This Ergonomic Raspberry Pi-Powered Cyberdeck Packs a Sony PS2 Thumbstick as an Alternative Mouse

Pseudonymous maker "SlurpBurgers" has shown off a slick split-keyboard cyberdeck build, using Un Kyu Lee's open-hardware Micro Journal Rev.2 as a base — but taking it in a new, more ergonomic direction.

"My cyberdeck/writerdeck build [is] based on a heavily modified [Un Kyu Lee] Micro Journal Rev.2," SlurpBurgers explains of the project, "to accommodate the keyboard layout, [Raspberry] Pi 5 and 7" screen. It runs Raspberry Pi OS with LXQt DE [Desktop Environment] — I found it more useful than whatever the DE that comes with RPiOS is."

The 3D-printed cyberdeck is, indeed, a fairly dramatic departure from Lee's original and later-upgraded Micro Journal Rev.2 designs — while retaining enough of the original aesthetic to be recognizable to those in the know. Rather than a single-matrix ortholinear keyboard, the base has been expanded to make room for a split design with a curve — similar to an Alice layout, but without the usual staggered columns.

In-between the two halves of the hand-wired mechanical keyboard is a thumbstick originally designed for Sony's PlayStation 2 controllers — which serves, its creator explains, as a mouse. "For my purposes, it works great. It might seem funky," SlurpBurgers admits, "but the bracket keys on the inside of each of the Ctrl buttons are the left and right mouse clicks as well. I don't have to move my right hand much to use it with my index finger. Overall its very sufficient. Not an absolutely amazing ergonomic solution, but its basically there so I have some sort of mouse input instead of tapping the screen when using GUI [Graphical User Interface] stuff."

The larger base gives way to a larger lid, making room for a widescreen 7" touchscreen display. Inside the 3D-printed case, meanwhile, is the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB single-board computer driving it all, alongside a Waveshare UPS 3S uninterruptible power supply for powering the machine on-the-go.

More information is available in SlurpBurger's Reddit post; at the time of writing design and print files had not yet been publicly shared.