This Steampunk Password Safe Hides Your Secrets Behind a Raspberry Pi Pico

Pseudonymous steampunk fan and maker "Smurfy_CH," hereafter simply "Smurfy," has designed a device which remembers your passwords for you until you need them then types them out — all while looking like something a Victorian incarnation of Doctor Who might pull out of his pocket.

"A few months ago I stumbled upon the Raspberry Pi Pico, a small and affordable microchip that is capable of emulating a USB keyboard," Smurfy explains of the project's origins. "So I came up with the idea, to put my passwords on a micro SD card, hooked up to the Pico with a small display. With a selecting option to send the login-string straight to the computer. To spice it up, I gave it a steampunk look with the help of my 3D printer."

The 3D-printed steampunk housing, which includes a decorative vacuum tube at one end with an RGB LED providing a glow, houses the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board, a compact OLED display panel, and a microSD card reader.

It's this card which stores the passwords, to be picked using a rotary encoder — and while the passwords themselves are stored in plain text on the card, Smurfy points out that they're safe from attack via the host machine by dint of only being accessible from the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Using the password safe is simple: use the rotary encoder to pick from the list of stored passwords and push its button: the Raspberry Pi Pico acts as a keyboard and types them in to any device which supports USB Human Interface Devices (HIDs). The RGB LED behind the vacuum tube provides a status report: green means it's ready to input data into a field, red means data is being sent, and blue means it's waiting for the user to push a button.

A full guide to building the device, including 3D-printable STL files, is available on Smurfy's Instructables page; note, however, that the current version of the tool is pre-configured to use a German keyboard layout.