The trend for cyberdecks has brought us many takes on the home-made portable computers, but it’s fair to say that some of them can be rather unwieldy. This is not an accusation you can point at [Smeef] with the Mini-Deck though, because its Raspberry Pi Zero, Adafruit miniature display, and tiny keyboard make the whole unit able to fit in the palm of a hand. We’re not sure we’ve seen one so compact!
The most obvious feature is the keyboard, it’s a DreamGear MiniKey miniature USB keyboard. It doesn’t have all the useful buttons a PC board has, so there’s also a separate set of buttons to cover those. Then there’s an analog stick connected to an Arduino Pro Micro that takes the functionality of a mouse, and an Adafruit Mini PiTFT 1.3″ Display. While a fully-functional display for the Pi, we do wonder if this tiny screen might actually be a bit too tiny to be practical. Power for the unit comes via an 18650 battery, which also functions as a pin for a folding mechanism.
The result is something that looks, feels, and works like a cyberdeck, but all in miniature. It might be a stretch to write a Hackaday piece on a machine like it, but we’re guessing that merely having built something like this is cool enough in itself. Certainly it’s considerably smaller than previous contenders for the smallest build.
This device falls apart in your hands, scattering into pieces. It certainly does not fit in the hand. It just falls apart.
I have the same keyboard in a steering wheel for my old carpc days. I wired mine through the airbag control wires.
I briefly had one back in the mp3car.,com days … which is now squatted it appears :/. Didn’t go through the Steering wheel, didn’t have the wiring, but did add a retractable cord. https://www.leeland.info/dreamps2keyr.html/
People really playing fast and loose with the term cyberdeck.
Love the esthetics 8)