Adam Blumenberg's Digital Typewriter Is a Raspberry Pi-Powered Beast of Distraction-Free Writing

Physician and self-described "tinkerer" Adam Blumenberg has turned a Raspberry Pi into a distraction-free digital typewriter, taking inspiration from a classic of the classroom.

"I write a lot," Blumenberg explains, providing as evidence an impressive bibliography of published papers on the topics of toxicology, emergency medicine, software, and more. "I wanted a distraction free digital typewriter with nice clacky mechanical keys and a thin wide screen."

Blumenberg's inspiration, though, comes not from the mechanical typewriter directly but from a device which may be familiar to those who came up through the education system relatively recently: the AlphaSmart Neo 2. Launched in 2007 as a successor to the AlphaSmart Neo, the Neo 2 was the last in a line of distraction-free writing devices which stored students' work in an internal memory for later transfer to a more powerful desktop or laptop.

Like the AlphaSmart, Blumenberg's Raspberry Pi 4 Model B-powered typewriter stores articles — written in the concentration-boosting FocusWriter or more general-purpose LibreOffice Writer — in its internal memory, for later transfer to a general-purpose computer using a simple USB drive "sneakernet" system.

"It's made out of plywood," Blumenberg writes of the machine's hefty housing, which hosts the single-board computer, ultra-wide display, and a mechanical keyboard, "and I rapidly [realized] that carpentry is hard, so I covered the lopsidedness and stray nails with decoupage. It's fun to write with and works as intended."

More information on the project is available on Blumenberg's Hackaday.io page.