A Cyberdeck Built Specifically for 3D Printing

If we’re being honest with ourselves, we can admit that most of the cyberdeck projects out there lack a true purpose. People create them because they’re fun to build and cool to see in action, not necessarily to use for any specific application in the real world. But Paul Lagier’s new cyberdeck is an exception, because he designed it for 3D printing.

Specifically, Lagier intends to use this cyberdeck in his shop where he has a small print farm. He wanted to monitor and control the 3D printers there, while also having the ability to do CAD work without going to sit down at a desktop PC. This cyberdeck does all of that in a relatively small, handheld package.

The word “relatively” in that last paragraph is carrying a lot of weight, because this is much larger than a tablet. Heck, it is a lot larger than any laptop made in the last 30 years. It has a 15.6” touchscreen LCD, which matches what you’d see on a mid-size laptop, but it is much thicker (several inches) to accommodate the other hardware.

That other hardware consists primarily of a Khadas Mind 2 mini PC and a Mind Graphics module. The Mind 2 is pretty slim, but the Mind Graphics module is very chunky, as it houses an entire NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics card. What Lagier sacrificed is portability, he gained in processing power. This cyberdeck is more than powerful enough to work with complex assemblies in CAD.

That hardware all fits into a 3D-printed shell. It looks fantastic and includes some nice extras, like three auxiliary OLED screens and an RGB LED strip controlled by an ESP32 development board. The ESP32, in turn, operates under the control of a Home Assistant server. That means that it can display and respond to all kinds of information, completely independently of the operating system running on the cyberdeck. It can, for example, flash the LEDs green when a print finishes. The OLEDs can show status information for the print farm.

While this is a very niche build, the execution is top-notch and the functionality will appeal to many people who run several 3D printers.