While DIY modular devices are no longer fashionable, they have had varying degrees of success over time. Some products, like AIAIAI’s TMA-2 headphones, were successful, while others, like the Blocks smartwatch and Google’s modular phone, failed. However, the failure of these systems to design and ship does not stop others from creating new modular devices. Pockit is a tiny modular system that can be turned into several gadgets, which may have created a must-have for its creator Anil Reddy. It appears to be incredibly cool, at the very least.

Pockit Creates 3D-Printed Blocks

Pockit can be compared to an electronic Lego package. Users can “snap” small SLA 3D-printed blocks on top of a magnetized baseboard the size of a credit card to create clocks, Bitcoin tickers, thermostats, cameras, automatic watering systems for indoor plants, and almost anything else, including a plug-and-play Linux computer with a Raspberry Pi.

Some blocks have elevated icons on top of them to signify that they are intended for specific use cases. A teeny, tiny circuit board and a coin-sized battery are among the blocks, which can be used in a range of devices such as garage door openers, watches, and motherboards. Some blocks may be used as controllers or keyboards. To make a Pockit module, you don’t need to be a coding wizard.

To put it another way, Pockit can program itself by recognizing which blocks are connected and how they are arranged on the board. Pockit recognizes that when you attach an LED block to a button block, you want the button block to turn the LED on and off. Reddy says that this auto-adaptive behavior makes the creation of more complicated gadgets like a smart thermostat or a gardening controller easier because the modular device already knows what blocks go together.

Reddy’s Career

Reddy started his career as an embedded engineer, building many projects from the ground up, using precise and time-consuming methods. Many people have great gadget ideas, even if they just want to make one for themselves, but soldering and coding are difficult to pick up on their own. Reddy wanted to make it easier for electronic DIYers to create gadgets with just their imagination as a limit.

A team of researchers has made a stunning discovery in underground waters in southern India. They found living members of a family of eel-like fish, which is named dragon snakeheads. These primitive fish are considered a “living fossil” because they are believed to have diverged from their relatives some hundred million years ago.

The Dragon Snakehead Joins a New Family of Fish

In taxonomy, the family is the category placed above genus and species, and discovering a new one is not very common. Usually, taxonomic families are large and diverse, but the new fish family includes only two species. The first one is named the Gollum snakehead, after the famous Lord of the Rings character, and the dragon snakehead is now the second member of this family.

The study leader Ralf Britz shared that he believes this might be the most exciting discovery in the fish world for the last decade. These long-bodied fish usually dwell in aquifers of porous rock, which explains why they are rarely seen. They would only come to the surface after heavy-rain floods.

The fish live in the Western Ghats of southern India, which is known as a biodiversity hot spot. In the aquifers there, scientists have discovered ten new species of subterranean fish. However, the water there is used for around six million wells, and this lowers the water table, putting some of the obscure species that call it home in peril.

Enigmatic Fish Species

Back in 2018, researcher and study co-author Rajeev Raghavan saw a photo of an odd fish that was retrieved from a backyard well. He and Britz had no idea what the species, genus, and family of the fish were and described it as a new species and genus – Aenigmachanna Gollum or the Gollum snakehead. During a similar and more recent discovery, Britz and his colleagues thought they found the same fish in another well. After performing further research on their genetics and anatomy, they found they belong in a whole new family.

The new dragon snakeheads exhibit a series of primitive characteristics, and these unique traits include fewer vertebrae with ribs, a shortened swim bladder, and a lack of a suprabranchial organ. These features show that the dragon snakeheads are not as specialized as regular snakeheads and can really be called “living fossils.” Genetic analysis showed that dragon snakeheads diverged from their nearest relatives over 120 million years ago when Africa and India were still the same landmass.