I have designed and made similar devices, starting with a RPi0w based device, and later with a pico w. Lately a lot of different ESP based handheld "dev consoles" have been popping up here on HaD, and I was thinking about it and wondering what the drive is for creating these devices. As many will mention, what will it be used for?

I remember when it all started for me back in 2014. I was realizing how invasive it was privacy wise to be carrying a smartphone with me at all times. I ditched the smartphone for a time, tried various "dumb phones", but I was also wanting to be able to send and receive emails as well as do some basic web browsing. 

It made me want a device that was a) portable, b) open source, possible to know what every running program is doing, with ability to modify in anyway, c) privacy friendly, e.g. no always listening microphones, etc.

Now there are privacy minded open source smartphones, etc. But I still think we are a long way from having truly free portable devices. Apple and Google have captured this market and also in the case with windows PC and all of these devices integrating AI, IMO privacy wise its 100x worse than it was 10 years ago.

I started developing pico w device instead of raspberry pi because of boot time, battery life, and size. It doesnt do all the things i originally wanted to accomplish, but it is a great excersize in developing truly free and open source personal and portable hardware.

With a raspberry pi device, we already know what softwarr we can run on it, so the device appearance and form is the main design challenge as well as possible addons.

With an esp32 or pico, and their limited resources, I think it is more of a challenge of creating the hardware, then when it comes to software what can we make it do?