Pseudonymous maker “ugly_robot” has put collectively a handheld cyberdeck with a distinction: its main enter is an unlabeled numberpad beneath a compact display screen, in an homage to “cassette futurism” design.
“Do not know the way finest to elucidate it,” ugly_robot says of the challenge. “I simply… needed a cassette-futuristic DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]-like ritual to honor the Machine Spirit. After all, it means nothing. And but, I do my benediction each single day… Actually — it is only a keypad, a [Raspberry] Pi 4, an inexpensive Amazon display screen, some OnShape CAD components printed in PLA, and a few 2D Godot.”
Impressed by cassette futurism and Warhammer 40,000, this compact cyberdeck helps you to higher serve the Omnissiah. (📷: ugly_robot)
Primarily based totally on the “cassette futurism” retro-futuristic designs of the 70s and 80s, with a little bit nod to Video games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 college and its Omnissiah Machine God, the machine runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B single-board laptop — “a great minimal spec for working Godot 4 initiatives,” ugly_robot explains, referring to the open-source sport engine, “[the Raspberry] Pi 3 and under cannot help the renderers” — linked to a low-cost five-inch colour show.
Beneath the display screen, which is positioned under a protecting sunshade, is a compact mechanical keyboard within the type of a quantity pad — with color-coded, although in any other case unlabeled, keys. The design is, ugly_robot explains, “considerably parametric,” permitting to be tailor-made to specific duties. There’s an antenna stump on the high, and no fewer than two chunky grab-handles.
“I nonetheless have not fairly discovered the phrases to explain my use…” ugly_robot admits, referring to each the {hardware} itself and the Godot-based sport it hosts. “It is a ‘sport,’ a each day ritual follow-along of a hymn written for the machine spirit [Omnissiah]. You may, nevertheless, use it as a smart-home controller, a musical instrument, a chunky calculator, a stream deck — any use that you could match on a keypad’s price of keys.”
Extra particulars can be found in ugly_robot’s Reddit publish, whereas the 3D print recordsdata have been uploaded to Thingiverse below a Artistic Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license; the design recordsdata from which they have been generated can be found on Onshape.
