Why I’m building Niblet

I kept opening my phone to learn one small thing. Is the train late? Is it going to rain? What time does the match start? The answer took a second. Getting to it usually took longer, and I would often leave with three other things in my head.

That felt like a design mistake. A useful answer should be able to sit quietly in a room. It should change when the answer changes, and then stop.

A screen that knows its place

Niblet One is a 64 × 32 display in a small walnut frame. You choose the weather, trains, scores, clocks, markets, art, or custom apps you care about. The display rotates through them and keeps the last good rotation available when the internet drops.

The important part is not that the screen can show a lot. It is that it can show enough. It belongs on a desk or wall, not in your hand.

Learning without pretending we invented everything

People around Tidbyt, Tronbyt, Pixlet, and the wider ambient-display community proved that a tiny screen could support a surprisingly rich set of apps. We learned from that work, and we will preserve licences, attribution, and upstream history where it applies.

But Niblet is not a relabelled server or firmware image. We are independently building the cloud, firmware, dashboard, device contracts, and hardware we want to maintain. Compatibility lets good ideas travel. Independent ownership lets us decide where they go next.

Free software needs an actual plan

I want the standard cloud service, companion app, and firmware updates to remain free for Niblet One owners. That promise only means something if the system is inexpensive to operate and the display still has a path forward if the company does not.

So we are building around shared rendering, small cached assets, explicit device contracts, local Wi-Fi setup, and offline playback. Efficiency is part of the product. Continuity is too.

Buy the object once. Let the useful part keep working.

Why privately owned matters to me

Niblet is a product of Comma Collective Pvt. Ltd., a privately owned company in Singapore. It is still founder-led, so the responsibility is personal. There is no committee to hide a bad decision behind. If the product becomes noisy, wasteful, or needlessly locked down, that is on me to fix.

I built FuturePost for a similar reason. It is a free place to write a letter to your future self. It does one small thing and leaves the meaning to the person using it. Niblet is a more complicated object, but I want it to keep the same restraint.

I do not know every app people will build or every place the display will end up. That is part of the fun. I do know the standard I want us to keep: make the hardware carefully, keep the system understandable, and do not make people regret trusting either one.

Ayush