Joopyter Is a Beautiful Retro-Style Terminal with a Thermal Printer
Gian's Joopyter is a retro-style terminal complete with an integrated thermal printer and vintage-looking marketing material.
While the cyberdeck community grew out of a love of William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novels, it is now so much more than that. The community today is all about expressing creativity by creating unusual computer designs, often with fictional backstories or as part of a hypothetical alternate history. The only real constraint within the community is that cyberdecks must be portable. Gian's Joopyter is a beautiful retro-style terminal complete with an integrated thermal printer and vintage-looking marketing material.
Gian started this project after finding a mini thermal printer in the parts bin at their local makerspace. The unit is similar to what you'd find in a receipt printer. It can communicate with a computer via a serial connection. It is monochrome only and doesn't have a very high resolution, but it is enough to print out notes and even low-quality photos. Gian decided to design a printer with that thermal printer as the centerpiece and the Jooptyer terminal is the amazing result.
That thermal printer isn't the Joopyter terminal's only means of output. It also has a 2.8" piTFT display from Adafruit, which is a full color screen with a usable resolution that provides a practical means of navigating a modern operating system. Both the piTFT display and thermal printer connect to a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer, thought Gian plans to upgrade to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W soon. Power comes from an Anker PowerCore 15600 battery pack.
The real draw of this machine is the industrial design. It manages to look like an '80s cash register crossed with a '70s radio, but somehow still looks good. The 3D-printed enclosure even has the yellowed-beige color that we associate with retrocomputers. The small, minimalist keyboard is a custom job and handwired. It communicates with the SBC through a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller development board.
We're not sure if Gian has any purpose in mind for the Joopyter, but we don't care. It is perfect as a functional piece of art.