Building a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck | DigiKey

William Gibson coined the term “cyberdeck” in his 1984 novel, “Neuromancer.” Just like #badgelife, there is a whole group of people designing and building their own cyberdecks for art, fun, and sometimes, useful laptop replacements. In this video, Shawn and Jayy team up to build their own cyberdeck in honor of the 2022 Hackaday CyberDeck Contest (https://hackaday.io/contest/186672-2022-cyberdeck-contest).

A tutorial with diagrams showing how the electronics were put together can be found here: https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/projects/building-a-cyberdeck-with-a-raspberry-pi-zero-w/f4a94ae192d147b8b6abe9cc4557dbab

Most custom cyberdeck builds revolve around the Raspberry Pi, although a few folks get creative with other single-board computers and microcontrollers. Jayy and I wanted to keep the build simple so that others could follow along and build upon our design. We used a Raspberry Pi Zero W, as it is small for our mini build and keeps the battery drain low. Additionally, we used a 7-inch touchscreen LCD from Seeed Studio.

By using a Tiny UPS 3.0, we could run the entire build off a single LiPo battery pouch, giving us (theoretically) 2-3 hours of runtime. However, I noticed the Tiny UPS would reset the Pi whenever the USB power cable was connected or disconnected. The workaround was to make sure to unplug the AC adapter first before unplugging the USB cable or to plug in the USB cable first before plugging in the AC adapter.

While the tiny keyboard was not the most pleasant to type on, it kept the build very small, creating something equivalent to an 8 or 9-inch laptop. This was perfect for such a cyberdeck that could be carried around in a smaller pouch. Jayy wanted to have a small computer capable of making field repairs on his robots, and this cyberdeck fit the bill perfectly.