Introducing my Prototyping Cyberdeck (PROTODECK V1)

An all encompassing toolbox for hardware enthusiasts 🌱

I did end up jumping on the Cyberdeck wave and made a few quick builds out of stuff I had laying around (lunchbox, raspberry pi, oled display and a cheap battery). 
 

But I wanted to expand on this, so I will be building a nice modular deck for the sole purpose of prototyping. An all you need hardware engineering toolbox in one place you can carry anywhere and prototype on the fly. 

I am using a hard carry case that's partially 3D printed. I've got a cylone FPGA laying around that I want to run Linux on. Then I'll be adding various parts and peripheries. 

This project has got my creative juices flowing, just drawing up and editing this infographic alone was so much fun. I've recently gotten into Blender and as soon as I got the hang of it spent hours on a full custom 3D design. As an artist, I think I prefer it to Solidworks - obviously they are completely different tools but it just feels a bit more intuitive. Aleast for this project. It also has a Python API and other useful integrations. 

There's so much you can do with a custom computer, me personally, I am thinking to add a LoRa module, SDR dongle and maybe GPS with I2C/UART - the possibilities are endless. Some solar panels for charging the battery, there'll be plenty of power I can extract from recent UK heatwaves 🌱 

There's no better feeling than complete control over what you own, I've seen inspired by so many different builds, some for example with hardware isolation which is great for security. One the modules become compromised, no problem, just yank it out. I am not to fussed about this though, I am more concerned about radio noise isolation and fault tolerance. 
 

Then of course you run your favorite version of Linux. And because it's Linux there will be no forced telemetry baked into the kernel (unlike Mac and windows). For those that don't know what a kernel is, think of it as an operating systems brain - it controls physical hardware like cpu and memory. Boot parameters are under your control. 
 

Finally, no forced AI integration. If I want to run local LLMs - I can run these myself.

That's it for now, keep an eye out for updates!