Why did smartphones evolve to eradicate the vestigial keyboards related to BlackBerry fashions? As a result of, when Apple launched the iPhone, the world realized they’d somewhat have a big display screen with an on-demand touchscreen keyboard than a devoted tactile keyboard. In concept, cyberdecks might comply with an identical evolutionary path. However cyberdeck builders aren’t typical shoppers they usually acknowledge the worth of a bodily keyboard, which is why cyberdecks are typically somewhat chunky. However Redditor John3dc managed to place each a beneficiant show and a tactile keyboard into this extremely compact cyberdeck.
It is a actually good lesson in house utilization, as a result of John3dc was capable of match rather a lot into a very small package deal. That’s significantly spectacular as a result of it solely makes use of off-the-shelf elements linked by good old school wires—no fancy customized PCBs required.
The star of the present is the keyboard, a modified Rii X1 Mini Bluetooth mannequin. John3dc first posted about that a number of months in the past with an necessary modification: USB connectivity. Out of the field, that keyboard can solely hook up with units through Bluetooth. So, John3dc tapped into the keyboard matrix rows and columns with a Raspberry Pi Pico growth board. That reads key presses and passes them alongside over USB to a linked laptop.
With that discovered, John3dc was capable of proceed on to establishing this cyberdeck. To save lots of house, he switched from the Raspberry Pi Pico to a Waveshare RP2040-Zero growth board, which is way smaller. That passes key presses to the primary single-board laptop: a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The display screen is a 2.7” 400×240 monochrome Sharp Reminiscence Show from Adafruit, which could be very vitality environment friendly. Energy comes from a 2500mAh lithium battery, with a Pimoroni LiPo Amigo for charging by means of USB-C.
All of these elements match right into a 3D-printed enclosure. It undoubtedly has a minimalist design with few distinctive components, nevertheless it seems good. A few handy options are the externally accessible USB-A port and microSD card slot.