A Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Design Inspired By Classic Luggable 8-Bit Computers

William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, and the novel Neuromancer in particular, is like the cyberpunk bible. A great deal of modern hacker culture can be traced directly back to Gibson’s iconic science fiction works. As such, it’s popular for makers and hackers to pay homage to the cyberpunk world that Gibson created in the Sprawl Trilogy. One of the most common projects for makers to tackle is the construction of a custom cyberdeck — the name for portable computers used by hackers in that world. Reviiser is a Raspberry Pi-based cyberdeck with a design that was inspired by classic luggable 8-bit computers.

We have covered a number of cyberdeck builds over the years, but most of them take a different approach. They tend to look something like a Commodore 64 with a screen attached to the case. The Reviiser, on the other hand, resembles early luggable computers like the Commodore SX-64. It was generous to call luggable computers portable, but they did pave the way for the laptops that would begin to bear resemblance to our modern laptops a few years later. The Reviiser manages to look like a vintage luggable while still featuring the cobbled-together cyberpunk aesthetics are the hallmark of cyberdeck builds.

The Reviiser is built around a Raspberry Pi 4 and includes a roomy 7” touchscreen LCD display. A massive 30,000mAh battery pack provides enough juice for hours of hacking. A touchpad is attached to the right side of the case, and there is a fold-down mechanical keyboard complete with an interesting set of keycaps. The entire enclosure and all of the mechanical parts are 3D-printed, and are designed to be modular in order to accommodate different components. You can, for example, redesign the battery holder module to take advantage of another battery power bank. All of the STL files have been provided, so you can go and build your own Reviiser cyberdeck and start living your cyberpunk fantasies!