This "Wizzard" Really Does Have Something Up Their Sleeve: The Terminal Up My Sleeve, or TUMS
Inspired by the Fallout Pip-Boy, the TUMS moves most of the hardware to the torso for improved comfort.
Pseudonymous maker "evilwizzardofcoding," hereafter simply "Wizzard," has built a Raspberry Pi 5-powered wearable cyberdeck in a novel form factor: the Terminal Up My Sleeve (TUMS), which doubles as an "internal heater" for on-the-go computing in winter.
"I love the classic [Fallout] Pip-Boy design, but it has a major flaw," Wizzard explains. "You really can't put much in it without making it very bulky. As such, I simply moved everything but the screen to the torso, allowing me to give it a beefy battery bank and [Raspberry] Pi 5. I am currently working on an improved cooling solution, for obvious reasons, in order to get maximum performance out of it, but for now it acts as an internal heater. As far as I can tell, no one has made something in this form factor before and published it online, but correct me if I'm wrong."
The heart of the system is, as Wizzard says, a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer, giving it four Arm Cortex-A76 processor cores running at up to 2.4GHz, up to 16GB of RAM, a Broadcom VideoCore VII graphics processor, and expansion options including USB 3.0, PCI Express, and a general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header. This simply inserted into an internal pocket of a jacket, along with an off-the-shelf USB powerbank — and the screen is, as Wizzard explains, "a rather large distance" away, in the sleeve.
"There are two cables running up the sleeve, one for image and the other for power [and] touch," Wizzard writes of the setup, which links the Raspberry Pi 5 to a Waveshare 5.5" touchscreen display. "They are occasionally tacked in place with thread. The screen is bolted into a piece of wool cloth, which is sewn to the inside of the sleeve."
"Of course," Wizzard continues, "I intend to expand it rather significantly in the future. Some of my ideas include RFID [Radio-Frequency Identification] in one of the sleeves, a headphone jack in the neck, a cell modem, a USB hub in one of the pockets, 9DoF [Nine Degrees of Freedom inertial measurement unit] sensors in the torso and arms for gesture control, a GPS [Global Navigation Satellite System receiver], and a secondary battery UPS on the [Raspberry] Pi to allow for hot-swapping the [power] bank. I also want to add magnets to the keyboard allowing it to be attached to my other arm for standing operation."
More details are available in Wizzard's Reddit post.
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