ENTRY

My Very Own Cyberdeck // napkin doodling the specs

So, feeling inspired by the many creations I've seen/read about on CS.O and Tumblr, I decided to at least have a theoretical draft of design/specs that would go in my own Cyberdeck and how I'd piece it together-- if this goes well and a briefcase full of cash smashes through my window, I could go ahead and put it together ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

[CYBERDECK DESIGN NAME PENDING] // v0.1 specs draft

My SBC of choice

In terms of hardware, I picked the Radxa Cubie A7A, I have no experience with anything else than Raspberry Pis (boards I don't even have lots of experience with in the first place) so while it is really this is a cost driven choice, it does have performance analog to a RPi 4 and isn't shy on features despite being significantly cheaper in nearly all aspects.

On-board SoC

The Allwinner A733 SoC seem to be no particular slouch; housing two big A76, six little A55 ARM CPU cores, an Imagination BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU, a Alibaba XuanTie E902 RISC-V microcontroller & a small integrated NPU (of undefined design) slopping out @ 3 TOPS :P; that last point aside, a sparse search of benchmarks puts it about the same perf bracket as a RPi4 though it does seem to have lower power draw in idle and better efficiency, which is a must for portable devices!

Memory

I did find listings for 4 & 6GB LPDDR5 models that, surprisingly, don't break the bank, most of the versions of this SBC are out of stock but the models that remain are wallet friendly, which is just what I need haha

Storage

Less wallet friendly are the storage options, anything else than a microSD bumps up the bill but nonetheless, there's a couple Radxa UFS 128GB for... a price worth consideration. Then again, I have a couple of 32GB microSDs still packaged and I don't expect this to need the storage speed I'd get from a dedicated NAND chip (I have to check for sure but I think a microSD might also be more power efficient?) so this choice is TBD for the moment.

Connectivity

Wifi 6 & BT5.4 surprisingly, w/ external antenna on top of that, I'd have expected older standards for cost effectiveness but no, though they don't mention the controller in use there so the question of software support hangs but I reckon I'd have seen something about a lack of qualitative support in the resources I've parsed.
It is functionally somewhere between a RPi 4 & 5 in terms of physical I/O: 40-pin GPIO (UART/SPI/I2C), MIPI DSI/CSI, PCIe3x1 interface (even though I don't intend to get an NVMe to as low-cost as possible -plus I already designated my storage solutions-, I would probably still get the cheap M.2 hat as I can always slot in an M.2 card that serves another purpose), RTC header, fan header, PoE header (don't intend to use that either, though it would be cool if it was useable by another module like a battery pack instead so the other I/O is untouched), GbE port, 1xUSB3.1, 3xUSB2.0, 1xUSB-C power input, 3.5mm jack, HDMI output

Cooling

there IS a fan header and I did look for the actively cooled heat sink but weirdly enough it is one of the many out of stock Radxa components unavailable at any of their resellers, so I am "forced" to go with the passive "Armor Case" one, which is still a rather decent chunk of metal and honestly, at the power this chip is supposed to operate at, that's more than enough for sure, and less power draw means longer battery life!

Power

Now this is where things get a lot blurrier, because I have zero experience adding a battery to something that didn't have already one and the Radxa boards, best I can tell, don't have neither native nor aftermarket "UPS" solution but I'm sure I can glean info from here and there; CS.O, Reddit, forums... I found this r/cyberdeck post from 4 years ago where someone used a Radxa Zero and A SHITTON of battery cells, giving it over 2 days of runtime (with the screen off) which is certainly something impressive! there's a few other mods to it, which includes a USB hub so I'm sure this could run for even longer if it didn't have to power those.
One thing to note though, is that I'd like to have some sort of battery sensing rather than just "yeah, it'll die when it gets discharged eventually", if I can get a battery percentage and automatic sleep/shutdown when it hits a critical charge level, that'd be great.

Display

that one is simple, two touchscreen options: 8" 720p or 10" 1080p (and if neither of those, I have a 10.5" 1280p -not a typo-, it's a 3:2 ratio non-tactile screen w/ HDMI & USB-C input + built-in stereo speaker but I got a feel this would draw much more juice than the other two, though I do not have the means to accurately measure how much it pulls)

Peripherals

keyboard; now, that's where I wanted to go exotic when I saw this this old Compaq keyboard but not only it wasn't produced in large number, it connects w/ a proprietary interface & communication protocol; some folks did find a (rather complicated) hacky way to get it to talk to a PC via USB but as exotic as I wanted to go, I don't want to get too complex either, at the risk of incurring costs to add a compatibility layer that isn't even guaranteed to work (and the step-by-step I found doesn't even explain properly how to do half the things...); despite this setback for the coolest keyboard I ever laid my eyes on, I kept looking but there wasn't much to see, the next best thing is a side-slide foldable keyboard that is also a 20+ y/o design and starts @ 100€+shipping for the cheapest listing I could find of that model and another one with a proprietary connector that also got a hacky converter that I won't bother with
sideways-extendable/butterfly/switchblade design are not only excessively rare, they're also old as fuck & unfortunately use bespoke I/O so instead, I settled -at least for now- for a basic portable micro-keyboard, there's a plethora of them, some really decent looking ones and nearly all of them rather cheap, with wired & wireless connection & built-in battery, which is always good to have
audio: I do have a nice pair of wired KOSS outer ear earphones that I initially intended to use as an audio mod on a VR headset which I ended up never doing and I have a feeling that'll be the perfect pair to go along with this Deck ensemble
add-ons: looking into a LoRa Meshtatic module to slap on the side, so I can try to delve into radio communications without -hopefully- breaking the bank either and have to go through the complicated -for here at least- process of acquiring a HAM radio license
the peripheral list may expand but at this time I have no further wants/needs to add to this, tinkering all that into something usable and possibly modular is already gonna give me enough headache and things to do of its own

Case

gestures in the general direction of my recently acquired 3D printer I reckon I don't need to explain further about how I plan to make it
now the question of the case design is circling back to what I said at the beginning of this post: most cyberdeck designs I've seen are either bulky briefcases (a surprising amount looking like vintage Commodore units) or blackberry-like; of course there's nothing wrong with that, if that's practical to the builder and they are comfortable using it, then I don't see why they shouldn't go for that, but I intend to switch things up a bit, looking for something that hasn't been done yet, or alternatively, hasn't been done much
the general gist of my ongoing concept, for a lack of a better example, would be something like a plate carrier phone/tablet tray but large enough to accommodate a second plate for the keyboard and have the SBC+LoRa+battery sit below the articulated assembly with cables running up the thing somehow, further details TBD :P

This whole write up might not go anywhere beyond that OR MAYBE in two months I could be on v6 with initial CAD works and a working SBC ensemble, getting a headache from trying to get the LoRa to work and not understanding what's wrong with the software operating it, I guess we'll see how it goes?

(Note: so far, the BOM with UFS storage & without LoRa, batteries & half the cables is @ 250€ (somehow, yeah, I'm surprised too honestly); I'm usually self sufficient in nearly all of my projects but if someone really wants me to see me build this and wanna help with shouldering some of the costs, feel free to CMail me, we can figure something out)

I hope this was still an enjoyable read for both the knowledgeable people among us as well as the less-than-novice passing through to whom I hope it was at the very least a tiny bit informative as to the kind of process involved in DIY micro-computing \(ᵔᵕᵔ)/

cyberdeck diy computers

1 reply