A slab that leans toward you.

The concept

The Ameka 01 is a vertical slab of nickel-plated copper, 312 mm tall, leaning 3° forward like a person listening. A single elliptical chimney runs from its base to its crown — the chassis is the heatsink, the fins are inside the chimney, the air moves of its own accord. It has no buttons, no logos, no light except a single aqua thread in a sapphire window on its top edge. You wake it by touching a small knurled copper key to a recessed point at its crown. It makes one mechanical click and then is silent. It is closer in feeling to a turntable, a Patek movement, and a museum-grade scientific instrument than to a computer.

The silhouette

From across the room you see a vertical slab. From a few meters you notice it leans — barely, 3° — toward you. From up close you see the brushed grain runs top to bottom, uninterrupted, on every face. There is no logo anywhere on the body. The single aqua window on the top edge is the only sign of life.

The numbers

The thermal claim

Eight hundred watts of sustained heat must leave the box every second, with no moving parts. The strategy is a single elliptical chimney running the full height of the slab, with 48 milled copper fins on its inner back wall. The SoC sits on a vapor-chamber plate solder-bonded to that wall. Hot air rises through the chimney via natural convection; cool air enters through the bottom mesh. The chassis is the heatsink.

Analytic target: ΔT of ~58°C from ambient to SoC junction at 800 W, using h ≈ 7 W/m²·K for vertical natural convection and an effective finned area of 0.21 m². This will be validated empirically with a CNC blank and an 800 W heater cartridge at the bench before any silicon goes near the design.

The key

Every Ameka ships with one solid-copper key fob, 28 × 18 × 4 mm, knurled on its long edges. The Key holds an ECC keypair on an NXP DS28E84 1-Wire chip. Touch the long edge of the Key to the receiver at the back of the crown — the machine authenticates in 25 ms and lights its single aqua thread.

The body of the machine is plated and will look identical in fifteen years. The Key is unplated — it will tarnish. Hand oils, atmospheric oxidation, and the friction of carrying it in a pocket will give each Key a patina unique to its owner inside two weeks.

The variants — three, no more

The anti-decisions

What we will not do — each defends the integrity of the form:

• No fan. Not even a backup.
• No exterior logo on the body.
• No exterior LED other than the single aqua thread.
• No plastic anywhere a finger touches.
• No tool-free upgrades. The machine is sold complete.
• No screen, no touch surface.
• No exterior screws.
• No charging brick. PSU is internal.
• No HDMI, no SD slot, no audio jack, no USB-A.
• No "Ameka" written on the exterior body.
• No paper manual.
• No 3D render published as marketing.
• No "concept video."
• No limited editions, no colorways, no artist collaborations.

The next four weeks

1. Foam-block mockup. A 312 × 240 × 88 mm urethane block, weighted to 7.2 kg, surface-treated to read as nickel-plated copper. Lives on a desk for two weeks. Adjusted by feel, not by calipers.
2. Key sample. Ten unplated copper Key blanks, knurled, engraved with placeholder serials. Carried daily. Photographed weekly. Patina evaluated.
3. Thermal black-box. Sintered-metal print of the chimney + fin array with an 800 W heater cartridge. Convection test. If the analytic numbers don't hold, the design goes back to the bench.
4. Seam study. Mill body + base from billet aluminum at three seam tolerances (±0.05, ±0.10, ±0.20 mm). Find the threshold at which the seam disappears in normal viewing. That becomes the production spec.

Note. No images on this page are renders of a finished product. They are technical drawings published as part of the v1 design intent. Photography of real foam mockups, CNC blanks, and EVT units will replace these illustrations as they are produced and posted in Bench Notes.