Simon Shimel's Bee Write Back Is a Compact "Writerdeck" for Late-Night Journaling

Mechanical engineer and maker Simon Shimel has built a portable distraction-free writing gadget — known as a "writerdeck" — with a compact keyboard and full-color display, designed to run a custom-written journaling app: the Bee Write Back.

"I struggled to fall asleep easily for a while, and after being recommended journaling I found that it helped me immensely," Shimel explains. "The one catch was that I didn't like writing in a physical journal, since I would be greeted by all of my previous entries and all the emotions would come flooding back. To solve this problem, I created a simple Raspberry Pi based journal, which I could use each night, entering in the chaos of the day, locking it away once I was done."

The Bee Write Back, brought to our attention by Liliputing, uses a 3D-printed housing inspired by classic portables like the Tandy-RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100. Unlike a modern laptop, which uses a clamshell design to maximize screen space, the Bee Write Back positions a small 5.5 inch 1280×720 AMOLED full-color display above a compact off-the-shelf ortholinear mechanical keyboard PCB.

Inside the 3D-printed housing — made with multi-color 3D printing in mind, though Shimel provides STL files for single-color printing in addition to a 3MF version — is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, one of the lower-cost entries in the Raspberry Pi range of single-board computers thanks primarily to its limited 512MB of RAM. For Shimel, though, that's enough: the Bee Write Back is designed to be distraction-free, opening up to a text-mode terminal running a custom journaling application rather than a full graphical desktop.

3D print files, a bill of materials, and a build guide are all available on GitHub under an unspecified open source license.