Alexis Belmonte's Companion Cyberdeck Is a Slick, Modern Take on the Classic TRS-80 Model 100
Smooth, clean case houses very modern components including an ultrawide touchscreen display and a Raspberry Pi 5 16GB.
Maker Alexis Belmonte has designed a TRS-80 Model 100-inspired portable cyberdeck, packing a Raspberry Pi 5 into a swish housing designed as a distraction-free device for everything from software development to web browsing: the Companion.
"Companion is a portable cyberdeck designed to be a sleek, modern, distraction-free machine in a distinguishable yet usable form factor," Belmonte explains of the gadget. "Writing, programming, web browsing, 3D modelling. Not gonna lie, there were a lot of frustrating moments along the way, but holding a working product at the end makes it all worth it!"
The form-factor of the Companion is inspired by the classic Tandy-RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100, originally launched in Japan as the Kyocera Kyotronic 85. Unlike modern clamshell laptops, the Model 100 uses a flat slab-like design that positions an ultra-wide display above a keyboard — though the Companion shifts this a little by swapping the flat layout for one in which the case angles upwards at the back to present the screen at a more comfortable angle.
Inside the housing is a Raspberry Pi 5 16GB single-board computer, connected to a USB hub over its PCI Express Gen. 2 lane. There's a 256GB microSD card for storage, four 3.7V lithium-polymer batteries with a management system — "incredibly weak," Belmonte admits of the soon-to-be-replaced charging circuit, "[and] painfully slow" — delivering around 20 hours of active usage per charge.
The front of the case is dominated by a 2280×864 full-color ultrawide touchscreen display, positioned — as in the original Model 100 — above a mechanical keyboard fitted with typewriter-style keycaps. FOr the software side, there's a version of Arch Linux on-board with a customized desktop and a plugin providing automatic window tiling.
More information is available in Belmonte's Reddit post, while the maker has released everything from branding materials to 3D print files and source code on GitLab under an unspecified license.
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.