Skip to content

2026

Dilder Full Board Rev 1 — One Green Rectangle to Rule Them All

After two months of breadboards, flying wires, hot-glued battery clips, and a stack of off-the-shelf modules taped to the inside of a 3D-printed case, the Dilder is finally a single board. One PCB. One green rectangle the size of a chocolate bar. Everything the octopus needs to live, lives on it.

This is a huge milestone, so this post is the friendly tour — what got built, what got learned, and why the silkscreen says "The Dildafication Begins" on the front.

Dilders That Find Each Other, Hide Treasures, and Grow a Community

Today's design session went deep on a question that's been simmering since the peer discovery research: what actually happens when two Dilders meet? The answer turned into a three-layer system — proximity encounters with unique audio signatures, riddle-based geocaching challenges with physical electronic prizes, and a collectible ecosystem that naturally markets the device to new people.

How to Stop Drowning in FreeCAD Files (and a Tool to Help)

After two weeks of daily CAD iterations, I had 13 FCStd files with names like "Dilder_Rev2_Mk2Full parts so far with joystick model with battery assembly even closer joystick and pit refined and cradle curvature fixed pcbjoystick anchor.FCStd". I couldn't tell which one I'd actually printed, what changed between versions, or which iteration had that one tweak that worked really well three days ago.

Sound familiar? Here's how I fixed it.

Design Tracker v2.0 — From CLI to Full GUI with Print Packages

The Design Tracker started as a simple CLI menu for taking snapshots and logging prints. After a few weeks of daily use, the friction was clear: switching between terminal commands to check render images, flipping to a file manager to find the right 3MF, and trying to remember which camera photo went with which print. So I rebuilt it as a full Tkinter GUI with six tabs, a render gallery, camera photo attachment, and a package system that bundles everything together.

Kicking Off the Dilder Full Board — One PCB to Carry Everything

For two months Dilder has been a constellation of off-the-shelf modules wired together on a breadboard: a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a Waveshare e-paper HAT, a TP4056 charger module, a GY-6500 IMU breakout, two AAA cells, a 20 mm piezo, a 62×36 mm solar panel, and the hand-routed joystick PCB I sent to JLCPCB last month. The 3D-printed case has been growing pockets and rails for each new piece. The next step is the obvious one: collapse it all onto a single PCB.

This post is the kickoff for that work.