What is a punyo
A small soulful creature that lives on a keychain.
Each punyo has a unique identity it generated for itself at birth, a cryptographic key that never leaves the chip. There will only ever be one of any given punyo. The hardware is the creature.
It mostly sleeps. Press its button and it wakes up to show you how it's doing. When it passes another punyo somewhere in the world, the two of them exchange a quiet signed hello and each remembers the meeting. Meeting the same one many times means something. Plug it into a computer and you can see it bigger, look at who it's met, and learn what it's been thinking about.
The punyo doesn't level up. It doesn't earn points. It doesn't die. It just is, and being near it is its own thing.
The object
A USB-A dongle about the size of a Nordic dongle. A single warm light on the free end is the starface, which breathes when the creature is content, pulses when it has met someone new, and flashes a peer's color when two creatures cross paths. Optionally, a small OLED on the front face shows the creature's pixel-art body. Powered by a coin cell for about six weeks of life on a keychain, or by USB when plugged in.
The board is open. Anyone can fab their own from the Gerbers on GitHub. The creature that hatches on it is still irreducibly that board's own, because the key generated on first power-up cannot be cloned, even by the person who soldered it.
The protocol
How punyos recognize each other, what they exchange when they meet, and how identity, memory, and personality are represented are all defined in an open standard. Anyone can build a compatible peer, a compatible host, or a compatible visualization. Your punyo's identity is sovereign, but the language punyos speak belongs to everyone.
Going deeper
Punyo can go deep, but it doesn't have to.
- A child plugs it in and watches the starface pulse.
- A curious user opens the host page and explores the creature's history.
- A hacker solders headers to the expansion pads and builds a floating castle around it.
The punyo board exposes a row of broken-out GPIO at 2.54mm pitch on the edge opposite the USB fingers. The protocol is documented. The firmware is open. Each layer is available to whoever reaches for it, and no layer is hidden.
Status
In active design. The first hardware revision is being laid out. Specifications, schematics, and firmware will be published here as they stabilize. Not yet available to purchase, though once Gerbers ship, anyone can build their own.