Mecha Comet – Open Modular Linux Handheld Computer

https://mecha.so/comet

by Realman78 • 6 months ago

270 98 6 months ago

mecha.so

WillAdams• 6 months ago

This project is currently seeking funds (and is funded) on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...

(and the super early bird rewards are all gone)

I might be interested if I weren't still waiting on the Soulcircuit Pilet to ship....

solomonb3• 6 months ago

Stumbled across this thing a while back and thought it looked really cool but I have never been able to come up with an idea for how I would use it so I haven't pledged.

I want to want it but I fear it would just sit on my desk. Does anyone have cool ideas for uses?

Fnoord6• 6 months ago

On the bottom of the website, several use cases are mentioned. It is a fairly robust list of examples.

Anything with USB-A is neat with this type of device. For example, a LimeSDR USB would work (even a uSDR for M.2, though I'd wait for the successor).

For Kali, I sport a GPD Pocket 2, and that works well, but I'm in the process of switching that to my Hackberry Pi CM5.

Still, I bought that end of last summer. I honestly would not buy any computer right now. The RAM prices are simply insane.

c0wb0yc0d3r• 6 months ago

It’s not exactly cool but mobile media server and tool box. Knowing I have tools I can trust in my pocket is nice. Being able to travel and watch my shows without setting up a vpn is double nice.

mikestorrent• 6 months ago

I made a really cool cyberdeck. It sits on my desk.

solomonb3• 6 months ago

Lol, Cyberdeck aka high effort paper weight.

There are so many cool vaguely scifi tech projects one could build these days but almost none of them have actual utility. : (

pkphilip2• 6 months ago

I kinda wish it could be used like a smart phone with a GSM module.

bsimpson5• 6 months ago

You can buy attachments in step 2 of the checkout. They mention having cellular as an option on the description:

LTE or 5G Modems
Add mobile data and calling support to your Comet. Bring your own modem and antenna or use our standard LTE upgrade kit.

jibbers• 6 months ago

I’d love to see a click wheel attachment for input, then it could become a neo-iPod.

fuzzythinker• 6 months ago

Or just a touch sensing pad attachment that serves different purpose based on the app.

bsimpson5• 6 months ago

Same.

Looks rad, but I have a Legion Go which I can play any game I want and tinker on. This seems like it would be a worse version of that, but also not a useful phone replacement.

Layogtima7• 6 months ago

Added this y'day to make it easier to understand use-cases,

https://mecha.so/comet#use-cases

I'll add pictures/videos of the examples we've internally tested in a bit!

solomonb3• 6 months ago

Thank you! I genuinely think its an awesome project and will probably end up supporting.

I didn't realize I could potentially use it as a highly hackable phone. Whats the battery life like?

EDIT: I just went ahead and pledged my support. I wanna see you guys succeed.

metalman• 6 months ago

looks like it would be great for making calls, texting, and emails, taking pictures, and looking at web sites, listening to music, and watching video, when not creating the software for a lunar lander.

tcherasaro3• 6 months ago

I am planning to build something similar as a hobby project except my idea is that Claude Code runs everything on the device for you.

andsoitis• 6 months ago

will it have a screen?

tcherasaro3• 6 months ago

Yes, I have 2 candidates so far: - A 7-inch OLED (that's 1920 by 1080) - A much cheaper but still nice IPS display. Again, 7-inch I'm not sure where I'm going with this yet, but if other people want one, I want to have some flexibility in the specs and pricing for people to select from.

I've been meaning to make a post about this on X for some time, so I went ahead and did it tonight. If you want to head over there and see the renders of what I'm thinking: https://x.com/TroyCherasaro/status/2016767340457980403

CrimsonCape• 6 months ago

Dude it would be so great to have a little device and you text it SMS messages as prompts. Then it just sits there and thinks away probably getting really hot lol.

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 months ago

So... what's the OS situation? From a glance at https://github.com/mecha-org/linux -> https://github.com/mecha-org/linux/commits/imx/lf-6.12.20/ it looks like they're starting from a 6mo-old kernel (6.12.20 vs current LTS 6.12.67 and current stable 6.18.7). Is there any reason to expect upstreaming or even just consistent updates, or is this yet another device that will ship with an old-ish kernel and never get updated again?

Fnoord6• 6 months ago

This is why I went with a Hackberry Pi CM5 [1]. I insert the CM5 I want to, and there's that.

It comes with a good, proven BB keyboard. No option for GPIO pins or gamepad module, but I don't need such anyway. Instead, what I have in it is a USB hub which fits nicely in the side.

Unfortunately, the RPi CM I had lying around were CM4 with eMMC or CM5 w/o WiFi/BT. So I bought a new CM5, with 16 GB RAM. That was end of last summer. I'm not sure I'd bother now, given the RAM prices which surely affected CM5 prices. Actually, I should probably sell those for profit, since they're not doing anything.

[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5

anonzzzies• 6 months ago

Yep, I use these too; they are nice and fun to use imho. It's limitations keep me focused.

backscratches2• 6 months ago

For what its worth the kickstarter page states: > Our software support will be officially available till 7 years, our SOC is supported till 2036. Community support could last even longer.

LeonM• 6 months ago

I'd take that claim by Mecha with a huge grain of salt.

How are they going to fund 7 years of support for a device that sells maybe a few thousand units? How are they going to guarantee they will still be around, and interested in maintaining the device drivers in 2033?

The Linux kernel project will remove the device drivers from the mainline kernel if they are no longer actively maintained and in use. So it is very likely that the support will be dropped from the mainline kernel way before 2033, as there probably won't be any users of this device remaining, and the original developers long gone.

Call me negative, but I expect that this company wil just vanish after some time. The team will just move on, maybe even start again under a different name, but there will be nobody to be held responsible for promises and claims they made in the past.

lloydatkinson• 6 months ago

You’re probably right. Seems these appear every couple of years with much hype and then the business behind them conveniently goes out of business.

I learned my lesson with this niche market after CHIP: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Exploring-the...

These clowns didn’t even tell anyone they went out of business, it took someone going to their listed address in person who found the office had been completely gutted to get ready for the next tenant.

shoaibmerchant8• 6 months ago

Creator here, thanks for highlighting this.

We are currently following the NXP IMX downstream kernel, that is why you can check the 'imx-' prefix on our branch, their releases follow 6 months after the LTS release. NXP IMX 6.18 will release roughly by end of March, when it does you will see us updating to 6.18 as well. By the time we ship, we mostly likely will be shipping 6.18.

Now we do intend to upstream, we've even got mainline u-boot to start working with the device albeit the display. We were waiting for the hardware configuration to be stabilized before we submit the device trees and start actively working on mainline support. It won't happen overnight but you will see our documentation clearly defining how far we are from the mainline. Also to add here, compared to other SOCs, NXP already has very good mainline support.

leoedin• 6 months ago

Thanks for this. When I first saw this I was expecting to find it was a dead-end Chinese SoM with an ancient kernel - so the fact it's an iMX (which has great support from NXP) is great.

I had a poke around the u-boot and linux repos they share, and it looks like the changes from mainline are pretty minimal - mostly related to device trees and configuration. That's to be expected for any custom board.

Obviously if the company died before this stuff was mainlined, then someone would need to maintain it. But from what I've seen everything you'd need is out there already.

deadbabe2• 6 months ago

Small gimmicky computers seem to attract so much attention and people who can’t help themselves but buy it, play with it for a while, then toss it into a drawer and never use it again.

theothertimcook• 6 months ago

I feel personally attacked!...

You are right though, ive loved tinkering especially some if the cool linux based handhelds but i always come back to mobile/tablet because my limiting resource is time and android/ios kinda just works.

nik282000• 6 months ago

Took 12hrs, but I got my PocketChip updated to Debian Bookworm recently.

AdeptusAquinas• 6 months ago

Too late backed it at maximum tier all extensions....

No idea what I'm going to use it for, possibly as a mobile Kali setup or something

deadbabe2• 6 months ago

Or at least a cool paperweight

t-3• 6 months ago

A powerful-enough pocket computer that can run a "real" OS with good input is the holy grail. Specialized types (gaming platforms mostly) seem to be converging on a few specific designs, but full general-purpose computers with keyboards etc still haven't really produced a "good enough" model. I used my GPD Win 2 daily when I was traveling often and frequently found myself in situations where it wasn't convenient to carry or use a full laptop due to weight/size, and even that thumb keyboard is 10000x better than a touchscreen keyboard in termux etc. There's definitely a niche to be served by either a better design or reimagining of the interface.

pipeline_peak• 6 months ago

So it’s a Raspberry Pi except now I can type Unix commands with my thumbs on a blackberry keyboard……ouch.

tcherasaro3• 6 months ago

LOL exactly! That's why I want to build something like this: https://x.com/TroyCherasaro/status/2016767340457980403

Layogtima7• 6 months ago

Same!

My goal is to use it to control this Quad-legged walker, possibly ROS.

matricaria• 6 months ago

This reminds me of Phonebloks from 13 years ago.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks

jayd16• 6 months ago

Or Project Ara

Or Moto Z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_Z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara

d--b2• 6 months ago

Or Pockit

https://pockit.ai/

Nursie• 6 months ago

I remember that!

Reminds me also of Motorola's attempt to have a hardware-expansible phone a few years ago, the Moto Z range and Moto Mods.

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/gadgets-computers-software/25...

Obviously this is much more open than the proprietary moto-z stuff.

Fnoord6• 6 months ago

Jolla's TOH (The Other Half) which is back in their latest reincarnation [1].

I have to say though: I like the communication of the Mecha Comet team here (and the UI). I wish them the best.

[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/the-other-half-returns-commun...

bsimpson5• 6 months ago

Website's a bit weird. The app icons highlight when you hover over them, but don't seem to do anything.

They've got a grab-bag of unrelated Linux etc. org icons - Nix, Debian, postmarketOS, Node, Kubernetes… You could argue that someone _could_ run Nix or Node on it, but Debian is just nerdbait. It's not relevant to the product they're selling, unless you're gonna wipe the disk and support it yourself.

backscratches2• 6 months ago

The OS for it was entirely based on Debian stable. They recently switched to a fedora build. I think the whole idea is you can put any OS on it you want!

Layogtima7• 6 months ago

Ah, sorry, that's on me; some of the links are still not active. (It's been a mad week!)

Could you tell me which section it was? I'll fix it

bsimpson5• 6 months ago

#software

bxparks• 6 months ago

Any chance you can prevent the left hand navigation floating widget of 10 bubbles (no idea what it's called) from rendering on top of the actual content? It obscures the text that I want to read, very irritating. [Edit: I see, it works at 100%. But my default zoom is 110% or 120%. Zooming seems to break your layout.]

rudderdev• 6 months ago

Open Hardware + Open Software is good enough for me to hit the buy button. Seems like a good toy, I hope I don't lose interest within a month of buying.

dmos62• 6 months ago

This makes me feel good. Aching for a portable computing future where daily driver needs can be fully met via open tech.

losthobbies• 6 months ago

I backed this on Kickstarter and have been following for a while. I am after a gadget to tinker with but still on the fence a little bit. It's about 300€ all in so I will see.

sureglymop• 6 months ago

It's really cool but I just wish the display had a touchscreen.

stevefan1999• 6 months ago

I wish we can have the low power Intel or AMD chip rather than ARM :( the distro fragmentation in ARM and my distaste for uboot makes me hard to press the buy button.

rgun• 6 months ago

Can you please elaborate on what kind of problems you have faced with uboot?

Schlagbohrer• 6 months ago

Strange to have this posted on Kickstarter and not on Crowdsupply or another open source hardware crowdfunding platform. But I suppose Kickstarter does have more reach.

watusername• 6 months ago

Buyers beware: 4-core A53 is genuinely unusable (original Pinebook/PinePhone specs), A55 is better but I still wouldn’t recommend buying. You may expect performance similar to 15+ years old desktops.

fsflover2• 6 months ago

User of Librem 5 phone with this CPU here. It works fine as a daily driver. Firefox with Noscript works fine in desktop mode. See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

pengaru• 6 months ago

Off-topic but curious if you experience this issue my Librem5 exhibits - I use my L5 mostly just to play mp3s. Regardless of being powered over usb-c or running on battery, it frequently has audio blips reminiscent of some old laptops briefly going in and out of deeper sleep states long enough for an audio blip.

Have you noticed something similar? do you listen to music on your L5?

Edit: I should also mention it does this regardless of audio out the internal DAC+3.5mm TRS, or over a USB MBox attached to a dock. It seems to be something quite low-level disabling interrupts for too long, something like that.

jagged-chisel• 6 months ago

And what’s wrong with a 15+yo desktop? Light OS, get stuff done. Are we trying to run a Switch emulator on this thing?

aeve890• 6 months ago

First time I heard about this project what's wrong with the CPU? I mean what makes it unusable?

Narishma• 6 months ago

It's only unusable if you try running bloated modern apps on it.

shoaibmerchant8• 6 months ago

Creator here,

For the IMX8MP - The pinephone was 1.2 GHz, this is 1.8 GHz on all four cores. As far as geekbench goes it hits between the Pi 3 and Pi 4, faster EMMC and LPDDR4 gives it a bigger boost compared to the Pi 3. The PCIe 3.0 is also there. Yes it is not equivalent to a desktop use, but for a phone sized usecases, the processor has not been a bottle neck. The advantage you get is a battery life that goes 7 hours on idle with the display on, and on sleep it can go upto 8D and wake up instantly.

The IMX95 is 6x A55 at 1.8GHz but you can check the geekbench below, it matches the single core performance of Pi 4 and beats it at multi-core performance while offering LPDDR5. But at the same time, is only 15% more power hungry than the 8MP.

So the way we see it -

Pi 3 < Comet 8MP < Pi 4 < Comet 95 < Pi 5

Ref: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/15259040?baseli...

Edit: The IMX95 is 6-cores A55 and not 4-cores

d--b2• 6 months ago

I'll buy it when I see it working as a phone. Looks like phone support is an option here, but after I bought the pinePhone, I am wary it's not going to work.

schromp• 6 months ago

so i see a nix logo on the website...

interesting would be if i can put nixos onto it but keep using their launcher...

Realman784• 6 months ago

I’m planning to build something like this over the next few months. Think Nintendo 3DS-sized, but as a tiny laptop. The goal is extreme portability while still being able to program on it reasonably well.

I travel a lot and manage servers, so I’ve been wanting a dedicated “SSH machine” that I can always carry with me. With how good AI tooling has gotten, doing real work on a tiny device is suddenly very viable. The other day I SSH’d into a box from my phone while I was at the gym and just told Claude Code to fix a Kubernetes manifest issue. It was fixed and deployed in under two minutes.

I mentioned this idea at work and a few coworkers immediately said they’d buy one if it existed. Curious what others think.

tpah8• 6 months ago

I’ve been looking at some tiny laptops. The GPD Micro PC2 is one of my favorites so you can take inspiration from it.

Realman784• 6 months ago

I saw that. Cool, but very expensive. It has a bunch of features that jack up the price but are not worth it for me.

RALaBarge• 6 months ago

I was doing the same recently and came to the conclusion that i would just get a new small macbook when needed. If I was worried about losing it or damage, I also got a netbook for 20 bucks on eBay the other day and installed Debian on it and as a thin client is more than you need, performance wise.

Fnoord6• 6 months ago

I own a GPD Pocket 2. Terrible support from this company. First of all, my screen had an issue (immediately apparent on first boot) and they refused to solve it. So if you buy such from outside of Europe, buy from Amazon instead of directly, not KS/IGG.

Second, their BIOS is a beta version of a commerciel BIOS, lol. As such, it doesn't have Intel SGX enabled.

That said, it served me as cyberdeck before cyberdecks were all the rage, and before they were easy and cheap to build. It stems from a time when ARM64 wasn't still as powerful as the current (approx) decade. Of course the machine has some downsides for 2026 standards. 2x USB-A, 1x USB-C, for example. I'd rather have 2x USB-C, since you use one for power. I also modded the device for better thermals, and have replaced the battery. The machine sits behind 8 philips screws.

One cool thing the GPD Pocket 3 and GPD Pocket 4 have, is similar to what Framework has: a modular port, where you can keep the form factor but gain KVM, RS232, etc.

The base variant of the Mecha Comet comes with very little storage and RAM:

This is the base variant with 2GB RAM and 64GB Storage.

And a relatively slow i.MX8. If you want to go with the quicker i.MX95 you're better off with:

This is the base variant with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage.

But that one is 50 EUR more, and still comes with only 64 GB storage and 4 GB RAM. My GPD Pocket 2 in 2018 came with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage (which isn't much nowadays).

As for the screen in that machine, compare:

6th generation Corning Gorilla Glass, AF anti-fingerprint coating, 10-point touch, 500 nits brightness

with

3.92" AMOLED Display (550 nits), Capacitive Touch

The screen of this machine, while small (4") seems quite decent.

And if you want to emulate any Android apps which are ARM (which you could with Waydroid, if you have pref. 8 GB RAM on your machine), then you better run ARM. You can emulate x86-64 on ARM with decent performance (tried recently with Qemu on a RPi 4, and my daily driver is a MBP M1 variant) but the other way around is not feasible.

IgorPartola• 6 months ago

My first and last Android phone was the Motorola Atrix, which at the time was supposed to be quite good. One of its benefits was the idea that you could pop it into a laptop type dock and have it act as a terminal of sorts.

You can also slap a keyboard onto an existing phone. I have tried vibe coding via ssh from my iPhone and honestly it’s not terrible at all. Instead of doom scrolling I can build things.

dpoloncsak• 6 months ago

I've been wanting to build something similar, but can't shake the feeling I'd just stick with the SSH client on my phone.

Any reason really to have a separate device for this?

bdcravens• 6 months ago

Any screenshots or videos of it running? All I'm seeing are renders. As someone who has been burned by crowdfunded "engineering" (where something seems good on paper, and then there's a year or two of posts about all the challenges that were "unforeseen" before a heartfelt postmortem) I feel like that's a requirement.

codybontecou• 6 months ago

They showcased it at CES 2025 and it looks like here's a hands on review of it at that state - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oQ0l2ghmcc

shoaibmerchant8• 6 months ago

Creator here,

There are a bunch of them added to the Kickstarter page, check them out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...

We are updating them on Kickstarter

Layogtima7• 6 months ago

Added a bunch to Overview and Use Cases;

https://mecha.so/comet#hardware

https://mecha.so/comet#use-cases

Bunch more are incoming as do more tests, will add them in soon

9999000009994• 6 months ago

If this thing had a 5G modem it would be the perfect device .

A phone where I can install applications without asking Google for permission.

RegW• 6 months ago

I'm a bit confused about if it does calls. It doesn't mention it for most of the page, but then says:

DIY Phone
Use the Comet and the Linux stack for calling*, messaging and mobile data as an alternate to your walled and closed smartphone. Contribute to the Linux ecosystem for mobiles.

So I guess this means it can, but it's not supported and you need to contribute the software. So perhaps it has the hardware, and perhaps it might work.

9999000009994• 6 months ago

Without any mention of 5G capability, I'm forced to assume this doesn't have it.

Or course you can attach a USB stick with a 5G modem in it. To be fair, this makes things really difficult. Not all modems support all bands. Different countries use different 5g bands, etc

Mecha Comet – Open Modular Linux Handheld Computer

Related Stories