A Tempad That’s Faux Real

The retro-futuristic styling of Marvel Studios’ Loki television series is pure imagination fuel for tech enthusiasts. All of the interesting electronic gadgets depicted in the show seem to really resonate with the cyberdeck crowd in particular. YouTuber Matt Gray has taken a liking to one of those gadgets called the Tempad. The Tempad is a little handheld computer — somewhat reminiscent of the early handheld computers of the 1980s, but with a futuristic twist — that is used by the Time Variance Authority as they chase criminals through time and the multiverse.

Since the Tempad does not yet exist in the actual universe, Gray decided to bring one into being. The goal was to not only make it look like it belonged in the hands of a temporal law enforcement officer, but also to make it functional. Don’t let the fact that this little device is handheld fool you — this build requires a lot of work. Sure, a prototype that is 90 percent of the way there could be built in a day, but that last 10 percent took over a month’s worth of effort.

The electronics of the Tempad replica were pretty simple. The components consisted of an Adafruit 3.5" TFT 320 x 480 with Capacitive Touch Breakout Board to serve as the display, and a Pimoroni Pico LiPo development board powered by an RP2040 microcontroller. This CircuitPython-capable board also includes the hardware necessary to draw power from, and recharge, a LiPo battery, which helped to keep the Tempad portable.

Most of the work involved designing the models for the 3D-printed case. Gray spent many hours creating — and reworking — the models in Fusion 360. Of course things rarely lined up exactly as expected on the first go, but after many iterations, Gray finally had an enclosure that looked and worked just right. The final versions of the parts were printed in a metallic PLA to give it the proper aesthetic.

That got the replica Tempad almost all of the way there, but there was still the matter of reproducing the woodgrain finish of the device. That is not a job for PLA or a 3D printer, but Gray had the idea to use a vinyl cutter to trim wood veneer to just the right shape. These pieces of wood veneer were very carefully super glued in place to complete the build.

While the Tempad looks great, it is somewhat disappointing that the buttons are nonfunctional. As it presently stands, the display only shows some pre-programmed graphics, and pressing the buttons accomplishes a whole lot of nothing. As a display piece, this replica Tempad is very cool, but before it can qualify as a legitimate cyberdeck, it needs some functional buttons and some type of operating system with a user interface. Perhaps after Gray recovers from the month-long build some new features along these lines will be added to the device.