An Ultra Compact Cyberdeck with a Full Tactile Keyboard
Redditor John3dc managed to put both a generous display and a tactile keyboard into this ultra compact cyberdeck.
Why did smartphones evolve to eliminate the vestigial keyboards associated with BlackBerry models? Because, when Apple released the iPhone, the world realized they would rather have a large screen with an on-demand touchscreen keyboard than a dedicated tactile keyboard. In theory, cyberdecks could follow a similar evolutionary path. But cyberdeck builders aren’t typical consumers and they recognize the value of a physical keyboard, which is why cyberdecks tend to be rather chunky. But Redditor John3dc managed to put both a generous display and a tactile keyboard into this ultra compact cyberdeck.
This is a really good lesson in space utilization, because John3dc was able to fit quite a lot into a really small package. That’s particularly impressive because it only uses off-the-shelf components connected by good old-fashioned wires—no fancy custom PCBs required.
The star of the show is the keyboard, a modified Rii X1 Mini Bluetooth model. John3dc first posted about that a few months ago with an important modification: USB connectivity. Out of the box, that keyboard can only connect to devices via Bluetooth. So, John3dc tapped into the keyboard matrix rows and columns with a Raspberry Pi Pico development board. That reads key presses and passes them along over USB to a connected computer.
With that figured out, John3dc was able to continue on to constructing this cyberdeck. To save space, he switched from the Raspberry Pi Pico to a Waveshare RP2040-Zero development board, which is much smaller. That passes key presses to the main single-board computer: a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The screen is a 2.7” 400×240 monochrome Sharp Memory Display from Adafruit, which is very energy efficient. Power comes from a 2500mAh lithium battery, with a Pimoroni LiPo Amigo for charging through USB-C.
All of those components fit into a 3D-printed enclosure. It definitely has a minimalist design with few distinctive elements, but it looks nice. A couple of convenient features are the externally accessible USB-A port and microSD card slot.