Started working on building a cyber deck

Last time I posted about the keyboard I had built. This was actually a precursor to building a cyber deck. Or at least a prototype for one. I am planning to use the machine I am currently building for note taking and keeping track of tasks (Taskwarrior is a really useful tool). In a sense it is an impractical and under powered laptop. However, I suspect that it is actually much more pleasant in social situations. It is always a bit unpleasant to be in meetings where everybody is hidden behind a laptop screen. With a laptop you are screening yourself of from the other people in the space (which is sometimes what you want). With the more flat design of the current designs, it is more like using a note book. Also the keyboard is, of course, much better than what you regularly have on a laptop.

I also have looking at building my own VR headset to go with the machine. Although I probably need different hardware then and perhaps I can let go of the screen then.

The gray one at the top of the photo is the first prototype. However, I felt that it was too clunky. Because I used a Rasbberry Pi with a PiJuice header (battery with controller that supplied the power to the pi and the screen), the whole thing had a minimum thickness of 2.5 cm. I also had a bit too much space at the bottom and top of the screen because of how I fixed the screen in place (there are screw holes at the top and bottom of the screen.

The white one at the bottom is the second design which is much more compact. It used a different separate controller for the battery and also used a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 which is much more compact than a regular Raspberry Pi at the cost of some performance. However, as I am planning to mainly terminal work with this thing, this should be okay. The slot on the right of the screen gives access to the GPIO ports of the pi. In that way I can also use it for various electronics projects.

The keyboard actually screws in place. So it is relatively easy to switch keyboard and compute unit. Unfortunately I broke my screen. That put me off a bit on working on it. For now I will be focussing more on the VR headset and see how that goes.