Polly's Primer: Polly Pocket-inspired, Pi-powered cyberdeck

The miniature worlds inside (now vintage) Polly Pocket capsules always captivated me – bursting with fold-out foliage, articulating furniture, and hidden gems. They originated in Swindon – as did I, and the Joule Thief circuit I built into a PCB – so I'm extra fond of these little marvels. :) As a child, I treasured our incredible crystal ball and spellbinding seascape/book – the latter of which is the physical inspiration for this project.

Later in life, I fell in love with the Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. While the novel has its weird bits, I was immediately inspired to build my own version of this tech-ified personalized learning tool – complete with telepresence!

My third inspiration is the classic grimoire: a book of spells, "typically including instructions on how to create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical spells, charms, and divination, and how to summon or invoke supernatural entities such as angels, spirits, deities, and demons" (per Wikipedia).

I decided to combine all of these into a cyberdeck!

The system

Brain: Raspberry Pi 4

Touchscreen: 10.1" HDMI touchscreen LCD from Waveshare

Keyboard: A stenography keyboard called Georgi – although I'll probably also use a regular keyboard for setting it up 😅

Battery: 20W USB power bank, with outputs to USB-C (for the Pi) and USB-A (for the screen)

Structure

Planned:

• Case: Printed in blue/green Quantum PLA with gold accents and a "jewel"! (I might upgrade this someday with an Adafruit Monster M4sk – but since those are out of stock, and I'm on a tight deadline, jewels will suffice.)
• Shoulder strap
• Latch closure

Capabilities

Planned:

• Knowledge base
• Stenography, via Plover
• Video streaming to Twitch? (I've begun doing "co-work with me" streams sometimes, as a productivity hack.)
• Macro buttons, including physical shutdown/restart controls
• Voice assistant testing (Picroft, Rhasspy)
• IPFS terminal? (Based on my earlier PiPFS project)

Build log

3/13, 10pm: Displays

Well! I wanted to have this done for Pi Day, but unfortunately ran into some issues with various displays:

• The touchscreen display I wanted to use kept showing vertical lines and blinking (as documented here); the Adafruit Discord folks were very friendly, and I got a couple new leads to pursue, but I'm setting that one aside for now.
• I also tried the Nebra Anybeam Pi HAT, but couldn't get it to work on the first couple of tries. I still think it would be rad to have a little projector Pi, and definitely plan on developing that further!! However, right now the projector refuses to show anything other than the Nebra logo on a white background. Ah well! It uses almost all the pins on the Pi, anyway, and I haven't yet found a list of which ones are free – so my shutdown/restart button might have challenges.

So, earlier today I biked around in the light rain and picked up the only mini HDMI display I could find: a 10" one from Waveshare, which comes with a bunch of cool stuff like an HDMI cable + adapter and power brick, plus a laser-cut stand, pre-attached (partly) with the ports labeled. It's definitely bigger and heavier than I originally wanted – but now that I think of it, for an actual portable Pi experience this is definitely more usable! Along with the 20W / 20,000 mAh power bank I got, it will be a hefty deck, but more practical than the original design.

Unfortunately, until I settled on a display I couldn't really start modeling the enclosure in CAD – since it's hard to set up a project so the dimensions don't get screwy when you drastically change them. I'm glad I waited, but it means I won't get to have a fully assembled deck for Pi Day, booo! At least I can still show off my PiPFS (IPFS portable console) from a few years ago... and I'm going to try and shortcut the process by prototyping with painted cardboard for the large planes, then 3D-printing the decorations. (This stuff usually takes a couple of iterations anyway, and it worked with F3NR1R!)

...Success! This new screen worked on the first go, although there was a bit of touchiness about the Pi restarting. The screen also takes 3A, so I'm a bit concerned about using one power bank for both. Perhaps it will have to be "semi-portable" until I get a less power-hungry display working. Kinda goes against the cyberdeck ethos, but who's counting? (Me. I'm counting.)

...Battery success, too! Baby steps:

3/14, Pi Day: Camera experimentation!

Today I received the new Global Shutter Camera from Raspberry Pi! This is great, because I've always wanted to have a perpetual Pi setup that I can plonk down on the desk and use to test new hardware. I'm going to try running it live on the channel... wish me luck!

Playlist for this project (Spotify)

Short link for this project: bit.ly/primerhack