This Retro-Futuristic 3D-Printed Cyberdeck Is a Handheld Shrine to the Machine God
Hosting a Godot-based game inspired by Warhammer 40,000, this slick handheld is available under a Creative Commons license.
Pseudonymous maker "ugly_robot" has put together a handheld cyberdeck with a difference: its primary input is an unlabeled numberpad beneath a compact screen, in an homage to "cassette futurism" design.
"Don't know how best to explain it," ugly_robot says of the project. "I just… wanted a cassette-futuristic DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]-like ritual to honor the Machine Spirit. Of course, it means nothing. And yet, I do my benediction every single day… Really — it's just a keypad, a [Raspberry] Pi 4, a cheap Amazon screen, some OnShape CAD parts printed in PLA, and some 2D Godot."
Based primarily on the "cassette futurism" retro-futuristic designs of the 70s and 80s, with a little nod to Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 university and its Omnissiah Machine God, the device runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer — "a good minimum spec for running Godot 4 projects," ugly_robot explains, referring to the open-source game engine, "[the Raspberry] Pi 3 and below can't support the renderers" — linked to a low-cost five-inch color display.
Beneath the screen, which is placed below a protective sunshade, is a compact mechanical keyboard in the form of a number pad — with color-coded, though otherwise unlabeled, keys. The design is, ugly_robot explains, "somewhat parametric," allowing to be tailored to particular tasks. There's an antenna stump at the top, and no fewer than two chunky grab-handles.
"I still haven't quite found the words to describe my use…" ugly_robot admits, referring to both the hardware itself and the Godot-based game it hosts. "It's a 'game,' a daily ritual follow-along of a hymn written for the machine spirit [Omnissiah]. You could, however, use it as a smart-home controller, a musical instrument, a chunky calculator, a stream deck — any use that you can fit on a keypad's worth of keys."
More details are available in ugly_robot's Reddit post, while the 3D print files have been uploaded to Thingiverse under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license; the design files from which they were generated are available on Onshape.
