Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The NEO With The Typewriter Shell

February 16, 2026 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Isn’t this glorious? If you don’t recognize what this is right away (or from the post title), it’s an AlphaSmart NEO word processor, repackaged in a 3D-printed typewriter-esque shell, meticulously designed by the renowned [Un Kyu Lee] of Micro Journal fame.

An AlphaSmart NEO in a 3D-printed, typewriter-esque enclosure, complete with big knobs. — Image by [Un Kyu Lee] via GitHub

If you don’t want to spend roughly 40 hours printing ~1 kg of filament in order to make your own, you can join the wait-list on Tindie like I did. Go here to figure out which color you want, and email [Un Kyu Lee] when you order. In the meantime, you can watch the assembly video and then check out this playlist that shows the available colors.

Assembly looks easy enough; there’s no soldering, but you do have to disconnect and reconnect the fiddly ribbon cables. After that, it’s just screws.

This design happened by accident. A friend named [Hook] who happens to manage the AlphaSmart Flickr community had given [Un Kyu Lee] a NEO2 to try out, but before he could, it fell from a shelf and the enclosure suffered a nasty hole near the screen. But the internals seemed fine, so he got the idea to design a new enclosure.

I don’t believe the knobs do anything, but they sure do look nice. There’s an area along the top where you can clip a light, since the NEO has no backlight. There are also two smaller slots on the sides if your light won’t clip to the top.

I’d really like to do this to one of my NEOs. I have two NEO regulars, but reviewers on Tindie report that it works just as well with those as the NEO2.

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Fully Backlit AlphaSmart NEO2 Lights Up The Night

December 24, 2020 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

The AlphaSmart NEO and NEO2 are great little word processors for distraction-free writing anywhere you want to go, but they lack the backlight of the later Dana model. Well, [starboyk] has done what many thought impossible and added a backlight to a NEO2. Experience gained from a ton of console mods and repairs led to the question of whether the NEO2’s LCD is similar to a Game Boy’s.

[starboyk] started with a fresh NEO2 from ebay, then swapped out the reflective polarizer for a translucent polarizer and added a trio of LED backlights meant for the original Game Boy across the back of the screen. The best part is that the backlight has its own power switch and a brightness control pot. It sounds easy enough, but this mod is not for the faint of heart as it sounds like a really tight fit in the end. Apparently we only need 500 orders to get a custom backlight manufactured, but barring that does anyone know of a backlight that’s 157mm x 44mm?

You can always stick with the mod where you power the USB-A port and use a USB reading light like I did with my NEO.