Overview
My goal for this project is to create a personal cyberdeck. This blog post gives a good summary of the history of cyberdecks and why they are so cool. I really like the idea of having a medium sized portable machine that you have built yourself. It feels like a techy form of self expression which I really like. Because of the nature of computers you really can design it and build it however you want with a few requirements. Some people make them big and bulky and powerful with a ton a bells and whistles. source
Others make them mini and clean with just a keyboard/screen and a humble USB port. source
Implementation
Hardware
It is going to be built around a raspberry pi 2B for a few reasons:
- I have one lying around
- Low power
- Can run Arch Linux
I dont have any concrete plans on how to pick a screen or keyboard to wire into the pi. As well as any idea on how to 3D design a shell to house everything. These are things that I will get to once I have the software more planned out.
Software
I have a lot of ideas of what the software is going to entail. I have been developing some software just to get some ideas of what could work. At this point I have created a library to write to the frame buffer, record inputs from keyboard, and written a basic application launcher that loads binaries from a library folder. I think this is pretty cool but I don’t know how well my current approach will scale as things and goals get more complex. Everything I’ve written is from scratch so things as simple as writing text are pretty involved. But if I were to do everything myself I think it would be pretty cool. I also dont know if I am abstracting the correct areas for this project. I am already using a pretty full fledged linux distro so is it really the best to just create a process for my launcher that runs at boot and writes to the framebuffer manually. These are things I’ll get to eventually but I think Arch is a good choice as it’s pretty lightweight by default.
Goals
In order of importance
- Aesthetic
- Portable
- Useful
I don’t think that anything I make in this project will be so useful that it’s better than just using a laptop and a raspberry pi. Of course I still want to build something that I will use in some sort of niche context. But if I had to choose between a cool-looking/useless cyberdeck or an ugly/usefull cyberdeck, I am going to choose the cool looking one. I also want to be able to actually bring this thing places and use some weird gadgets out in public. In reality it could just be a glorified raspberry pi + powerbank but as long as it looks cool I’ll be happy.
Aesthetics
I enjoy the medium to smaller designed cyberdecks. I think the design and size of the pilet5 is pretty perfect. The only things that I would change are the gap of buttons in the middle. I really enjoy the gameboy style shape with that size keyboard. I don’t really plan on typing that much on the deck so the keys that size are good enough to do most things.
Portable
I want to be able to bring the deck out in public and have it last long enough to tinker with without having to charge it. It also shouldn’t be bulky, I want to be able to toss it in a bag and not have to really think about it.
Useful
This is more of a fun project to build something kinda interesting as well as a good learning project about low level linux. One of the main things that I want to use it for is using rust to create programs that use GPIO to interact with little modules I build.