Pocuter – A coin-sized micro computer with WiFi and BLE (opens in new tab)

The small blue chip on the bottom left corner of the side of the board with the SD card is the antenna. We isolated it with ground plane stitching and placed it as far from the SD card as we could in order to avoid interference, and we haven't seen any thus far!

I’m not 100% sure it answers your question about the antenna, but FTA: “Some people are asking themselves where the antenna is. We are using a chip antenna - It is the blue component in the corner!”

...only much smaller. You can't make a watch out of M5, you can only make a clock.

Thanks! I also wish we could ship immediately. We figured we'd better set a conservative delivery date in case regulatory approvals and the chip shortage caused havoc but we're looking to fulfill all of the deliveries as early as possible so we can move on to branching out with derivatives.

It sure does! I am directly involved with Pocuter. We are already organizing production for backer fulfillment. We'd like to upgrade to the ESP32-C3 since it isn't as affected by the chip shortage as the SAMD21 and ESP32 are (and offers more favorable performance/security)

Sure, but it would more likely be a reader for the keys you hand to someone on the SD card.

Unlikely though - the physical representation of crypto has been tried several times, but trust and key ownership is hard.

Hi! I am actually directly involved with Pocuter. Amazing to see it posted here! The ESP32 alone doesn't have enough pins to handle all of the features of the Pocuter, so the SAMD21 was selected as the main MCU to supplement this. We are looking in to upgrading to the ESP32-C3 in the near future.

A lot of powerful computers were built by bunging in a powerful CPU, perhaps with extra RAM, as a coprocessor to an already-existing weak computer, whose weak CPU then serves as a sort of front end processor, or FEP. An example is the Tandy Model 16, which was the second line of desktop Unix workstations ever released (and arguably the first affordable one, for multi-kilobuck values of "affordable"). It was basically a Tandy Model II Z80-based computer with a daughtercard carrying a 68000 processor and up to 512 KiB of RAM. The 68000 actually ran the Unix (Microsoft Xenix), and delegated I/O to the various peripherals to the Z80.

Not nitpicky at all. Some ideas.

1. I believe that there are some microcontrollers that have irreversible settings, such as a setting to permanently disable writing to flash memory.

Is the ESP32 such a processor?

If so, maybe they want to have WiFi on a coprocessor that they can write protect so that they can get certification to sell their modules in jurisdictions that require that WiFi has protections against people reconfiguring it to use channels that are not part of the WiFi bands in those jurisdictions.

2. Their software, Pocuter OS 1.0, the SDK, and the 3D and physics libraries seem to be a big part of their pitch.

Maybe they already had these, or a large part of them, for ARM before they decided on how they would do WiFi and BLE. Later they picked ESP for WiFi and BLE and could run everything on that, but porting their OS and low level libraries from ARM to Xtensa or RISC-V (depening on which ESP32 they are using) might be a lot of work.

3. Power savings? If WiFi and BLE aren't being used they can completely shut down the ESP32.

This is probably not it though, because I believe that ESP32 provides very fine grained control over power. They could run everything else on the ESP32 and still completely shut down WiFi and BLE when not in use.

4. I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that they are doing it for the next reason I'm going to name. I'm just including it because I'm sure at some point someone on Kickstarter or Indiegogo is going to try it.

Use a coprocessor for WiFI and BLE that is ridiculous overkill if that is all at does, and use all that extra power to run something of interest to you such as mining crytocurrency.

Edit: oh well, none of these guesses turned out right.

Almost certainly because of better tooling and probably better peripheral support.

They support native USB and ESP32 doesn't have that.