Virtuscope Mod

If you like the idea of cyberdecks but aren't a real hacker or particularly fluent in 3d printing and raspberries.. well then we have something in common. After noticing some of the cool decks makers are putting together and in particular the Virtuscope I decided I wanted something like it.

I started by playing around with my first raspberry and some cardboard cutouts and I decided that I would go with this project but that it would be a mod of it to satisfy a few conditions: it needed to use a 40% keyboard (I fell in love with those over last summer) and it needed to have some mouse-like input (trackball or touchpad).

With that in mind I bought a 3d printer, raspberry pi, lcd and a few random electronics and tools. With packing tape and cardboard I put together an earlier working prototype. I wanted to be able to play some games in my steam and blizzard libraries, but it looked like the raspberry would have some issues to power those. After browsing online for alternatives I decided to give lattepanda alpha a try, which with a slightly larger footprint packs significantly more punch. At that point I had a generally working deck! hurrah!

Project Photos:

29Oct19: Managed to 3d print one part with the printer I just assembled. Then I traditionally printed a couple of other pieces and glued them to a cardboard cutout.

13Dec19: I 3d printed a few more parts, dremeled the screen frame to hold the LCD screen I bought and added some cardboard to accommodate the keyboard and touch pad. I also got raspbian working on my first raspberry pi!

17Dec19: Swapped the raspberry pi for the lattepanda, and re-printed a few parts after modifying them on tinkercad. Mensk... here I come!

29Jan20: After taking a break to work on other stuff I made a few more modifications to the parts in tinkercad and started working on a powering solution:

16Feb20: I am now working on structuring the process so far of modifying the Virtuscope. Then summarizing what have I learned and what comes next. This blog post is one step in this direction. Overall I am baffled that we live in a world where you can see photo online of something and then you are able to recreate it in your apartment with tweaks to your liking and have it work... for real.

(CREDIT) MSG