This Ultra-Compact Raspberry Pi Project Squeezes an ePaper Cyberdeck Into an Altoids Mint Tin

Pseudonymous maker "UmBeloGramadoVerde," hereafter simply "Verde," has shown off a low-power pocketable cyberdeck built, in classic hacker fashion, into an Altoids tin — and using an ePaper panel as its primary display.

"The ideal build size for me, that I would actually take everywhere, would be at most an Altoids tin, maybe a little bigger," Verde wrote at the start of the project, while still considering options for housing the build. "The main part of the cyber deck fits perfectly on the bottom of the tin and to close I have to separate the keyboard which is fine because it is Bluetooth."

In the days since, Verde's cyberdeck build has progressed apace. Settling on the classic Altoids mint tin, despite the metal meaning a move to an external antenna for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth reception was needed, Verde's deck keeps size and power draw down by opting for a compact ePaper display rather than a liquid-crystal panel. While this leads to slow refresh rates, it means the machine is easily readable in direct sunlight and draws power for the display only when it's changing states.

"My idea with the machine is for it to be a persistent terminal manager," Verde explains, "but the screen cant handle the amount of updates needed, so to test I built a launcher that is a nice dashboard and you can use tools like: h -> help - check available commands; w -> check Wi-Fi information; t -> running processes (top); : -> bash command mode. The updating of menu -> command -> result screens is suuuper slow, but it's progress."

The deck is driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer, communicating with a three-color ePaper display over the SPI bus — though Verde has indicated tests of other monochrome ePaper displays are in progress, in an attempt to speed up the full-screen refresh cycle. There's an 18650 lithium battery for power, and an off-the-shelf ultra-compact Bluetooth keyboard that, impressively, squeezes almost perfectly into the bottom half of the tin.

"Having such a tiny little thing in your hand that is a full computer hit the fresh sense of wonder I was looking for," Verde says of the project. "I think what does it for me is in a cyberdeck is not a rad cyberpunk look, for me it's more a tiny, cute, truly useful machine."

More information is available in Verde's Reddit post.