A Nothing Dial for creatives? Introducing: Revolute

T_Zhong

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed and taken part in the Nothing community achieve some incredible things—from designing backplates for CMF phones, to launching the Phone (2a) Community Edition, which recently won a Golden iF Design Award, to the mind-blowing 700+ submissions for the upcoming Phone (3a).

There’s clearly something remarkable happening here: a community of designers, engineers, and creative minds pushing boundaries and bringing fresh ideas to tech. We’re incredibly inspired by this energy, and today, we want to share something we’ve been quietly working on in our free time throughout the past 2-3 years of high school.

Meet Revolute

Revolute is a compact, wireless smart dial designed to reimagine creative workflows across any Bluetooth enabled device: iPad/tablets, PC/laptops, or even smartphones.

It’s a tool designed and engineered for creatives like you.
It lets you fine-tune settings, scrub through timelines, and adjust parameters—really anything you can think of, all with a twist of a dial.

But it’s not just about functionality—it’s about portability and expression. Smaller than a coin and charged via a wireless RevoPod case, it’s designed to live in your pocket and anywhere you take it—not be tied to your desk. It also comes with a keycap mount to be used on mechanical keyboards and a flat magnetic base mount that can be used on any flat surface or even stuck to your laptop.

Here’s a full breakdown + video demo of the Revolute:

edit: here’s our new video on the Revolute dial where we talk about the development process of it:

Why We’re Sharing It Here

We’re not launching a product. We’re not selling anything.

(we’re not done developing yet, we are at finalizing stage)

We’re sharing Revolute with this community because it’s something we built for people like you—the creative minds who made Nothing what it is today.

We believe Revolute could be something much more if it lived within Nothing’s ecosystem: designed and refined by the same brand that puts creativity, design, and expression at the center of its identity.

Before we try to pitch this idea to the Nothing team, we want to hear your honest thoughts.

Would you use something like this?
What could make it better?
How do you think you would mod or redesign it to make it even more interesting to use?
Do you see this as a product that could belong in the Nothing lineup?

You Matter in This

If you’ve made it this far, we have a favor to ask:

Please drop a comment below with your thoughts, and if you’re comfortable, let us know what you do: are you a designer? engineer? filmmaker? artist? It would be interesting to see all the kinds of professionals in this creative community and would really help us as we finalize our pitch to the Nothing team.

Thank you for being part of the community, let’s build something to make tech fun—together.

We have much more to share in the future so please watch out for more content and designs! And if you are interested to learn more or want to take part in the project for fun please feel free to DM us!

Here is the Onshape document with the 3D CAD models of the Revolute available for everyone to access and modify, feel free to share your designs and ideas in the discussion:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/de00d6387f9e5dcc654c56fe/w/2973ca0d7b7a281f65f86b7e/e/ec567b2785f88f4d45cd2220?renderMode=0&uiState=684eef9837e5aa626b99f8a1

T Zhong & Tongtong Wang

Aleks Levet

T_Zhong impressive!

CaptainOatmeal

As a fellow student designer, i’d be thrilled to help in any way I can. I do product and hardware design in Onshape. Big fan of the product too.

T_Zhong

CaptainOatmeal yea you know what that’d be awesome, now im thinking if we could have a public onshape project where everyone could make their own design based on our current standard design. I’ll see what we can cook up in a bit

WizaSichiweza

Exactly it will be so amazing

CaptainOatmeal

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/c3598e1fff101de188d795b5/w/48d6e5a6cb498f83f74dacd7/e/7f2eae464868bf53dbb571f0?renderMode=0&uiState=684c445295dea11eb3ce6f07

Can you import it into here?

T_Zhong

CaptainOatmeal yea sry hold up I gotta go sleep I’ll check it out first thing tmr when I wake up

Tong_tong

CaptainOatmeal Hi CaptainOatmeal, our project files are currently all on Fusion360. Although we are in the process of migrating to Onshape, it might still take a few days. We’ll notify you when its done!

Anonymous717

Great work! Really like the idea ✔️

DawiD

It reminds me of the Microsoft dial thing, and I think Logitech attempted this as well, but if memory serves me right, both were rather expensive and had limited integration. They were obviously closed code, and only worked * well * in a few specific programs.

Therefore, I’m suggesting to make the whole thing as open source as possible, to ensure success. If people can do whatever they want to with it, there is a need for dials in peripherals. I can easily think of use in OS UI like switching workspaces/windows/tabs, in Blender, choosing things in pie menus or using it to control the turntable view. I can think of use in games, especially simulators (if somebody is not doing crazy setups).

I think there is a market for this, but it absolutely has to be as accessible and versatile as possible.

Ah, pardon, forgot to say, I’m an industrial designer, but not active in the field, I’m working as content designer in a game studio. Though I do some 3D modeling in blender for fun (and also I’d hate to forget those skills).

T_Zhong

DawiD yeah I agree with your points on the Microsoft surface dial and the Logitech dial. The surface dial originally only worked on the surface studio back when it first came out which really cut out all the hype for it because few people used the surface studio, only until later they supported it on other surfaces and then all windows PCs. The new mx creative console to me feels somewhat overpriced and redundant, considering that it comes with a console with those cool macros but meanwhile your keyboard is like right next to it (just judging from what I’ve seen). Learning from these devices we aimed to integrate it as much as we could into the user’s existing setup, no matter if it’s a mechanical keyboard, laptop, or tablet.

About the UI accessibility, since I’m working on the windows side, I did look into trying to use the existing APIs for the surface dial radial UI control menu but because Microsoft seriously sucks at developing an integrated system of software and the API is really limited to a very specific windows app framework which makes it almost impossible for me to use. So now I’m trying to design something similar for it in our own configuration app for the dial.

And also thank you for the suggestion and thoughtful comment, we also hope to make this as open sourced as we could, but what it takes to make an open-sourced project great is a strong and creative community to preserve its originality, that’s also part of why we thought it would be wonderful if it could be a Nothing community product where everyone can contribute to building something that is designed for people like you and me and many others of this community that does designing and creative development.

LimZhenYao

Imagine you stick it on a joystick.

T_Zhong

LimZhenYao yea lmao we’ve thought about it. You should check out the controller gameplay demonstration part in the youtube video with the dial attached to it, that’s the furthest we’ve gotten with the controller attachments so far.

Tong_tong

We just posted a new video on the Revolute dial where we talk about the development process of it and how everything built up to where we are now with our plans for it, feel free to check it out:

Nintu

Please call it “something”.