A Scary Good DIY Severance Computer

If we are honest about it, a lot of us would like to be able to completely forget about work when we call it a day. But probably not in such a literal way as is depicted in the television series Severance, where a medical procedure causes employees of a company to forget everything about their work while they are away from the office. I don’t know about you, but if a brain implant is involved, you can count me out.

Andrew Chilicki is a fan of Severance, and, in particular, is fascinated by the computer terminals used by members of the Macrodata Refinement department. Sure, they have a weird and mysterious job — looking at screens with grids of numbers, identifying those that are “scary,” and sorting them into bins. I guess you have to have a microchip implanted in your brain for it to make sense.

But the terminal itself has an amazing retrofuturistic vibe to it. Chilicki was so drawn to this, that he had to make it a reality — if not for official spooky purposes, at least as a very cool desk toy. This purpose was accomplished by, as you might expect, 3D-printing a look-alike housing for the Macrodata Refinement computer. The model was produced in Blender by referencing images from the show. The remainder of the hardware consisted of a Raspberry Pi single-board computer and an LCD display.

As for the software, it had to be able to display a grid of numbers that filled the entire screen. Chilicki did not want these numbers to look too random, so a Perlin noise map was generated to assign the grid’s values. “Bad” numbers are determined by a threshold, and groups of them shake about when hovered over by the pointer. A click sends them to a bin with all the other scary numbers.

For more information on the build — and the details you need to create your own Macrodata Refinement computer — check out Chilicki’s GitHub repository.