We like cyberdecks here at Hackaday, and in our time we’ve brought you some pretty amazing builds. But perhaps now we’ve seen the ultimate of the genre, a cyberdeck so perfect in its execution that this will be the machine of choice in the dystopian future, leaving all the others as mere contenders. It comes courtesy of [Sector 07], and it’s a machine to be proud of.
As with many cyberdecks, it uses the Raspberry Pi as its powerhouse. There are a couple of nice touchscreens and a decent keyboard, plus the usual ports and some nice programmable controls. These are none of them out of the ordinary for a cyberdeck, but what really shines with this one is the attention to detail in the mechanical design. Those touchscreens rotate on ball bearings, the hinges are just right, the connections to the Pi have quick release mechanisms, and custom PCBs and ribbon cables make distributing those GPIOs a snap.
On top of all that the aesthetics are on point; this is the machine you want to take into the abandoned mining base with you. Best of all it’s all available from the linked GitHub repository, and you can marvel as we did at the video below the break.
If you hunger for more cyberdecks, this one has some very stiff competition.
Thanks [Jeremy Geppert] for the tip.
What a nice bit of design, with some good thought put into making use of what a Pi is often used for in the end, really love the relatively easy removal of SD or Pi for integration into your other project after you have effectively used this thing as a breadboard to check everything works!
Though the ball bearings on the screen rotation are a bit overkill especially with the quality of prints he’s got being so high – just a little bit of grease between the arm and screen body would give a lovely smooth motion. I’d also personally not have put the back cable cover over the HDMI cables – always handy if you can just plug into an external screen easily, so I’d probably have left that cable ‘exposed’ but well protected in those channels and looked for a way to actually hold a longer cable to make plugging into something else easier – running the right monitors HDMI cable up the left arm and across the handle at the back and visa versa seems like a good move..
It is also perhaps a bit wider than I’d like – desk space is always an issue for me, though adding a bit more functionality into into that claws back more desk space might be possible – for instance add a trackball/trackpad or perhaps one of those air gesture mice type concepts internally so you don’t absolutely need an external pointing device any time you are not just working in the terminal.
It has touch screens, so no external pointing device is necessary (although he uses a mouse).
I suppose but to me a touch screen is never a good substitute for a mouse as you end up putting your big fleshy pointing device in the way so you can’t see what you are actually pressing and need the targets to be much larger to only hit one button. Don’t get me wrong touch can be good, intuitive etc and if you really build the whole UI around being a touch based system it can work functionally enough. But when it comes to say closing/maximising the window or really just about anything else in the more menu and control sections of a program rather than the main window navigation on most GUI those buttons are generally too small, close together and thus too fiddly to use reliably with your fingers (though maybe my large hands exaggerate this effect enough I find it more annoying than most would).
“A Dual-Screen Cyberdeck To Rule Them All”. A title of 8 words that manages to reference both William Gibson and J R R Tolkien :-)
Looks great, I am impressed by the amount of thought that went into it, the build quality and the overall design!
Just one (ok, two) thing(s) that struck me were those square corners left and right of the keyboard. They would definitely irritate me quite quickly, being in the way of my palms. It would probably irritate my RSI even more. :)
Wouldn’t a split keyboard with low profile switches and caps have room enough below it if you drop the sides and raise the middles a bit? My Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard seems to have enough space under the middle to house a Raspberry PI.
With “drop the sides and raise the middles a bit”, I mean that each half of the split keyboard is slanted (left half slanted to the left and bottom, right half to the right and bottom).
IMHO, the right step towards making Sphinx happen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_(home_automation_system)).
I’ve long thought about starting in the same direction, but the usual things like full-time job, family, different hobbies and mandatory laziness would slow me down.
I don’t want to see any more RasPi based decks. Does no one care about processing power and expandability?
X86 ftw. I realise it’s worse if we factor in the power consumption but that’s the price of having a non paper weight deck
A Pi 5 has some serious computing potency for its size, I found the vastly slower Pi4 was with decent cooling a perfectly good desktop able to do 95% of the CAD I was working on just as snappily as my workstation for instance (Have to get pretty complex or be doing mechanical analysis etc to make the Pi really show the strain), it would run VM with decent performance for the VM too (obviously its not a gaming GPU pass through VM but for that sub GB of RAM few core VM to play with something still good.). And if you design you deck around the compute module there is a pretty good chance you can just drop in a faster upgrade brain seamlessly in the future (Pi folks have not as far as I know committed to the CM6 having the same footprint as the CM4 and 5, but there are others using that same interface with other arm chips if you want to deal with the usual hassles of leaving the really well supported Pi ecosystem)
IMO the Pi is also hugely more expandable than the nearest x86 rivials you could use, as those would be motherboards from something like a Steamdeck, which will have maybe 8 lanes of PCIe run to anything you can access if you are lucky and the odd usb port – better for some applications as that bandwidth from even a single lane of modern PCIe gens is huge as the Pi5 while it has PCIe is almost certainly older generation. But as both are also so limited in PCIe lanes and the x86 offers little other expansion paths that it just doesn’t come close to the easy flexible expandability of the Pi based deck to the users desires…
Really to start getting into a cyberdeck that hits the selling points you are after its perilously close to if not a full Mini-ITX (hopefully the thin version of the spec but that is much harder to find) build. Which are awesome builds, I hoped to get the one I have planned done this year myself and haven’t even started yet (life and the weather keeps getting in the way of all the stuff that must come first). But those builds generally have to be orders of magnitude larger than the entire Pi based cyber deck just to hold the motherboard and CPU cooler, before you start to consider the shell, HID or that expandability element…
I think it’s Linux/Raspbian that’s a burden to the earlier Pis.
Self-booting projects such as mt32-pi seem to be very capable if run on baremetal.
RISCOS also is very snappy on even an Pi 2!