Skip to main content

My Cyberdeck Build

I'm a big long time cyberpunk fan even before reading Neuromancer. After getting addicted to mechanical keyboards and building many portable gaming consoles, i feel like it's time to finally build my own cyberdeck!

The deck is supposed to be a portable computer like a notebook. Small but usable. The GPIO & other external interfaces of the SBC [Single Board Computers] should all be accessable from the outside. For the keyboard there is only one option, a mechanical one. Preferable a custom build, or something in the 60% to 40% area. A mouse is optinal but a trackpad/-ball would be benefitial.

Planned Features#

Must have#

  • Batteries with charge & play
  • Powerfull SBC
  • Mechanical keyboard
  • GPIO breakout
  • Internal Speakers

Should have#

  • Trackball / -pad
  • Software defined radio with external antenna
  • Internal USB-Hub for additional internal devices [SDR, GPS, Keyboard, ...]
  • EL-Wire for cyberpunk fanciness

Could have / other ideas#

  • GPS with internal antenna
  • Solar panel for charging
  • External wifi antenna
  • LoRa/WAN

Components#

PartDescription
NanoPC-T4Powerfull SBC to drive my deck
HD702E LCD7" Display with eDP interface
JJ50Small mechanical keyboard
TrackballThe Pimoroni Trackball Breakout seems like a good option
BatteriesDepends on the space i have in the case
RetroPSUHelder's RetroPSU seems like a good battery management solution
ELWire & TransformatorOrdered some green ELWire with a cheap 5V transformator, let's hope it's not too noisy

Case#

I will design the case from scratch in fusion 360.

Display#

I"m using the HD702E eDP Panel from FriendlyElec. Which has upstream linux support and connects using eDP. For it to work using Armbian I had to do some digging into the Device Tree files to enable eDP & also configure X11 to use the correct settings for the Display.

DTB Overlay#

TODO

Xorg Config#

Somehow Linux didn't get the right Modesetting for my HD702E Screen. So i had to fix it in xorg.conf:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-edp-display.conf
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "eDP-1"
Modeline "800x1280_60.00" 85.25 800 856 936 1072 1280 1283 1293 1327 -hsync -vsync
Option "PreferredMode" "800x1280_60.00"
# My display is "Landscape" Mode:
Option "Rotate" "CCW"
Option "RandRRotation" "on"
# Don't know if this is needed:
Option "DPMS" "true"
Option "Primary" "true"
EndSection

Keyboard#

Firmware#

For the Firmware I'm using the QMK fork for "VIAL" a fork of "VIA", which allows the configuration of the keymap without reflashing the firmware.

Setup QMK#

Follow the QMK Docs - lol.

qmk setup --home /home/nold/git/qmk

RetroPSU Linux integration#

I wanted to integrate the RetroPSU in a native Linux way to get the actuall battery status in lm-sensors.

To acomplish this, i had to dig into devicetrees and was quite successfull.

Devicetree Modifications#

Here is the part of my DTS-File that defindes RetroPSUs ADC chip [a TI ADS1015] connected to the I2C bus number 2.

&i2c2 {
adc: ads1015@48 {
compatible = "ti,ads1015";
#address-cells = <1>;
#size-cells = <0>;
#io-channel-cells = <1>;
// I2C Address:
reg = <0x48>;
// RetroPSU uses ADC0 to GND convertion, so that's channel 4:
adc1: channel@4 {
reg = <4>;
ti,gain = <0>;
ti,datarate = <0>;
};
};
};

This creates a IIO-Device you can check out under /sys/bus/iio/devices/.

Next I wanted to get the voltage of the battery as a battery- or sensor device. Luckily there was something called "iio-hwmon", which allows using a IIO-Device as hwmon-device [which will be useable in lm-sensors].

So here is another DTS snippet:

/ {
...
iio-hwmon-retropsu {
compatible = "iio-hwmon";
io-channels = <&adc 4>;
};
...
};

This is fairly straight forward: it defined a hwmon device, pointing the the ADC on channel 4.

And this is the result:

$ sensors
iio_hwmon_retropsu-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
in1: 4.20 V

Not a "Battery", yet. But I can live with the battery voltage level for now.

Software#

No cyberdeck is complete without some cyber-eye-candy!

Theming GTK / XFCE#

Theming XFWM [Cyber]#

Theming XFWM [Retro]#

Fonts#

Icons#

Edit this page