Geek Alert... Cyberdecks! (Patreon)

Hi everyone, in a recent poll you asked for more posts about "random things I'm geeking out on". Well. As it happens my new hobby seems to be daydreaming about random cyberdecks that would be fun to build. 

What's a cyberdeck, you ask? Well, the easiest way to explain it is "weird DIY laptop". The name originally comes from a William Gibson novel (of course), but now people are creating them to experiment with hardware hacking and novel form factors for computing. Here are some of my favs (1) (2)

This is the build that led me to start daydreaming about my own...

So what would go into MY cyberdeck?? 

My vision for the project is "disaster recovery" laptop. If the internet goes down for some reason (or if me and friends need to go somewhere with spotty internet), I'd like a device that is designed to be as useful as possible in that scenario.

In this case my main target functions would be:

• Have access to critical information
• Communicate with my friends
• Be able to update my own website in a crisis (lol, priorities I know)
• With the bonus of being able to use it to program (or re-program) other devices for more useful in-the-moment functions or repairs.

 The core of it would be a RaspberryPi, ideally a pi4.

I already have a few Pis kicking around my house (one (a Pi 3B) serves my home automation and will be the backbone of my early hydroponic trials, and the other (Zero 2W) is serving as a piHole right now.) I got these mostly for fun and learning but neither of them really allow me to mess around with the actual Pi OS . I'd like a space to play with that system, mess around with hosting my own websites or whatever and learn more about Open Source.

The Pi4 has some really interesting features, for example it could be configured to become its own router, so if the whole web went down people could still use their phones to connect to it over wifi. Then they could chat to each other using a Matrix instance, access some essential files using a nextcloud and even access offline wikipedia using kiwix :0 And if someone has a phone that happens to still have cellular access, that can be rerouted through the pi for everyone else as a hotspot.

Speaking of the phone, it could be docked there beside the rugged case to serve the pi with 5G or GPS while on the road. The keyboard and screen could also be plugged right into the phone to use it in "Samsung Dex" mode. (Mostly because I happen to have a samsung :3c)

The keyboard could be a split mechanical keyboard. My idea is that it would slide out of the way and allow the pi-box to come up out of the case. Which is extra but how badass would that be? My vision is that it would be something like the ultimate hacking keyboard with a trackpoint just be extremely extra. 

What's next for this project?

Nothing, haha I will be honest this is mostly just my weird imagination getting away from me. I do have a number of the pieces available (I have the touchpad monitor, power bank, UE boom, SSD and USBC dock, and I've been messing around with Samsung DeX). All of these are serving different Actually Useful functions in my everyday life. It's fun to think about voltron-ing these elements together into something new and weird like this, but I don't want to buy a whole set of stuff just for this!

I don't even have any mechanical keyboard, let alone a split mechanical ultimate hacking keyboard *laughs*. I figure I will try to see about getting a used one to see if I even like them at all and play around with different switches and stuff (later, later).

And I don't even have a Pi4 because they are sold out everywhere!

(just kidding, I could easily find a used one if I really really wanted to, but I'm not going to buy something like that until I actually am ready to sit down and mess around with it :) )

Anyway, this is what I think about instead of anything practical