Tim Eastwood Unveils the JetDeck SCOUT, a Raspberry Pi-Powered Handheld Running Mainstream Software

Maker Tim Eastwood is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a handheld Raspberry Pi-powered cyberdeck with a twist: it's built to require absolutely no custom software at all, running Raspberry Pi OS with zero modifications.

"I've been working on this lil nugget since back when it was the JankDeck 0.1 and it's finally about ready to make a home in your pockets," Eastwood says of the gadget he has designed. "Please meet the JetDeck SCOUT! That stands for Smart Cyber Ops Utility Tool. (It was critical that it had a catchy acronym.) It runs either a [Raspberry Pi Compute Module] 5 or CM4 and is aimed at achieving a couple of things I feel other decks fall way short on."

Perhaps the most interesting of these goals is on the software side: unlike rival handheld cyberdeck designs, of which there are innumerable, Eastwood's take on the concept is built to need absolutely no custom software or drivers for full functionality. "Slap in any CM5-compatible system-on-a-board, flash your [Raspberry Pi] OS to it, and off you go," he promises. "You do need to enable DSI1 [MIPI Display Serial Interface 1] for the display to work, but it's very easy to do and uses a standard [Raspberry Pi] display driver that comes with the OS. All the peripherals use standard USB drivers and take up none of the GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output]."

In addition to a compact keyboard located below a full-color 800×480 QLED display — with a stretch goal set for a potential move to a higher-resolution version — the JetDeck SCOUT includes gaming-centric controls including a digital direction pad and a Nintendo JoyCon-inspired Hall effect analog joystick that can be toggled between joystick and mouse emulation modes, all driven by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. There are 5V and 3.3V power rails for external hardware, capable of providing 6A each, with bidirectional USB Power Delivery charging, an infrared transceiver, Omnivision OV5647 five megapixel rear-facing camera, a Near Field Communications (NFC) radio, and an M.2 PCI Express (PCIe) slot for high-speed storage or other expansion.

Other features include the promise of "decent speakers on par with a[n Apple] MacBook Pro," Eastwood promises," as well as analog headphone and SPDIF digital audio outputs, a backlit keyboard running the open-source QMK firmware, and full access to the Raspberry Pi-standard 40-pin GPIO header. "There's a few nice-to-haves I'd love to get into the product but will depend on a few technical hurdles," Eastwood adds. "A LoRa or SDR [Software-Defined Radio] module would be great, that won't be too difficult but comes with design and compliance challenges, as would an LTE/5G [cellular] modem, but that will be super difficult given carrier-specific hardware requirements in a lot of countries."

More information is available on the project website and in Eastwood's Reddit post; interested parties can sign up to be notified when the crowdfunding campaign goes live on Kickstarter.