an ambient Anki companion
hako lives on your desk and shows your daily Anki progress on a 64×64 LED matrix. No notifications, no dopamine loop — just a quiet presence that knows what's due.
第一弾 First batch · Summer 2026 · ~25 units
How many cards are due. How many you've done. Time remaining. One number, one color, no notification dread.
A small chibi mood-shifts with your workload. Behind on reviews, it looks worried. Caught up, it rests easy. No streaks, no shame.
A rotating window into your newest additions, random samples, or anything tagged. Quiet revision while you work on other things.
A heatmap of your past reviews. Retention windows. Card health. Enough context to feel your progress without obsessing over it.
手作り
Each case is cut from baltic birch plywood and assembled in my workshop. Visible joinery. Soft natural finish. No glossy polish — just the wood.
電子
A Raspberry Pi Zero W drives a 64×64 RGB LED matrix. Inside, the same software that runs the desktop preview — built and refined over months with the testing community.
少量
First batch is ~25 units. I'd rather make 25 well than 250 hastily. If you miss this batch, the next is planned for late 2026.
I'm a Japanese learner and YouTuber who's spent the last few years documenting AJATT-style immersion at @jareddesu. hako started because my desk needed something quieter than a phone and more present than a tab.
It's a solo project. Every unit will be assembled, tested, and shipped by me. If you have a question, you'll hear back from me directly.
hako wouldn't exist in its current form without the testers in the Discord who ran builds for months, broke things in interesting ways, and pushed me toward better choices.
@MysticaJP
@alihene222
@Seigyo
@nwsell
第一弾
About 25 units. Handmade. Then a few months of quiet before batch two. Drop your email and I'll send one note when pre-orders open — not before, not after.
Tap any question to read the answer.
It sits on your desk and shows your Anki progress on a 64×64 LED matrix. Six screens you can switch between — today's queue, card health, a six-week heatmap, a study-pet chibi, recent or random card review, and retention percentages. It's ambient, not interactive: there's no touchscreen, no notifications, no app to open.
Via the free AnkiConnect addon. hako talks to your local Anki Desktop over Wi-Fi. As long as Anki is open on your computer, hako stays in sync. The device polls roughly every 30 seconds — fast enough to feel live, slow enough to never interrupt.
The first-batch price will be announced closer to launch. It will reflect the actual cost of small-batch handmade hardware, not the cheapest possible mass-produced version.
Yes. The desktop preview app runs on Mac and Windows and shows exactly what the physical device shows. If you join the Discord, you can try the beta now and shape what ships in summer 2026.
Yes. It works with any Anki deck. The bundled font has full Latin and Japanese kana/kanji coverage, plus optional Unifont for wider script support. Korean, Mandarin, Cyrillic, and most European languages render correctly.
Plan is yes, late 2026 onward — but each batch is small by design. If you miss one, you'll be able to join a waitlist for the next.