A couple weeks ago, Brooke and I crammed
our lives into a rented van and launched into a two-thousand-mile journey
from New York City to Colorado. [Road noise] Bridge! Duck! [Road noise] As we hurtled into the setting sun, I could feel
that big city smog giving way to blue skies, crisp mountain air, and a
fresh new outlook on life. But I was wrong. We now live, you see... in the suburbs. To beat back this desolate cyberpunk wasteland
and pry its consumerist fingers off my soul, I've developed a weapon of pure creativity
- a cyberdeck. Ladies, gentlemen, cyborgs, say hello to the Voidstar Data Blaster,
and welcome... to Voidstar Lab West. [Song:] I'm a cop... from the future. I am Zack Freedman, high-altitude cybernetic
suburbanite, and this is the Voidstar Data Blaster. I've taken this Raspberry Pi 400 and
souped it up with a detachable wearable display, battery handles, an SDR receiver, and a
goddamn antenna! In fiction, the cyberdeck is the trademark battlestation of console cowboy
anti-heroes running nets through cyberspace, but what makes a real-life cyberdeck depends
on who you ask. The cyberdeck subreddit says "it's basically a laptop computer,
but using an HMD or neural interface." Cyberdeck Cafe says they're "artisan crafted
computers made in the cyberpunk aesthetic." The Cyberdeck Discord says... I don't actually
know what they say, because every time I log in I get distracted for hours. You should
totally join the Cyberdeck Discord. Also, join the Voidstar Lab Discord... even
us cyborgs crave human interaction. I decided this cyberdeck needed four things:
One, it needs handles so I can lug the deck where the action is, and jack in without sitting
down. It's always easier to jack in one-handed. Number two: It needs a full-size physical
keyboard, but it can't fold up. If it's got a touch keyboard, it's a tablet.
If it's got a hinge, it's a laptop. Number three: It needs cyberpunk features.
Brain computer interfaces are bogus - fight me - so that means it needs a head-mounted
display and some cyber-snooping-ready SDR. Why is it called the Data Blaster? Well, it ended up looking kind of like an
old-school ghetto blaster, except... data. Some of you may ask what I'm going to do with
the cyberdeck, and that is an excellent question. This is the first project I built at my new
workshop which TOTALLY RULES. Voidstar Lab West is almost as big as my entire old
apartment, and has tons of tools and toys that just couldn't fit into the Fab Lab.
I also added a 3d print farm humidor room! I'm giving my Patrons an exclusive tour, so if
you want to see the new and improved Voidstar Lab, and support future projects like this
one, head to patreon.com/zackfreedman. The heart of this project is the Raspberry Pi 400,
which is basically a Raspberry Pi 4 in a keyboard. The Pi 400 is perfect for cyberdecking because
it's a slim computer and a slim keyboard, and all the ports are on the same side so there
are fewer cables to run. The Pi 400 uses the same chip as the 4GB Pi 4, but it actually runs
both faster and cooler. It's science, look it up. I ordered this 1280x480 touchscreen from
Aliexpress. 1280x480 sounds like I'm saying something wrong, but think of it like two 640x480
displays in one. The display is sensibly short, but still comfortably holds two terminal
windows side-by-side, or one 1337 h4xz0r split terminal. I have no idea what this
script is doing, but it looks SICK!! But no cyberdeck is complete without a
way to wire your head into the Matrix, so allow me to introduce the Vufine. Unlike my
Optigon wearable teleprompter, the Vufine is just a display, no computer, which is perfect
because it's attached to a computer! This is literally a second monitor. I can drag anything
from the main display to the Vufine, and even use both at once. The Vufine doesn't permanently
attach to glasses - it's held on by a magnetic mount - so I can detach it from my face and stash
it on a dock on the deck. On... on the deck dock. The Pi 400 succs 500mA doing literally
nothing, and it can draw over one and a half amps when it's feeling frisky. I bought a
chunky 20AH USB bank to give it plenty of juice; it's a fancy one with, like, a solar panel for
off-the-grid fun. Don't get too attached to it, though; this story does not have a happy ending. You see, I was supposed to design a circuit
board for the Data Blaster, but dragging 200 boxes of crap through two time zones turns out
to be kind of distracting. This week's episode is sponsored by NextPCB, the quick-turn circuit
board prototype manufacturer. Even with NextPCB's four-day turnaround and 24-hour shipping, I just
could not finish this project before we left New York. With prices this low and service this fast,
prototyping straight to PCB is a no-brainer... says the guy who just proved he had he has no
brain. Had I made boards, I would also be able to refine my design with NextDFM, their free Gerber
analysis tool! Not only does this visualize the Gerbers that you're about to fab, it also scans
them for hidden dangers and risky elements that can trash your budget and smash your schedule.
NextDFM also lets you panelize your boards, which is a super useful feature that's missing from
*cough* EAGLE *cough* popular board editors *cough KiCad cough* No matter what you're building, no
matter what software you're using, and no matter where you're having them made, NextDFM can boost
your odds of crushing your design on the first try. Links are in the description, and
every board you order supports Voidstar Lab. I started by modeling the Raspberry Pi 400, and
then I designed a home for each part. I constantly printed these little test slices to make sure all
my dimensions were right. You can see that some of these took a few tries, so thank Satan that
we have Micro Center in Denver so I could buy more filament. I have got to stop name-dropping
Micro Center. The trickiest part was getting the wearable display dock - its sexy curves made it
basically impossible to measure, and I had to design the dock mostly by trial and error. You can
see that I originally intended to make the Data Blaster white to match the Pi, but this was a big
mistake - everyone knows that everything cyberpunk has to be black, which is why the most cyberpunk
of all the cookware is the cast-iron skillet. Next task is the battery handles. Before we build,
we must destroy. Its equivalent exchange, baby! I'm gonna pull the lithium-ion cells out
of this power bank and then rearrange them into the handles, except wait, this
USB battery pack doesn't HAVE cells. It's got LiPo packs. Well, if only I had
made my own power board. All I have is my daily-driver USB power bank and I need
that for my portable soldering iron. At least I needed it for
my portable soldering iron. Hey, kids! Soldering to batteries is EXTREMELY
DANGEROUS! These things can start a house fire, so make sure you do this project before
you get too attached to your house. So I bought this extra-flexible 18ga wire from
Amazon, and I added a slot in these segments to route it, but when I started soldering,
this weird black crud started boiling up and ruining my joints. This was odd, because this
usually happens when there's padding or enamel or some other additive on the
wire, but this is all copper... wait a second... why is the cut end silver
instead of, you know, copper-colored? Well, this isn't copper wire at all! Each strand is
aluminum wire painted to LOOK like copper wire, so this wire is worthless! I'm gonna find out
who did this, I'm gonna go to their house, I'm gonna wait till they're showering, I'm
gonna sprinkle Legos all over their floor. Here's how this thing comes together.
In front, we have a faceplate, which has the heads-up display dock and has a
frame to stick the display to - it has, like, some double-sided adhesive on it. Everything
is covered in ads nowadays - I mean in our cyberpunk future - so I printed some fake logo
badges. The PCB from the power bank is mounted in the middle layer. The back has some fancy
flair, for which I forgot to focus the camera, and some integrated pegs to wind
up the wearable display's cable. You have to do a little loop-de-loop at the end... Next step, figure out the wiring. These
ribbon cables are the thinnest available, but I'm limited on how aggressively I can
bend them, because if they crease, they break. Figuring out a combination of ports
and parts that minimize the wiring was by far the hardest part of the project, and
I really should have just... integrated all these into one board. This is a double pain in the ass
- that's right, a pain in two asses - because the ZIF sockets are super-duper fragile, and even a
tiny bit too much force will snap this tab off. Wait, I need this one for
the project! Pissfiddles! The power bank's charging port and power button
are now buried inside the dec,k so I added an extension cable and a fancy light-up button.
The battery handles mount to the back plate, and over here is the charging indicator from the
power bank PCB. I added some light pipes made of 3D-printer filament, and the blue LED's make
the filament fluoresce! For the finishing touch, I added a Nooelec NESDR Nano 3, a super-small
software-defined radio. An SDR is sort of like an AM, FM, CB, TV, basically super-high-bandwidth
receiver with tuning electronics to let you use SOFTWARE to DEFINE what RADIO signals you pick
up! I can still use this to sweep for bugs, debug wireless gizmos, and make cool-looking
waterfall plots! Nothing says cyberpunk like sniffing and demodulating every
radio signal in the immediate vicinity with a collapsible aerial. Finally,
let's get ahead of the memelords. Not only does the data blaster play Doom,
it plays Doom on a wearable display. I'll be honest, I built this thing for the cool
factor, but it turned out to actually be really useful. It's easy to carry, and it's a, you
know, fully loaded desktop computer with, like, Linux. The battery life is bananas; this
thing draws like 600mA from the batteries, so with over 20AH in the tank, this thing
could run for like 30 straight hours. I left the GPIO, USB ports, and Ethernet open
so I can hook anything up. The Data Blaster has immediately become my dedicated
go-anywhere do-anything field computer, and now that I'm in Colorado where we actually
HAVE fields, you're going to see a lot more of it! If you want to build your own, I did
not have the time to take pictures for the how-to guide and now it's fused
together with epoxy, so you're screwed! I did put the printable STL files in the
bill of materials in the description. It's not terribly difficult to figure
out how to make it, but... uh... sorry! In the future, I do plan to revisit this project
and make a version that's better-documented, you know, not permanently glued together, and of
course, loaded with custom circuit boards from our sponsor NextPCB... assuming they don't fire me for
not actually using their product in their video. Subscribe if you want to see that!
Not me getting fired, the cyberdeck. This project was made possible by my
hyper-generous patrons filling up the parts fund! If you've got the means and you want to
see more spicy projects, hit the thing right up over there. Your support makes a colossal
difference. Our super-cyberpunk Co-Lab-Orators are cmd and I'm noT Betta Core! I've implanted
their names somewhere in this episode, so go trace their uplinks. Our augmentedly awesome
lab assistants are: Tech Daddy, Taranach, C. Harris, Robert Berriz, salthy, Roger Pincombe,
TheANTIFA, Azundo, Gregory Jones, James Barry, Bill Schuller, Brian Santero, Michael Dunn,
good succ, Jason, Olivier Yiptong, Accalia, Varka, Cyrus Draegur, powerful_cch, Anthony
Mincarelli, Sir Derpington of Derptopia, Zanforian, Andrew Paton, But by far the biggest
thankyou to my overlord and savour the one person who I really wouldnt be here without,
Oh I'm sorry, looks like it got cut off. Just kidding, William Overton!, and Daniel
Cadwell. I'm glad the guy from the last episode who was calling for help via Patreon username
got rescued... although maybe he died. Anyways, thanks to Brooke the greatest road tripper
in the West, and to our Discord mods, MyFairJulie, Billie Ruben, and Techniack,
who held down the fort during our voyage. Billie has been streaming regularly on
her own channel, and it is dee-lightful, so go check that out. But wait! One final thanks
to bootdsc, the hack maniac who basically made the entire cyberdeck community happen. He invited
me to the Cyberdeck Virtucon a few weeks ago, and we chatted about DIY wearables, we got
Doom Eternal running on a heads-up display, and I spilled prosecco in my lap about
three minutes after the camera started rolling and I had to keep a poker face! Link is
in the description. Like, comment, subscribe, follow me everywhere, and keep on hacking. Thanks
for watching, and I'll see you in the future
I discovered this subreddit from this video. The circle of life.
This is properly cool, and I like the guy's style!
Theres a discord?
That's so cool.
I'm not sure what the other commenter is hearing, the audio sounds perfect to me.
I wish he had some customization for the vufine+. I've got one, but it is a pain in the ass to try and get positioned and stay positioned.
I'd really like a custom 3d printed glasses/mount for it.
I love this design, but mostly the handles and how big it is.
Where am I ?
He mentions that he should have made a single board pcb for the components right?