-=CYBERDECKS=- (and why build one?)

A cyberdeck is a personal, portable computer inspired by classic cyberpunk fiction—think Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell, or Blade Runner. Unlike a laptop or phone, a cyberdeck is usually hand-built, customized, and unapologetically weird. It might live in a Pelican case, a 3D-printed shell, or a hacked-together metal box, often featuring a small screen, mechanical keyboard, exposed wiring, and blinking LEDs. Under the hood, it’s commonly powered by a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer, running Linux and whatever tools the builder finds interesting.

People build cyberdecks not because they’re practical, but because they’re personal. A cyberdeck is a rejection of sealed, disposable technology in favor of something tactile, understandable, and modular. Building one is a way to learn about Linux, electronics, networking, radio, programming, and hardware—all while making something that feels like it came out of science fiction. 

 

I built my cyberdeck with a spare Raspberry Pi 3B+ board I had lying around, running Raspberry Pi Lite OS. I extended 2 of the USB ports and the ethernet port out to the main panel, which is made of ABS plastic, cut to fit into the opening on a Pelican 1300 case. My plan is to use this machine for software development, networking experiments, and maybe some software defined radio experimentation (more on that to come).

 

To give the Deck more cyberpunk street cred, I slapped a sweet "Legalize Recreational Plutonium" on the side. My plan is to expand the functionality of this unit over time. Some enhancements I'm considering include some blinking LEDs (maybe to give a visual indication of wi-fi strength or some other signal), adding an Arduino to the mix, and creating a custom speaker/antenna mount to handle software defined radio stuff.

Building a tiny Lisp interpreter with C++

I made a very simple Lisp interpreter using C++. I decided to focus on Lisp after a failed experience of trying to write a tiny BASIC interpreter for a cyberdeck build I'm working on putting together. I ended up shifting to Lisp for a variety of reasons. It is an interpreted language, meaning it relies on a program to act as a sort of middle man to execute the code versus compiling it to machine language. It also is one of the oldest computer languages with an extremely simple syntax. I decided to use C++ rather than Python for this task. C++ runs extremely fast compared to Python (which is also an interpreted language), and interpreters really require that speed provided by the program running as native machine code. This project could have been done using Python, but my guess is that running the program would have suffered from the increased headroom necessary of running in interpreter within an interpreter.

The interpreter is very basic by any standard. It currently can process the following mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, absolute value, square root, and calculating powers. It can define and set variables, as well as print both numbers and strings to the console. It can handle floating point numbers. Essentially, it's an extremely simple programmable calculator!

So what did I learn from this? The first thing is, under the hood, there is nothing basic about BASIC. I was shocked at how challenging it is to write a simple interpreter for such as simple language. The second is the robustness and honestly the beauty of Lisp. The language, even in it's extremely simplified form is a joy to work with. I've always thought that there is magic to be found when working with limitations, and while Lisp seems to be extremely limited compared to more modern interpreted languages like Python, the structure of the language lends itself to some really creative solutions. 

Here is an example of code that runs in my interpreter to solve quadratic equations:

> (define a 1)
=> 1
> (define b -5)
=> -5
> (define c 6)
=> 6
> (define discriminant (- (* b b) (* 4 (* a c))))
=> 1
> (define x1 (/ (+ (- 0 b) (sqrt discriminant)) (* 2 a)))
=> 3
> (define x2 (/ (- (- 0 b) (sqrt discriminant)) (* 2 a)))
=> 2
> (print "Solutions: x1 =" x1 ", x2 =" x2)
Solutions: x1 = 3 , x2 = 2

 Below is a video of me running a demo of the interpreter to show the basic syntax for some of the operations and showing how to set up a simple program that converts Celsius to Fahrenheit.

 

The robotic voice in the video was created by a separate program I built with Python that converts text to speech and then saves the output as a .WAV file. Still working out some of the kinks with that, but it's fine for now.

 

Housing a Linux computer inside a broken Atari 2600 cartridge

 I started thinking pretty soon after completing the custom cable channel project of housing a Raspberry Pi UNO into a repurposed cable box from the 1980s about other novel and interesting ideas to house single board computers. I recently was tidying up my work space and my eyes fell on a stack of Atari 2600 cartridges that failed to boot when testing them. It was during the process of taking the casing for a fairly grimy copy of Surround apart it dawned on me that these cases are the perfect size to house a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which I happened to have a couple just sitting on the desk mocking me for not using them.

The first stage was to completely disassemble the old cartridge, which honestly is a bit more challenging than it probably should be. I got pretty lucky removing the original labels, so I was able to reuse them after everything is assemble. There is only 1 phillips head screw to remove, but there are 6 plastic clips which require you to deal with before the casing will come apart. I used a small sized slotted screwdriver to carefully push the clips in and manage to get the thing apart, but I could definitely see people breaking the tabs and/or scarring up the plastic of the cartridge while trying to get these things disengaged. After that it's pretty straightforward. The dust cover assembly slides out, and nothing is holding the game ROM in place. I opted to save my ROM, since I'm still going to see if I can rehab the pins to check if it might actually boot after a good scrubbing.

The next step was to hot glue the offsets in place inside the cartridge to mount the Raspberry Pi. I decided to run a very bare bones distro of the Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit) which comes with no desktop. My goal here is a totally basic Linux system hidden inside an old Atari cartridge. Maybe I'll install Stella or some other 2600 emulator on it at some point - I imagine it would be pretty cool to play 2600 games on a computer housed inside an actually 2600 game.

After testing to make sure everything worked, I reassemble the case and glued the orginal labels back into place. Since the Pi Zero W uses 2 micro USB connections (one for USB stuff and one to power the board) I decided to put a red dot of paint underneath the power connection, since you can't easily read the board to prevent me from inadvertently mixing up the connections.

 Fun project that was totally a spontaneous use of time that I should have allocated to doing something else. 

Constructing a homebrew "Cable Channel" Part 2

 It's relatively easy to use a Raspberry Pi to approximate the experience of having your own custom cable television channel similar to what folks of a certain age may remember from their youth. In a previous post I went over some of the basic steps to get a Raspberry Pi 4 set up as a "retro box" that automatically plays a curated collection of movies and shows from the 1970s, including period correct public service announcements and commercials. After a couple of weeks of testing - which was essentially just letting the box run to make sure that the flow of the programing actually felt like watching period correct television - I decided that I needed to ramp things up. It wasn't good enough to just have a Raspberry Pi that played old movies and commercials. Any modern computer can do that. This needed to actually have the entire aesthetic of a classic 1970s cable channel. It needed to dress the part.

That's where eBay comes back. Some quick searching and I was able to locate an untested cable box circa early 80's for parts/repair that had a buy now price of only $3.81 (plus $12 for shipping). This box included a front channel display and was roomy enough to house both the Raspberry PI and an Arduino UNO (more on that below). I decided to go with the 80's style box, since the larger encloser would make it much easier to work with, and I had some ideas about utilizing the front channel display screen.

 

When the box arrive it was immediately obvious that the particular Jerrold 550 Starcom converter had lived a rough life. The was some serious damage to one corner of the plastic face plate due to what I can only attribute as "falling damage" from being dropped on a hard surface, and the unit was covered in old masking tape and 40+ years of grime. I also noticed that the unit's enclosure was secured with rivets, probably since the majority of these units were distributed by local cable companies and they didn't want to make it easy for industrious hackers to open them up to try to figure out how to get free Home Box Office. The first step was to drill out the rivets so I could take the unit apart.

 

After I parted the case out I spent some time scrubbing the case down with dish detergent and using a liberal amount of Goo Be Gone to get all that sticky tape residue cleaned up. Once everything was clean and dry, I could spend some time attending to the smashed corner of the face plate. I had a couple of options for the repair, but I decided that the easiest (and structurally most secure) fix would be to recreate the corner using Green Stuff two-part epoxy. For folks not familiar with Green Stuff, it essentially is a two-part epoxy that you mix by hand and then mold like a really rigid Play Dough into to place. It is typically used a lot when kit bashing models for games like Warhammer 40K, when you need to sculpt a custom piece, and maybe adhere a particularly tricky portion of a model together. It works well, can be easily sculpted, and takes simple water-based acryllic paint just fine. I eyeballed the amount that would be needed to recreate the missing/damaged corner, mixed it up, and then went to work sculpting the corner as best as I could. Green Stuff sets pretty quickly - typically with 5-10 minutes - so I didn't have the luxury of time here. My goal was good, not great. After the epoxy set I mixed up a fairly good approximation of the color of the faceplate using acrylic paint to blend the repair in as best as I could. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. From across the room it's not noticeable and the Green Stuff actually made the faceplate much more sturdy that it was previous to the repair.

 

Once the plastic was repaired I started brainstorming how to use the front channel display. I immediately though about using an Arduino UNO to power a small LED screen, since I'd used that pairing to great effect on a couple of smaller projects. I suppose I could have powered the LED's from the Raspberry Pi, but to be honest it was quicker and easier for me to wire up the display to an extra UNO R3 I had and I was able to repurpose a sketch that I had written for a handheld snake game. The Pi can power the UNO via USB, and if I ever want to change the display it is super easy to do (and doesn't affect the functionality of the Pi). It also gives me to option of adding a module for a remote control if want later down the line. I played around with different text for the display, finally settling on having an asterisk gliding across the display. It looked cool and I'm a sucker for moving LED's (let's just blame that on "Knight Rider"). After some tweaks for placement and a couple of generous blobs of hot glue to hold the screen in place, I had a functioning display that I could easily modify to anything that used a basic character set.

 

 

The final stretch was just to drop the Raspberry Pi into the box and get everything secured. I cut and glued some rubber welcome mat materials to the bottom of the case to assist with giving everything a nice, non-conductive floor to mount the pieces on, and mapped out the most efficient layout to screw everything down.

 

And there it is...a working retro "cable channel" that lives inside a period correct cable box with a customizable LED front panel. Eventually I will add an Arduino remote control module that I will use to change up the front display to a couple of different visual options. I still need to come up with a reasonable plan for cable management that will allow me to plug in a mouse and keyboard into the back. I can remote into the box from another computer to add videos if I want. Overall, I'm pretty stoked on this little project. I'd like to make another one at some point using a Raspberry Pi 3 with composite video so I can easily run the signal to one of the CRT televisions I have. This is the first project I'm done that has utilized both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino boards and I love the flexibility of having both in a build. Now it's time to watch some TV!
 

Let's create a cable TV channel!

I’ve become infatuated with Raspberry Pi single-board computers recently, and thanks to a low-grade eBay addiction, I now have several of them just sitting around, mocking me to make them useful. Recently, I read about someone who turned one into a sort of personal cable channel, and I got fired up on the idea of creating my own “cable channel” of highly curated videos—which I’m sure nobody else would want to watch.

It probably would have been easier to just follow the tutorial I found online for this type of project, but as usual, I felt it necessary to reinvent the wheel for the sake of “learning.” For me, the basic parts of getting a home cable channel working are:

1. Figure out how to randomize/play/loop videos from a folder

2. Determine how to “broadcast” the content (HDMI, Wi-Fi, etc.)

3. Decide what content to use

I kept the first part simple. Since I’d be running this project on a spare Raspberry Pi 4 with Pi OS, I decided to use VLC as the media player. VLC natively does everything I needed (randomize, play, loop from a folder), and it can be controlled via terminal/bash scripts—perfect for making everything restart automatically if the system reboots.

I skipped the broadcasting question for now and focused on getting the system running. The fun part, after all, was deciding on a theme for my channel and grabbing videos! I’ve always been a movie buff and grew up watching late-night “midnight movie” flicks on TV, so it was a no-brainer to load up the Pi with movies and shows that fit that vibe.

I could have taken the easy route and gone straight to the Internet Archive, but instead, I pulled material from YouTube. A little-known fact: YouTube not only streams video content but also allows you to download files. Since I’d need a large number of videos, I wrote a quick Python script to batch-download user-curated playlists. Python makes this easy with the pytube library, which was designed for this purpose. The script asks for a YouTube URL and a save location, then pulls down the highest-quality stream available.

At first, I ran into certificate errors on macOS. Instead of troubleshooting libraries, I just ran the script on an Ubuntu machine and it worked without issues.

The flow is straightforward:

1. Prompt for the YouTube URL and the save folder

2. Use pytube to get the highest-resolution stream

3. Download it to the folder

It’s a short and simple tool, but it does the job—a quick way to grab videos for offline viewing. After downloading a bunch of nostalgic movies and TV shows, I started scraping vintage 1970s commercials too. Since VLC randomizes playback, there’s a chance that after a movie or show, one or two commercials will play before the next feature. After raiding YouTube’s vaults, I had a solid library for my channel. Then came the fun part: testing and tweaking.

Long story short—it worked! It feels like watching a real TV channel from the 1970s. Videos flowed seamlessly from one to the next, with a nice balance of movies, shows, and commercials. (I might add more commercials later—it’s surprisingly fun to see a 1972 McDonald’s ad pop up.)

My startup bash script launches VLC at boot, runs everything in fullscreen, randomizes playback, and loops continuously without showing the user interface:

#!/bin/bash
vlc --fullscreen --loop --random /home/pi/Videos/

Right now, I have the Pi hooked up to a spare TV via HDMI, but I’m tempted to pick up an HDMI-to-RF modulator so I can run the channel on a CRT I keep around for playing Nintendo. Ideally, I’d love to broadcast to multiple TVs around the house—but I don’t know if I want to run 100 feet of coax cable just to watch Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of in every room.

Or do I?