The last photos and videos from Kamoji's first development phase are dated May 15, 2024. After that, the project went quiet for nineteen months — not abandoned, but paused while we rethought how we were actually building it.
Every significant feature decision in Kamoji has a reason behind it, and a few of them are the opposite of what you'd expect from a car gadget in 2026. Here's why they're built the way they are.
By March 2026, Kamoji's inner structural frame was more or less settled. The next problem was one nobody on the team had any experience with at all: industrial design.
Late April 2026 was the sprint to launch: colorways settled, a manufacturing run underway, and a first real look at what it takes to turn a finished design into a physical product at scale.
Before a single line of firmware was written, we had a decade of building our own smart home and smart office automation at Originally US behind us — custom hardware, our own firmware, none of it off the shelf. Kamoji is where that experience pointed next: an in-car companion that could feel the road and react to it.
The first task wasn't building a prototype. It was picking a screen.
By November 2023, the project had a name on the PCB silkscreen: "Kamoji prototype v1 p0", crafted by Originally US. What followed was ten PCB revisions, one deliberately reversed decision, and a set of component choices aimed less at us and more at whoever wants to build on this board after we're done with it.
There is a well-known way to find out how smoothly someone drives, and it costs about as much as a cup of water.
Put a full, open cup somewhere in the car. Drive. If you arrive with the cup still full, you drove smoothly. If you arrive wearing it, you didn't.
It sounds like a party trick. It's actually a fairly precise instrument, and it's the idea behind Takumi's Cup Challenge in Kamoji.