Jay Doscher's Kuiper Deck, Inspired by The Expanse, Gets the Raspberry Pi Ready for Spaceship Use
Sci-fi luggable Raspberry Pi likely to be Doscher's last for a while, too.
Maker Jay Doscher is back with another cyberdeck build, but this one's a little different: The Kuiper Deck is inspired by spacefaring sci-fi including Seveneves and The Expanse, and is designed to look entirely at home aboard a spaceship.
Doscher has been playing around with cyberpunk-inspired cyberdeck builds, powered by Raspberry Pi single-board computers (SBCs), for a while: The Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit offered an all-in-one luggable system for off-grid use, and received an easier-to-build update late last year; the ARM Terminal, by contrast, lived on an articulated arm and drew inspiration from The Matrix.
The latest — and likely to be last, for a while at least — of Doscher's designs takes an Orbis Corporation stackable tote as its framework, sacrificing waterproofing for ease of modification and improved cooling. "The entire project pressure fits inside the bin with plenty of space behind the project," Doscher explains, "so you can add batteries, switches, wiring, custom PCBs, or pretty much anything reasonable. If you want it to be semi-permanent, a simple (and carefully placed) self-tapping screw on the sides will hold the project in place."
In addition to the Raspberry Pi and the stackable tote, the Kuiper Deck's design incorporates a range of 3D-printed parts, a high-resolution HDMI display from Sheffield-based Pimoroni, panel-mount Ethernet, USB, and USB Type-A connectors, a Raspberry Pi Power over Ethernet (PoE) HAT, and a 40mm fan for cooling — enough to keep the top-end Raspberry Pi 4 Model B from hitting its thermal throttle point and reducing the CPU speed.
"Although I read (and loved) William Gibson’s Neuromancer, I set out for these projects to be durable, portable, and hackable Raspberry Pi designs," Doscher writes of the cyberdeck collection as a while. "While I’m not swearing off or stopping cyberdeck work, I think it’s time for me to focus on other projects for a while."
The full build log of the Kuiper Deck is available on back7.co, along with links to purchase a kit of pre-printed parts at $97 or a full-assembled kit for $450. For those looking to print at home, the custom parts have been published to Tinkercad under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 3.0 license.