If you were a Pokémon-obsessed kid in the '90s, there's a good possibility that one of your biggest dreams growing up was to have your very own working Pokédex.
Despite being a work of fiction, the device always looked so cool whenever it appeared in the anime, essentially acting as a high-tech encyclopedia that could identify whatever Pokémon you could throw at it. For many, though, the closest they ever came to owning was the Tiger Electronics toy, released in the late '90s, which covered only the first 150 Pokémon and was inevitably much less high-tech than the version shown off on the TV show and in the films.
However, as Retro Dodo recently spotted, two online creators have since decided to take matters into their own hands to build a more "anime accurate" version, which puts the '90s version to shame.
The incredible project is the work of the YouTube modder Mr. Volt, in collaboration with Big Rig Creates, with the former handling the hardware while the latter focuses on the software design.
The main body of the device is built using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, a 2.8-inch LCD screen (640 x 240), and a camera, which is used to identify the Pokémon in question. The side case, meanwhile, features a Raspberry Pi Pico and white OLEDs for the side case to display text entries for individual Pokémon taken from PokémonDB, which can be read aloud by a robot voice, similar to in the show.
In a recent video, entitled "I made a real working pokedex," Mr. Volt showed off the creation and went over the process of how the pair brought it to life. In this, he explained that it was actually pretty tricky to design, as we don’t exactly have a perfect idea of how the Pokédex actually works, with several buttons on its interface going unused in the show.
"You might think that across dozens of episodes, we see all the features of the Pokédex," Mr. Volt said in the video. "But it turns out animating hands [and fictional GUIs] is hard & expensive. So 99% of the time, the only thing the Pokédex does is ding [and] show a plain picture of a Pokémon."
This meant there was some interpretation that needed to be performed. One example of this is the rounded yellow rectangle beneath the main screen, which the creator thought would be a good place to put an ESP32 power display, showing the remaining battery life, Wi-Fi connection, volume, and the current database it is pulling from.
In case you're wondering how the recognition actually works, you might be surprised to hear it doesn't use GenAI models, like OpenAI, DeepSeek, pixlab, and Gemini, with Big Rig Creates stating in a comment under his video, "I Programmed the World's Smartest Pokédex", that the pair wanted to move away from "systems that steal". Instead, it uses Google's reverse image search, with some pretty spectacular results, being able to identify Pokémon from merchandise and even "bad" Pokémon art.
What do you think? Would something like this have blown your mind growing up?