Why I Finally Built a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck (plus Teardown!)

[Music] so [Music] [Music] so what's up guys dennis here and today i'm going to show you my latest project so this is a video i've been wanting to make for a long time and i've been hesitating because it's not a build video this is going to be a bit of a show and tell maybe kind of a bit of a tear down of my own build to kind of show you how i made it how it works and then what i'm going to use it for which is the most exciting part but yeah let's take this into the lab and we'll get a closer look and i'll show you just exactly what it is [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] all right now i know what you're thinking but it's not and i'll explain but first i kind of want to explain my thought process and motivation for building this project here's the thing when you're someone like me there's a certain expectation that you have built certain things or at least had exposure to certain products or hey dennis have you heard about the raspberry pi have you ever used a raspberry pi hey you know would be cool if you built something with a raspberry pi you ever made anything with a raspberry pi so i just heard about these things yes i know about the raspberry pi no i've never used one one of the reasons is that you kind of need a lot of kind of stuff to get one up and going you know you need the raspberry pi you need a monitor you need a keyboard and a power supply so you need all the peripherals and um if you're going to tinker with one you probably want to set it up somewhere as you can see i don't have a lot of space to just have like a corner dedicated to something that i might go and i actually didn't know what i would use it for so my original thought for building this was okay i'm finally going to put together a raspberry pi i started seeing some really cool things that people are doing online making these like retro futuristic cyber deck military slash cyberpunk looking things and hey i've got some cash that i shouldn't be spending but and that's what this initially was but something also in the back of my mind was that one of the great features of raspberry pi is that you can work on other projects and interface them so the first feature of this is an odd one it's empty space it's a compartment down below here for me to put whatever i could put a prototype project down below hooked up to the raspberry pi it's all contained i can take this wherever i go to work on it and if i want to i can just store this away on the shelf and come back to it later which is really nice let's go into the details and i'll show them to you start off this case was really cheap this was not one of those pelican cases i got this from harbor freight and i forget how much it cost but it i think it was under thirty dollars and uh it's not you know glass reinforced nylon or anything it's got a little bit of flex to it but it's actually a really decent case okay another what i would consider a feature and a motivating factor for this project was this right here this is the raspberry pi 400. it's a raspberry pi built into a keyboard and that already simplifies a project like this where now i don't have to go sourcing a separate keyboard and then figuring out how to fit a keyboard with a raspberry pi somewhere all the main computer electronics and compo is all in here the heatsink um it's all within this keyboard so i just need to mount the keyboard and i'm already halfway there uh let's talk about the screen the screen is where i spent my money i actually ordered a few different lcd screens from amazon and i kept the one that looked the best and it ended up being the most expensive one too this is a 1280 resolution screen this is a 10 inch screen you can get eight inch screens in the same resolution but i wanted to be able to see this from across the room and not be right on top of it so i went with the 10-inch screen because it just is a better viewing experience i think now the way i built it into this is this panel right here and i'll take this off in a second it's an aluminum panel that i made actually from this this was an old oscilloscope cover and i just basically cannibalized the cover which is aluminum for uh for a panel to make the uh the screen mount here's the main power button for the raspberry pi and all the five volt devices i knew i wanted a speaker so here's a speaker right here it's got a volume control and an audio source selector so i actually have two audio inputs going into an amplifier for the speaker and i'll show you that when we take this panel off now here's a design that i think is really cool i came up with this because i wanted to be able to type comfortably on this thing and then also be able to close it and the challenge there is that if the keyboard is at a height where it's comfortable for your wrists that then you can't close the lid because it's going to interfere with the screen so what i came up with was a panel that lifts up it can rest on these little brackets here so it's at a raised height makes it super comfortable to type on and now if you want to close the lid just pop those brackets down they rotate and now the whole panel goes back in [Music] the whole panel goes back in go pic what are you the battery got out of place whole panel goes back in and now you can close the lid again this lifts out brackets flip up now you have a nice little platform to do your work the nice the other nice thing about this uh is that there's a little bit of a gap with this raised up it actually allows some airflow in here so there's a gap all the way around the bottom so when i have projects that down there that have like heat sinks or you know cooling requirements at least i'm getting a little bit of airflow there and i do have plans to maybe add some fans either to the side or the back uh right now it's a watertight system the way it is but i'm willing to compromise for the sake of adding some power electronics down below all right so let's take a look at what i consider to be the most important feature of this the space so this panel is actually a piece of wood that i painted black but i also rolled on some carbon fiber liner here which is that just kind of makes it look nice right this is a track pad obviously i had to modify it slightly and let's see when i flip this over you take a look at the underside here because i did have to cut out this big section of the wood i put a little bit of a brace right here with some aluminum angle and this track pad screws onto the wood and then also this this angle here so this here is the usb hub going to the track pad this here is a usb audio device sound card basically and over here i installed a 256 gigabyte solid state drive i didn't like the idea of having everything on an sd card and i also like the idea of having a free sd card slot for a reader in case i want to pop in some extra storage on there maybe download photos or videos or whatever another feature of this is the way i'm powering it the whole thing runs on a drill battery and this is the same battery that i'm using to run my power tools the nice thing about it is it's got protection built in it's got over current overheat over charge and i have a charger for it so i can just unplug it out of here plug it into my charger to recharge it and i could even set this up to run off of two of these and have hot swappable batteries so that i'd never have to worry about having to shut this down when the battery got low right now it's actually fine i'm getting a pretty good run time on just one battery so i'm not concerned about that but the connector i made is actually you can buy these little flashlight things that for the hitachi tools and they're only like 10 bucks which is cheaper than any kind of battery adapter that you can buy so what i did was i bought the flashlight and then i just cut the the bottom off and soldered some power power leads to it i am using this um i forget what the name of this connector is it's the kind you see on the end on the back of ham radios and stuff it's just another nice kind of modular connector if i ever change the type of battery i'm using i can just use this connector instead not super psyched with how much space all of this hookup stuff takes but i've found that these screw connectors offer the most flexibility especially for projects like this where i wanted to be reconfigurable one of the things the way it's set up right now is i have a plug right here which is a standard cigarette lighter adapter i don't have it regulated right now it's running straight off the battery which is fine for a lot of devices that can plug into a cigarette lighter a lot of them are made for 12 or 24 volts i actually don't have it right now but i plan on ordering a a car charger that does power delivery type charging so that's the really fast usb charging and that one will work on 12 up to 24 volts so i could plug it right in here and then i have a a really nice usbc charger built into this i decided to put the main power switch inside because if i wanted to i can close it all up and there'll be no way for anyone to turn this on from the outside so no chance in the battery getting drained and in terms of like security yeah you know it's a security concern or whatever i really i'm more worried about my kids playing with this so that's the reason uh i decided to put this on the inside and not have it coming coming out for monitoring the battery i have this little volt meter right here and when i flip on the switch it tells me what the battery's reading so i can kind of get a sense on how much life i've got left in this battery before i need to shut down and recharge all right now let me tell you what the killer app is for this my real motivation for finally building it and that is ham radio digital modes it's a digital form of communication over the ham bands that typically allows communication with very low power so something that would lend itself to portability but the catch is that you need a computer to do the interpreting for the digital processing part of it with this package here i hope to have a self-contained battery i even want to have the antenna in here i have a length of wire that i can pull out hook up hang it in a tree and just start communicating wherever i am in the world this can go in a car and a backpack bring it out to a field top of a hill mountain something anywhere and i can communicate over the ham digital modes no cell phones no internet it's just can you tell i'm really excited about it so that was my initial reason for putting the speaker here and having an audio selector my deal was that i wanted to leave enough space down below that i could fit a radio maybe a an amp to have an antenna port coming out the back and the switch is if i wanted to switch the speaker over to the ham radio versus the audio coming from the raspberry pi and the main reason i even have the usb audio device there is for digital mode communication with a single sideband transceiver if you don't know what that is don't worry just know that basically the computer makes the audio signal that goes into a regular type of ham radio that would normally get voice so you'd normally use a microphone talk over it instead the computer is sending tones to that ham radio it's transmitting the tones and other computers hearing that and decoding it into text what i'm really excited about though is a new device that just came out from qrp labs which has a built-in sound card it's tiny and it's a self-contained digital only transceiver i believe it's five bands maybe four bands but it is like the perfect device to pair with this and that's why i'm doing this video right now i just ordered one they sold out they were listed on the website like yesterday and they sold out in like 15 minutes uh really cool device i can't wait to get it hook it up to this and i'll do a video specifically on that but i just wanted to give a whole overview of this system because even though that's going to be like its main killer feature other projects i might have in mind will live under here an interface to the computer in various ways that said let's take a look behind this panel and i'll show you how the computer and everything is powered all right and one of the nice things about this case from harbor freight is that you do get these four little mounting points i don't think i drilled these out at all i think they just basically matched up pretty well to a 10 24 thread screw which is the what i'm using right here um to keep these screws in place as i put this up here i did make um some little retainers here let me see that it's basically just uh some aluminum tube that i had but i squirted some hot glue in here just to kind of keep them on the uh the screw keep them captive there sometimes they they come out and i just have to kind of tighten them back in but that was the only way i could get all four lined up in place to screw this down but um yeah let's take a look behind the panel here all right so the power from the battery comes up here through this switch and into the dc to dc converter this is a pretty nice converter i got this off of amazon it's using the xl semi chip xl 4015 it says on this chip here uh pretty standard design but it's a nice dc to dc converter i tested it on my bench before and uh it did well with a with a pretty decent load so this is stepping it down to 12 volts because that's what the lcd wants to see and the nice thing about this lcd is actually is advertised as compatible with the raspberry pi because it can output enough current from its usb um port right here to drive the the pi and other peripherals and stuff which is nice so and i'm actually tapping off of this 5 volts to run the audio over here so this is um a really nice it's a pam 8302 a little two and a half watt class d amplifier from adafruit and it runs off five volts so the two audio sources that i can switch between come from these two wires here and they go down below to some three and a half millimeter jacks this switch right here is a double pole double throw that switches both the left and right channels so i can select between you know source one and source two the output of this goes first to a headphone jack so i have the option of plugging a headphone into here instead and um and listening that way if there's nothing plugged into the headphone jack the circuit's completed to go here which is basically i've got you can't see it in here but there's a couple resistors right here forming um a bridge that mixes the two left and right channels down to mono so this is a mono i mean it's only one speaker obviously this is a mono amplifier so this mixes them equally so you have both left and right going into to this speaker here i did want to incorporate the volume control for both the headphones and the amp it i just couldn't the way the amp needs to see this um this resistance and it it became very complicated i just um unfortunately was not able to add the volume control in before the headphone jack all right so that's it for the back panel here this five volt goes through this cable down here to a usb c connector for the raspberry pi and i'll just show you what the connections are on the back of the pi 400 hopefully not break everything and here's that power cord right here it's a usbc input to the raspberry pi this is a micro hdmi for the lcd screen right so this usb is the type 3 or 3.1 so we're using that for the ssd drive of course and then this is a standard usb 2.0 port so this is going to the usb hub down below so one tip about using that little two and a half watt audio amplifier from adafruit i really like it it's a really nice compact class d the sound quality is perfect for a little speaker like this or some headphones certainly not high fidelity but i did run into one issue with hum and that had to do with grounding i thought it was going to be clever by separating the ground from the audio and the power supply and i thought that would be a cleaner setup it's not you have to ground both your audio connection in with your dc supply ground voltage i thought it was a limitation of the chip and was really annoyed by it and then when i figured out that it was just a grounding issue it sounds great so happy with it so oh so another feature i didn't mention is that this board has magnets embedded in it where it contacts these little brackets and my thought was that when the brackets are down i wanted to stay down and i didn't want this whole board to come flopping up and hitting the lcd screen or anything up above here the way i ended up making this it kind of ended up being a non-issue because it does have a snug fit within the case so when i push it down it it doesn't have a tendency to move around that much it kind of just sticks down in in there but i do think the magnets help just a little bit and it does help surprisingly from the whole thing shifting around when you have it in this mode here so it's um it's really nice and stable and the magnets kind of keep it centered you kind of hear kind of hear them clicking when when they get into position so um yeah so that's the other clever piece of this system put it back in this configuration and i can still use it this way it's certainly you can still type on here you can use the trackpad it's just a little bit uncomfortable and not ideal for ergonomics the way it's recessed under this uh this lip here but but it works all right so i think that's all i had for you today that's i think that's all i wanted to show for this um like i said i'm going to have other future projects using this and certainly the hem radio one is going to be top of the list um i'll certainly do a video first time getting on air if there's other projects i think of um why don't you tell me i'd love to hear in the comments of ideas what would you use this for um you guys always have the best ideas so shoot hit me up with some some projects i could build or ideas for this so if you like this video click the thumbs up down below if you're not a subscriber consider subscribing click the bell for notifications of course and follow along for future projects like this and we'll see you next time thanks for watching guys

Channel: What Dennis Does

Views: 62,302

Keywords:

Id: kw8e5XPixHQ

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021