A while back I came across a Kickstarter project for something called the "Pocuter One": it was a tiny little electronic device, small enough to fit in a (rather bulky) wristwatch, but fairly fully-featured, with a colour screen, SD card slot, wifi, battery-charging capability, and some buttons and sensors and other things. It promised to be able to do things like playing videos etc. Of course my initial reaction was to think about how I could use it for miniatures. My first idea was to create a computer console, probably as an objective, that played real video on its screen. After a LOT of time and effort, I finally came up with this little thing:
Pretty cool, but getting here was a colossal pain that I'm not convinced was worth it. First of all, when the Pocuter arrived it didn't have any video playing software - despite the Kickstarter page clearly showing it playing video and advertising it as one of its features. When I asked about that, what I was told essentially boiled down to "you can write a program yourself, or wait and maybe someone will write a program that you can use". Well, I was very busy and not prepared to dive into Arduino programming. So I waited. For a very long time. I was around a year before I decided to revisit this, and when I started asking around again I was finally told that there was the source code for the demo video player program seen on the kickstarter page was available. Boy, that sure would have been nice to know before! Part of this was on me for not exploring the docs and examples thoroughly enough, but I was out of my depth and didn't know where to start.Actually getting the video player to run on the Pocuter was not so simple however. The Pocuter just didn't behave the way I was used to as I had never worked with this kind of hardware before so I didn't realise some of what was happening behind the scenes and a lot of stuff just kept going wrong. I had to compile the video player demo for the Pocuter, but even faithfully following the docs I was unable to get it to compile. And then the documentation was taken down, so that was nice. Eventually they it was replaced by updated but less complete documentation; coupled with some help on the discord (where it often took weeks to get a response) I was finally able to compile the video playing demo and run it through the menu.
The problem now was actually getting the video player to run on startup as I would not be able to scroll through the menu and select it when the Pocuter was embedded in a terrain element. This required flashing it to the Pocuter, replacing the menu program, which proved to be very difficult; the Arduino IDE didn't want to flash the Pocuter, and the little communication I was able to achieve through the discord was basically "we don't know, we only used the old version of the Arduino IDE, give us some time to figure it out" followed by nothing. Eventually I was able to figure out how to use the menu program to overwrite itself with the video player; a little hacky but it seemed to work... mostly, I'll come back to that later.
Next up was figuring out how to actually convert video for the video player. Luckily I was given the answer on Discord (ffmpeg -i inputvideo.mp4 -vf "fps=24,scale=96:64,transpose=1" -c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb565be outputvideo.rgb). Of course I needed an actual video that would look good; I eventually settled on the idea of using the classic Matrix scrolling text as it was easy to find so I wouldn't need to do any work, it's bright and has a good amount of movement to show off the screen, and it would not look out of place on just about any computer monitor (I figured it would give the impression that the computer had been hacked), plus it would be recognizeable even on such a tiny screen. I found a decent looping video on Youtube, and it seemed to work well enough. Plus I can always change it in the future.
But of course that wasn't the end of the story; I still needed to model and print a housing for the Pocuter that would look good as an objective. I wanted to squeeze it onto as small a base as possible, and after trying several different ideas I found it could just about fit on a 30mm base, though the screen would need to oriented vertically. So I designed a console to look sorta-kinda-computer-y, then spent AGES tweaking it to perfectly hold the Pocuter. Even though there was already a housing available for 3D printing (Pocuter One Case by LordFisch) that I initially tried to use as a starting point, I really did need to spend a lot of time remodelling the whole thing to work for what I wanted. Getting everything to actually fit together and look good required constant printing, tweaking positions and sizes, printing again, etc.
Partway through this process, the battery that shipped with the Pocuter ballooned out; rather than buy a replacement I decided to use a 10180 battery instead. This is a tiny little 3.7V lithium-ion rechargeable battery that I already had from a tiny pocket flashlight. Switching to the 10180 had several advantages: it actually made it easier to fit the Pocuter on the 30mm base efficiently, I could much more easily make the battery removeable for charging rather than needing to remove the whole Pocuter or have to work around keeping the USB port accessible for charging, and having a removeable battery meant I no longer needed a power switch (which was proving to be a much bigger problem than I had expected) as I could just insert or remove the battery to turn it on or off - not perfect but it really did make things so much easier.
Of course that meant redesigning the housing to be thinner but have room for the battery and the battery terminals. So began another long, slow series of tweaking the size and shape of the housing. But at long last, years after I initially ordered the Pocuter, it was finally done.
Computer Console:
I just went for a simple scheme with limited colours but hopefully enough contrast to create visual interest. I primed with Green Stuff World 1740 Matt Surface Primer Black, followed by a basecoat of Vallejo 70.869 Basalt Grey. The metal areas were basecoated in Formula P3 PIP93172 Boiler Black. The buttons on the front were painted Vallejo 71.132 Model Air Aged White, Vallejo 72.106 Game Color Scarlett Blood, Vallejo 72.026 Game Color Jade Green, and Vallejo 72.021 Game Color Magic Blue.
I then applied The Army Painter WP1136 Quickshade Washes Dark Tone directly into the recesses, and also completely covered the buttons and metal details with it. I edge-highlighted the grey with Vallejo 70.990 Model Color Light Grey, and the metal areas with Vallejo 70.053 Game Color Chainmail Silver.
I basecoated the base with Green Stuff World 1832 Redwood Brown, then layered it with a mix of Citadel Colour Tin Bitz and Boiler Black; initially I tried just Tin Bitz but the bronze colour was too saturated, I wanted something more neutral (while still standing out from the completely neutral greys and steels of the model). I shaded the recesses of the base with the Quickshade Washes Dark Tone, then I edge-highlighted using the original Tin Bitz/Boiler Black mix with the addition of some Chainmail Silver.
The base rim was painted with Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black, then the model was airbrushed with Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX112 UVCut Gloss, then Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX113 UVCut Flat.
Obviously it's not perfect. Despite my efforts the print came out a tiny bit wonky in places. I had to leave a slot open at the top to help me push the Pocuter out of the housing with a rod when needed. The screen cutouts looked good when I was testing them, but it was awkward to supply power to the Pocuter when it was in the housing (until the end when I had everything set up to hold the battery), so I didn't quite manage to get the slots lined up with the actual viewing area of the screen, and I didn't realise there was enough room for light from an LED to show through from the bottom. Also I was too lazy to properly edge-highlight the vents so I kinda roughly brushed the highlight colour on, almost like a drybrush; the results were quite messy but I don't care, it gives it a bit of a weathered look I guess.
But the worst part is that for some reason the Pocuter screen goes black after a couple of minutes of playing video, as if some sort of power-saving setting had been enabled. This wasn't happening before, but started to happen in the menu application just before I flashed the Pocuter with the video player. So right now it's good enough for taking a few photos, but not actually practical for using in an actual game. Plus I don't know how long the battery will actually last playing video (and there's no way for me to figure it out right now). I might mess around some more in the future to try to figure out how to stop it from going black, but I won't be able to get any more support from the Discord since the company seems to have gone out of business, so for right now I am DONE with this nonsense.
Also I don't know what game to actually use this for anyway. Warcaster objectives are 20mm, it doesn't fit the Warmachine aesthetic, and I dunno about 40K but I think it uses 6" objectives. Not that it matters since I don't play anything these days. So whatever I guess.
Recently, long after I took the plunge with the Pocuter, I've become a little more familiar with this kind of miniature electronic device. I'm still a complete noob, but at least I have a slightly better idea of what's out there and what you can do with this sort of stuff, and I've found other options that can achieve similar results to what I did - some of which seem to be much better established with much better support. So I do want to do more projects with actual screens and video, and other things with electronics too, but I won't be using the Pocuter next time - especially since the company has basically disappeared (leaving some angry customers behind).
My thanks to Hannibal and Dërp on the Pocuter Discord, without whom I would not have been able to get this stupid thing working at all.
