The "SexyberDeck" Ditches Modern Production Methods for a Truly Cyberpunk Upcycling Approach
There's no 3D printing or laser-cutting here, just the housing from an old MIDI keyboard turned into a powerful portable deck.
Pseudonymous maker "Ok_Party_1645," hereafter simply "Party," has shown off a cyberdeck truly worthy of the name — built, as it is, by hand from reclaimed parts and a low-cost single-board computer: the SexyberDeck.
"Here the idea," Party writes of the project, which takes its inspiration from classic cyberpunk literature like William Gibson's Neuromancer. "I wanted a truly handmade build to stick with the improvised-cyberpunk-recycled-trash feel, so there is no 3D-printed parts, no laser cutting, only hand tools."
To start, Party needed a casing — and with a moratorium on modern rapid manufacturing techniques turned to upcycling, choosing an unwanted Akai MIDI keyboard to sacrificing its housing for the cause. Inside there's a Radxa Zero 3W, a Raspberry Pi Zero-style compact single-board computer built around the Rockchip RK3566 with four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.6GHz and an Arm Mali G52-2EE graphics processor.
Elsewhere in the housing, which eschews the clamshell foldable format of modern laptops in favor of a flat slab-like layout inspired by vintage devices like the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 and Cambridge Computers Z88, is a 10Ah lithium-polymer battery with charge controller, a touchpad, and an ultra-wide 1920×480 color display sitting above a custom-designed 4×12 ortholinear keyboard. "[It's] based on the STHLMKB CYOA board," Party says of this latter feature, "with homemade key caps and tactile switches."
Externally, the deck is built for portability: there's a grab-handle, connections for a sling, and Picatinny rails for accessory mounting. There's also a single USB Type-A port for further expansion — with the option, of course, to use an external hub if you need more ports.
More details are available in Party's Reddit post.