Thread #2983706
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Anyone know what to do to make a cyber deck? Do I need a raspberry pi because it would be hard for me to buy one online. Any alternatives?
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>>2983706
>make a cyber deck
define cyber deck? I mean just put a smart phone as the display and add the faggy keyboard. if you can't get a pi how tf are you going to get the other shit necessary? just use a fucking smart phone you poser ass.
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>>2983735
unfortunately this
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>>2983706
Touch typing on this piece of shit is going to hurt, the faggoty minimal keyboard is going to piss you off because you won't be able to keep track of Fn combinations, the monitor is tiny and off center, the counter display is pointless, that tryhard bird logo is an ugly waste of space and raspberries neither have a battery buffered real time clock nor proper onboard storage (well, you do have USB). Also they're ARM which means a lot worse performance than x86.
Get a used thinkpad and buy a new one if you do break it. This cyberdeck garbage will end up costing 3 times as much and has exactly zero advantages. And no, the waterproof case does not constitute an advantage because you can easily afford a waterproof laptop case with foam rubber inserts if you go with the used thinkpad option.
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>>2983773
Varies. For the prepper/survivalist types it's something to be filled with zim backups of Wikipedia and discussion boards/forums, survival guides, botanical field guides, med books, a pharmaceutical/pill identification book, an Uglys reference, Haynes manuals, equipment operator manuals, yadda yadda. You can faraday it then, after that big RaHoWa/WROL/whatever settles down, you've ostensibly got the data to get humanity back on track. So long as it survives you've got the guidebook for agriculture, construction, progression of industry, fuel refining and power generation. Whatever techniques, trade secrets and trash you thought to cram in the space available. The built-in switch means that, wherever you find others with surviving equipment, you can easily share that data and further ensure knowledge isn't lost. Or you get popped for it by some starving asshole who promptly smashes it to bits out of frustration when they realize your case wasn't full of Twinkies, Slim Jims, meds or anything else to alleviate their immediate needs.
tldr it's for collecting dust or maybe trading rare pepes during the end times
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>>2983925
AI slop reply
All of these things can be done with a regular laptop. There's nothing wrong with making a cyberdeck. They are cool
But they are a larp in 99% of use cases.
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>>2983706
Tons of info over here:
https://hackaday.com/blog/?s=Cyberdeck
>>2983711>>2983726
Are those power efficient? Draining the batteries in 5 minutes is beyond inconvenient.
>>2983773
Getting online from the field in harsh conditions. Thinkpads will not hack it.
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>>2984701
>Getting online from the field in harsh conditions. Thinkpads will not hack it.
Care to qualify these "harsh conditions of yours"? I for one do IT for agriculture (farms with livestock, which means flies, mice, ammonia rich atmosphere, dirt everywhere) and use Thinkpads. They're fine and I only switch them out as they become too slow for recent software. And cheap when bought used to boot. Also, a Pi and various amateur made lose connections rattling around in a case that's no longer going to provide IP67 protection as soon as you flip it open is even worse in harsh conditions. If you've got too much money and want extra ruggedized and/or are a nigger who drops computers a lot, get a Toughbook. Going by what sort of "harsh conditions" someone who wants a "cyber deck" is likely to get exposed to in their heated, air conditioned, urban life, you won't need it, though.
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>>2984701
>Are those power efficient?
Look at the TDP ratings for the CPU. Low-power CPUs run fine on battery power as they're essentially laptop specs in thin clients and mini PCs. TDP isn't a total power rating (because of CPU throttling) but it will give you a general idea of what will run for an extended time on a given battery capacity. You can get away with a 12V PSU that outputs enough current if you spoof the PSU one-wire ID. A 19.5V PSU is only needed for charging the laptop battery.
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>>2984719
>Mil. spec stuff used in the field.
Bullshit. "field" can be anything from a heated, air conditioned vehicle, a camping table in a tent (these hams appear to like pavilions) to pouring rain in a muddy trench with 20 inches of water. A Thinkpad can handle the former two and let me assure you that neither a Toughbook, not to mention any "cyber deck" you can conceivably build in your garage is going to handle the former for very long. It's a known problem with general purpose computers that need general purpose means of input.
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>>2983871
Also, if you really needed a super-rugged laptop for whatever reason, you could just transplant the guts from a Thinkpad or whatever other laptop into a case of appropriate size, with some custom 3D printed or laser-cut bezels. If you're already cool with the bulk of these "cyberdecks" you could fit the charger and an oversize battery inside the case too.
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>>2984762
Let me rephrase my simple question in simpler terms for simple minds: has your garage cyber deck ever served in the military or does it just play a milspec computer on TV? I'm sure you can show me evidence of certification according to MIL-STD 810G and/or deployment in the field, right?
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>>2984779
What are you going to do now? Ask harder? I could tell you that I graduated top of my class in the navy seals or that I'm a draft dodger. Either could or could not be true. And neither answer has a bearing on the subject matter under discussion.
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>>2984765
You could line the case with something if you really wanted to, but it's irrelevant unless it's an anti-espionage thing, EMP is massively overblown and only a realistic threat to things that are plugged into the grid.
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>>2984623
How is a raspberry pi in a case rugged? How likely are you to be able to repair one or find a drop in replacement?
For the cost of a Pi5 you could have 6 reasonably specced thinkpads or a few actually hardened laptops
There is nothing wrong with doing this for fun and because it looks cool. But this is a larp
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>>2984879
>How is a raspberry pi in a case rugged?
You can ruggedize a commercial off the shelf computer. We did that with a computer by suspending it in elastic webbing and got it qualified for shipboard use. Waveheights that exceeded the leeway would have sunk the ship and our guarantees with it. You can also ruggedize by coating. The military loves parylene coating, others encase the cards in epoxy. There are plenty of variations here.
>How likely are you to be able to repair one or find a drop in replacement?
The very reason why half the RPi volume goes to the professional market, is that the company promises to keep producing the very same models for years on end and they have been true to their word. Back when I worken in the embedded industry you paid a huge premium for that, even for rather slow computers. Especially defence contracts required a guaranteed supply of spares for decades.
>For the cost of a Pi5 you could have 6 reasonably specced thinkpads or a few actually hardened laptops
Are you comparing the cost of a new RPi 5 with used thinkpads off eBay?
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>>2984988
>You can ruggedize a commercial off the shelf computer. We did that with a computer by suspending it in elastic webbing and got it qualified for shipboard use.
And no doubt you qualified it by running it through a set of standardized tests applying defined forces, defined amounts of dirt etc. to it - anon building a LARP deck in his garage is not going to do that, anon's l33tdeck is not going to be anywhere close to MILSPEC[tm].
>The very reason why half the RPi volume goes to the professional market, is that the company promises to keep producing the very same models for years on end and they have been true to their word.
I seriously doubt that includes the military market. For these very same models for years on end lack a real time clock, even 5 generations on. I doubt the military is the same kind of yolo about that as "professionals" who go "I'm sure we'll always be able to access an NTP server every time this thing boots".
>Are you comparing the cost of a new RPi 5 with used thinkpads off eBay?
It's a fair comparison. You get better performance out of them for roughly the same price. And they're closer to MILSPEC[tm] than anything L33t L4rrY the LARPER can build and qualify in his garage, them being tested and certified and shit: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkpad-milspec/
I'd say that testing regimen beats giving a plastic suitcase an olive drab paint job by several orders of magnitude. Doesn't look as cool and LARPy, of course.
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>>2983735
This, if you want a "portable PC you can fit in your pocket, you already have one. It just needs to be rooted with a keyboard and mouse.
>>2983773
In my case, It's escaping the pitfalls of laptop design that manufacturer's keep screwing up.
-Soldered CPU
(sometimes RAM with newer commercial devices)
-Inconvenient cooling fan placement
-reduced customizability and reparability for daily use (like plastic welded keypads and metal welded screen joints)
>>2983773
Kind of missing the point with soldered laptop CPU's. Once you buy, your stuck with that model. Compare that with SATA storage. You could give a windows 7 machine 16 TB's of storage no problem because the socket standardization has made it easy to swap in new drives as long as their small enough to fit within the originals footprint. Compare that to CPU's.
For my build, I went with a slimi mini ITX with an LGA 1700 socket, 2 DDR5 U-DIMM sockets, and SATA / PCIe NVMe M.2 slots.
>>2984701
>>2984708
If your looking for survivability and have money to spend, the Dell Rugged and Toughbook's are good enough for police and military. If you really want to go wild, try an ACME for the highest power. Unless you have a clean room and an RnD team behind your back, a cyberdeck will never be as durable as a rugged PC.
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>>2984993
>And no doubt you qualified it by running it through a set of standardized tests applying defined forces, defined amounts of dirt etc. to it - anon building a LARP deck in his garage is not going to do that, anon's l33tdeck is not going to be anywhere close to MILSPEC[tm].
I didn't, I just did the embedded programming. Also I don't know how it was tested but I know that it never failed. Also this was maritime specifications; I never said it was mil spec, not sure where you get that idea. Civilian vehicular specs are also demanding but the tests are less dramatic.
>I seriously doubt that includes the military market.
OK, you are free to doubt. Others deliver.
https://militaryembedded.com/radar-ew/signal-processing/the-raspberry- pi-swap-c-revolution-driving-battle field-iot
>It's a fair comparison.
Hilarious.
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>>2985066
>OK, you are free to doubt. Others deliver.
Do they now?
>The JADC2 goal
>can drive new applications
>To make that vision a reality
>The next step is to bring the industrial version up to military standards
>What’s more, the new generation of engineers entering the defense market
>can be used in the field
>can be repurposed
>can be easily added
> the introduction of true military-grade versions
That's a whole lot of woulda, shoulda, coulda and maybes and not one one concrete application where they boast about actually fielding this thing. Somebody like
>David Jedynak is chief technology officer and Technical Fellow for Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions
know better than breathlessly cheering a visionary vision envisioning the faintest ghost of an idea like that. And lo and behold, he probably does since this exciting and novel piece! of gear is not being shilled in their official product portfolio:
https://defense-solutions.curtisswright.com/products/computing
Strange. Almost as if they just built a gimmicky freebie for their trade show booth because lol, why not, huh?
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It's a real cyberdick waving contest.
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>>2983925
>the prepper/survivalist types
If the social contract becomes severely strained or completely breaks down altogether and someone catches you out and about with a Pelican (or whatever Chinese equivalent hard shell) case that your cyberdeck is made from, they'll probably assume you are toting a firearm and shoot you on sight. Even if it's not for a SHTF scenario, you're still making your "dude-cyberdeck-bro box" a target for crackheads who are probably thinking the same thing as they peer at it through your truck's back window. At the very least someone with sticky fingers will convince themselves you have something worth taking inside of it, like thousands of dollars of camera gear or wahtever. Not to mention the park ranger who will approach you with his pistol unholstered because you're out in the woods with your Krylon-camo-sprayed cyberdeck that has antennas protruding upward out of it, and then you could bang your head against the wall for the next two hours detained and trying to explain to the law that you are actually in possession of a custom ham setup pelican case with a 3D printed inlay and raspi while they consider whether or not they should be contacting a federal agency about it.
>>2984993
I can tell this anon spent a good amount of time considering the real world viability of a cyberdeck because of the conclusions that he is articulating. I spent probably a good year and a half pondering, borderline obsessively mentally parsing through the process of constructing and actually using such a creation with considerable purpose, and I always came full circle back to a rather boring conclusion: Just use a fucking laptop. Drop it in a Pelican case if you want for extra protection. Shit, I've even considered making my own custom fit LiFePo4 battery pack which would be mounted inside a case so that I could have 72+ hours of portable compute... but the reality for me is that I simply don't need that.
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>enter cyberdeck thread
>people arguing
>no images