Soulscircuit's Pilet 5 and Pilet 7 Raspberry Pi-Powered Handhelds Hit the Crowdfunding Circuit

Soulscircuit has launched a crowdfunding campaign for its Pilet 5 and Pilet 7 portable Raspberry Pi 5-powered computers — and has already beaten its funding goal by an order of magnitude as people rush to get in the queue for the stylish gadgets.

"Pilet is a retro-futuristic, open-source mini-computer powered by the Raspberry Pi 5," the team says of the project and its two distinct designs. "With seven-hour battery life and fully modifiable hardware and software, it's built for tinkerers, creatives, learners, and coders who want total freedom. We've embraced the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle to minimize unnecessary complexity. No extra drivers or hardware hassles—just straightforward, 3D-printable, and fully customizable components."

Soulscircuit's project began with what was known at the time as the Consolo, a modular tablet-style 7" computer with a keyboard and trackpad that could be attached at the bottom. A few months later, the Consolo had become the Pilet 7 — and was joined by an engineering prototype of the Pilet 5, an all-in-one design switching to a smaller 5" display in order to make room for a dedicated keyboard, trackball, joystick-like "navigational switch," four game buttons, and scroll wheel.

In both cases, the Pilet handhelds are powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer — chosen over the more compact Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 computer-on-module, Soulscircuit explains, for reasons of design complexity — with a 16Ah battery pack good for around seven hours of active use. Both designs are built to be modular, with a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) module already designed and a cellular modem module in the works — while the detachable keyboard of the Pilet 7 is a work-in-progress that Soulscircuit notes will launch if the campaign hits a million Canadian dollars.

In addition to selling kits to build a Pilet, Stockall has promised that it will be open hardware —pledging to release schematics, KiCad project files, and CAD/STEP/STL files for all components under the Strongly Reciprocal variant of the CERN Open Hardware License 2. "The source code will be released when the first units of Pilet are shipped," Soulscircuit adds. "It will initially be available to testers and then later to the general public."

The Pilet campaign is live on Kickstarter, with pricing starting at CA$289 (around $200) for a Pilet 7 kit or CA$309 (around $215) for the Pilet 5, plus shipping; all kits require batteries, available for an additional CA$60 (around $42) as an add-on, and the buyer's choice of Raspberry Pi 5 to build. Devices are expected to ship in July this year, though the team readily admits that the hardware is still under development.