Have you ever seen a toy and said “That wants to be a deck”? [Attoparsec] did, when his eyes fell upon the Little Talking Scholar, a punch card driven toy from the 1980s. It’s now a punch card driven cyberdeck.
The punch card interface on the toy is only six bits, but sixty-four application cards are probably more than parents would have wanted to keep track of in 1989. Originally, they cued up simple matching games on an anonymous epoxy-coated microprocessor; after [Attoparsec]’s surgery, they do the same thing, cuing up custom Python applications on the Raspberry Pi Zero he’s implanted into this thing.
The square display comes courtesy of HyperPixel. It’s designed for a Pi, but both the display and the case needed a bit of surgery to get it to fit. First, a bit of milling was required on the plastic case to make room for the printed bracket to hold the display. That left depth, as the original toy had no display, which means the lid of this faux-laptop is quite thin. (The punch cards were printed with all you needed to play the games and were visible through the hole that now shows the LCD.) By removing the headers and soldering directly to the board, [Attoparsec] was able to get the display to fit, but space was then too tight for punch cards to slide in easily. Some washers added the extra space required.
A battery lives inside of the original battery compartment, but because the lithium cell he’s using is thicker than the AA’s this toy was designed for, a little bit more milling was required. A couple more holes gave a charging button and a power port.
The buttons and the punch card contacts are connected to the Pi via MCP23017 I2C port expanders, since the square display provides a handy I2C pass-through. A nice detail was putting the MCP23017s onto a custom PCB that sat directly on the contacts of the original button board. We might have used those eight buttons for a chording keyboard, but [Attoparsec] isn’t a fan of cording. Instead, the buttons are context-dependent based on the application. For text input in his note-taking application [Attoparsec] fell back on Morse, with two keys acting as paddles. We’ve seen Morse keyboards before, and while they seem like great HAM training, they can also be assistive devices.
The whole video is absolutely worth a watch, for all the details and the fun tangents [Attoparsec] goes off on. We’re grateful to [smellsofbikes] for tipping us off to this project. The tips line is always hungry for cyber decks, so let us know if you find one— or anything else interesting.
Angry toddler indeed! For I2C port expansion, I love to use Arduino minis, micros, and what not flashed with my I2C slave firmware, which allows me to add both analog inputs and outputs as well as GPIO.
https://github.com/judasgutenberg/Generic_Arduino_I2C_Slave
Once again, not a cyberdeck…
You can’t just use words wrong because you think they sound cool.
They have one job. They convey an idea as completely and concisely as possible.
Using words wrong on purpose just makes it harder for the rest of us to communicate.
A cyberdeck is a general purpose computer that:
1. Is designed with multiple discreet/separate components, each being required to function.
2. Is portable by design.(There are a few counterexamples but they are usually in-universe corruptions).
3. Is assembled at the location of use, which isn’t specifically designed for use.
4. Disassembled and moved after use.
The design intention and actual use is important to the definition.
What is a “coffee mug”? A cup with a handle, used for drinking coffee.
Remove any of the intention OR use, and it becomes something else.
A smartphone is not a cyberdeck. (Only one component)
A smartphone with an external display and keyboard, used in a classroom to take notes, and taken away by the student after, is a cyberdeck. (Multiple parts. Assembled on location. Removed.)
A PlayStation is not a cyberdeck. (Not general purpose. Not assembled/disassembled and moved.)
A laptop is not a cyberdeck.
A laptop at the the beach, with external cameras/microphones and a teleprompter, used to Livestream an interview, is a cyberdeck.
Get it?
There are dozens of examples that created the archetype.
Gibson novels.
Johnny Mnemonic.
Cyberpunk tabletop/games.
Shadowrun.
Etc…
They all share the same features.
That is why the word HAS a meaning.
It’s not just “cool portable electronic thing”.
Citation required. Bill Gibson left it pretty loose, up to the imagination of the reader, in the very best way.
Trying to constrain the definition to one person’s interpretation is narrowminded and self-centered. Diversity of ideas should be welcomed.
So give it a rest. Really.
If you really want to be specific about word definition and meaning, perhaps start with your own usage of “discreet”.
So you are saying I can’t drink tea or hot coco out of a coffee mug or else it magically morphs into an entirely new object.
God you got your panties in a twist over some complete fiction (that frankly holds up about as good as your silly little rant)
But we’re not reliant purely on words, we have pictures and a build log so any confusion can be cleared up. Also, the discrete component claim is very suspect. Just because they can work with discrete components, that doesn’t make it a core requirement to meet the description.
No problem at all if that’s your personal definition, it just isn’t that of the author or many other people. The best thing you can do is submit your cyberdeck project to HaD.
Can I ask, in your exacting source-material-based definition, why you don’t consider the neural interface important? If you need to be true to source, most of the examples you cite either plug into your brain explicitly, or are implied to. I’m honestly curious why “assembled-in-place” is your hill to die on, but the ‘jack is unimportant.
In any case, other people– like, an entire community dedicated to building things they call “cyberdecks”– has decided on a different definition. It happens, and I’m sorry to say that words are defined by usage, not origin. Take a look at an etymological dictionary sometime; go back far enough to their roots and many of the words you use daily are “wrong”.