Cyberdecks are an amorphous thing, there is no one definition for one, as long as it is one to you, but many accepted definitions are: - any computer you made from parts (really loose I know, but technically true) - a personal computer custom designed for a purpose - a cyberpunk/solar punk/steampunk themed machine ## Cyberdeck Features my cyberdeck is going to accomplish a few tasks: 1. [ ] Travel Router - [ ] I want to have a personal travel router, that I can connect all my devices to and only have one connection to manage when I travel to and from places. - [ ] I want my travel router to also be able to forward my traffic via a VPN (e.g. if I'm traveling in a digitally restrictive country, USA, UK, China, Australia, UAE, or any other) --- 2. [ ] Portable Network Attached Storage - [ ] While I have WebDAV services I host myself, it would be nice to have a cache that makes that data available offline to any device I'm carrying with me or even as a primary node when I'm at home. - [ ] This would also be great for transferring things home when I'm away as I can easily dump my files on the cyberdeck and let it handle sending things home while I'm doing other stuff --- 3. [ ] Personal Pocket Calendar - [ ] I want to have something that I can use to manage my to-do lists and daily tasks to keep on top of what I've got going on. - [ ] I also want this to have a pomodoro timer that can be either automatically set, or manually set and sync with other devices, enabling/disabling Do Not Disturb on my phone for example. --- 4. [ ] Off Grid Comms - [ ] I want to have a personal reticulum border router on me, preferably one that can be configured to multiple frequencies depending on where in the world I am as an off grid way of either communicating home or with anyone nearby without having to carry a dedicated rnode or meshtastic unit, or if I do, my phone won't have to provide a reticulum server to my other devices, this can handle it. --- 5. [ ] Personal Voice Note Aggregator - [ ] I want to be able to pair a neck mic to this and be able to record voice notes whenever, wherever and have this run Voice-To-Text either locally or on my home server for easy reference in notes in future --- ## Cyberdeck Hardware For a cyberdeck to exist it must be made of something, else it is but an idea... ### Core (Brain) For this project, I'm going to use a CM3J from Radxa. Initially I was kicking myself for this decision, since initially I couldn't get NixOS running on this. --- Turns out the Device Tree Files for the SOC that the CM3J uses was not mainlined into the Linux kernel at the time. So Sad

Luckily, since then, a kind soul named [K900](https://github.com/K900) helped me make a U-Boot bootloader with the DTF's needed over the course of 6 months, there were Broadcom specific optimizations were added in 6.19, and the DTF's were introduced in 7.0! So Happy

### Making it a good device So there are a few things we have either come to expect with a modern device, or are just plain missing from the Radxa CM3J. 1. Real Time Clock Obviously, you want to be able to keep time when the main board is off, unfortunately the CM3J just doesn't have an onboard RTC, so I'll need to add one. 2. Native Battery Level Support We kind of expect devices to know when they are low on battery, but for that to be the case, it needs to know its on batteries, luckily, the Linux Kernel already has support for a bunch of battery management/charge IC's over I2C, of which we have plenty of buses available for this. 3. USB-PD Support USB Power Delivery has become somewhat of a standard now, and is available almost everywhere. I want to be able to fast charge this, if I'm on the go, I want to be able to just plug it in, and let it fast charge like my phone or any other device. 4. Offline Music Music is a huge part of my day to day. It helps me focus and helps regulate my mood. One of the consequences of this is that I'm at the mercy of whatever I downloaded ahead of time, or whatever YouTube Music decided would be good to slap in an auto-generated offline playlist. Also, has anyone else ever noticed that shuffle is never really random anymore?! Sometimes I want to just listen to my whole library, however YouTube Music only shuffles the last 50 or so songs, so after a few hours, the playlist ends even though I have hundreds of saved songs... Holy Hell, I miss Google Play Music before it got butchered. 5. Display As much as I would love to have a silent, relentlessly cyberpunk brick attached to my hip that looks sick, I'm going to need to know what's going on... I'm still going back and forth on how I want to do this... 1. [ ] E-Paper Display This would be HUGE for battery life, less to manage, readable in any condition, only one problem. I would have to write EVERYTHING from scratch for a UI Library. I Love the hardware side of this, but I HATE the software side of this, I already have a bunch of software I'm going to have to write for this, 2. [ ] LCD Display This would be a hard one to get right battery wise. Quick display turnoffs and good management of the display would be vital. Possibly even a hardware switch might be a good shout... of course all this depends on the battery drain and the lifetime I can eke out of this thing. 3. [ ] OLED Display Honestly I think this would be the holy grail. Good Battery performance, Good visuals, Good Readability and just like with the LCD I can leverage existing UI frameworks like GJS/GTK and make a simple, but efficient dedicated UI, using all the existing web dev knowledge I have. - [ ] To-do: figure out if GJS has a Golang alternative, fine if not, would be cool though.

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Getting the software sorted

Tue Apr 14 2026

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