one adjusts the brightness of the OLED. The second one adjusts how long until the device times out. This one over here also adjusts how many FPS u maximum the OLED can get. If you turn that down, you can get slightly lower FPS but a little bit more battery life. But the main ones that most people might mess with are these few right here. So, uh, say I didn't want this little clock down here and I just wanted the little battery indicator. I could type clock false. That's the bool right there, the false. And then I hit enter and the clock has turned off here. And our little switch has also toggled. There's also an option to save power. I'd recommend that that stays on. It essentially just lowers the clock speed of the device when it's not doing anything and raises it when it's thinking. Essentially, it's pretty much free battery life. Some of the other interesting ones are boot to home. That means like on every restart, instead of going to the app that you were on previously, it will go to the home every time. That's something else I've implemented alongside this preferences. I've used a library called preferences in ESP32 that allows you to save the state of the device between power cycles. Before every time you turned it on, it would be like you were getting a fresh device. All the settings would be reset to their defaults and everything. But now I've changed it so that the settings are saved. And also as a result, I can save the state that the device was in. Say I'm in the text editor app and I put the device to sleep. But if you turn it back on by pressing any key here, you can see we're going to jump right back into the text app instead of going home like we did before. And it also loads the current file as well. You get basically back into the app you were in and you get the file back that you were editing. And when you turn it on and off, it's right where you left off. This also works for other apps. For example, tasks. Oh man, I didn't do that. That was due a while ago. But if I turn it off here, should get one of the beautiful community-made screen savers. And then if we turn it back on, get right back into tasks where we were before. This this makes it a lot easier to use the device dayto-day. I was noticing that every time you turn it off and on again, it would be a little bit annoying to go through all the menus. So, I just made it so it brings it back to where you were before. But, of course, you can turn that off if you want to. Speaking of those community screen savers, let's take a look at a few more of those. The community has been nice enough to make me um some art to put on the screen here when the device turns off. Before I had those wiggly lines, but now I have these amazing screen savers. So, let's throw this off. Uh this time we got file wizard drip. There's a bunch of different ones. I will try to show a little slideshow on the screen. There we go. I'll scroll them across the screen right now while I'm talking. But if you're looking to join in on this project, I mean, I'm interested in seeing people from any skill set. I think it's awesome when people make art, people help with code. It's been really awesome to see the community come together and, you know, be passionate about something I made. Let's get into some of the devices new hardware. So, starting with the buttons, these are kind of remade with deeper grooves for the key legends and some interior geometry that make it so that I don't have to have a clear coat on top to be able to keep these legends in. We can see that they now have a nice matte finish and I guess the overall effect is a lot more professional feeling than it was before. They're still made with the same process with, you know, pushing clay into the divots, but I think it looks a lot nicer with them being matte. So, I'm I'm pretty happy with that. You'll also notice in general that the device has a lot more screws. There's four up here, two here, two here, one here. There's actually two on the front, and two more on the side. So, in general, this thing is a lot better secured. And not only are there more screws, but instead of screwing directly into the plastic case like before, we actually have captive nuts that are pressed into the case itself. The the nuts are on this side, and then the screw kind of holds it together on the other side. So, a really good example of this is if I take out the battery. So, you can see right in here that these nuts are kind of in this little groove. So, you'll you'll put the nut on this side and then screw it in through the other side. And this allows for the case to, you know, maintain its rigidity even if you disassemble and assemble it multiple times. Because before, as you assembled and disassembled it multiple times, it would start to get stripped. the threading in the plastic wasn't so good. So now it it's just a lot more robust and better for assembly. Some other assembly improvements include what I mentioned before, this OLED ribbon cable. So this allows for the kit to have uh no soldering required because all of the circuitry is on the PCB and all you have to do is plug in this ribbon cable. This turned out really nice. It kind of folds over the edge of the PCB and comes down to plug into this ribbon cable connector. I've also added um a micro SD card slot like I mentioned before. So, this just holds a small micro SD card. You plug it in through the side. And I've kind of moved all the file operations off of the internal storage and onto the SD card. So, it's a lot more robust. Again, um trying to think of longevity and making sure this product can last a long time. The case has had to get a little bit thicker just because of all of this extra stuff on the PCB. I think it's maybe half a millimeter thicker, but it hasn't been a super big deal. I think I I took up the slack by making this battery door a bit thinner. So, the overall device, the bottom portion is not any thicker. V3 is a lot more polished. It seems a little bit more like a a final product, especially in the hands. It's just like bent trying to bend it. And uh overall there's a lot of a lot of stuff that makes the device a lot more finished feeling which is nice. [Music] Okay, I'm going to go through some of my upcoming plans to make this project into a kit. I've put some footage from my trip this summer to New York in the background as well. To start, this version Pocket Mage V3 is the final hardware version. This means that in terms of the hardware features and components, the device is finalized. All the hardware functionality is more or less set in stone, apart from a few small changes that may need to be made to make this practical to produce at a larger scale. Since I need to change from a one-off model to production model, there'll likely be sort of 3.1 circuit board that will act as a sort of production ready board. I've had some professional engineers review my schematics and board layouts, and they've come back with some really good information on how I can make the boards more efficient, safer, and have better performance. I'll be making these few small changes and updating and testing the board before production. After I have a productionready PCB that I'm confident in, I'll move to the beta stage. As I mentioned before my previous videos, I'll need some help with getting the software to a mature stage. Luckily, many community members are interested in helping develop software, and so I've set up a beta testers and developers channel on Discord. These channel members will have first dibs on beta kits to play with, test, and develop code for. If this is something you're interested in, check the link to the project Discord in the description. The current plan is to send out 100 beta units to developers, testers, and just people who are super interested in the project. These beta kits will likely be a little more rough around the edges than the final product, so keep that in mind. They'll have 3D printed parts instead of injection molding and the software will be a work in progress during the beta. I plan to use the capital from the beta kits to invest in some injection molds and ramp up to a larger production run. And again, Discord link is in the description and a link to the email interesttorm for the final kit is pinned in the comments as well. After the beta, as I mentioned, I plan to start a full production run. I have some ideas for how this will work, but to be honest, I'm focusing on the beta kits right now. Their current plan is to try to partner with a company to help outsource the kit making process and hopefully lower the overhead of the kits as well to ensure they aren't too expensive when they hit the market. Kickstarter or a similar crowdfunding service may also be an option here as the initial cost for molds is fairly expensive and capital upfront will be very beneficial for that. This will also allow early backers to get a discount on the device as well. Let me know in the comments of a Kickstarter campaign is something you guys would be interested in. So, overall a lot for me to think about and work on. Um, but right now I'm working on getting an LLC set up, creating a website for the Pocket Mage, and getting those changes made for the beta production run. This has been a crazy journey, iterating on my creation and making it better and better. I sincerely thank each and every one of you who is supporting me through ideas left in comments, helping with cleaning up my code, making awesome art that gives the device even more charm, or even just watching the video and supporting me that way. Thank you so much for watching, and a special thanks to my supporters over on Patreon. As always, have a great day. See, there your gun is a [Music]