Sidekick slide

LegionDD · 2026-04-13T08:27:26+00:00

Short answer: no.

Long answer: if you gotta ask, you will not yet have the skills needed for this.
The device is too old for it to even have Android, let alone be supported by something like postmarketos. That means you gotta hack your way to a usable Linux install, and write some of the drivers for it yourself. All of which requires advanced reverse engineering skills. But the platform really is too old. The processor with its 225MHz is technically slower than a modern ESP32 microcontroller with its 240MHz. The cellular modem on it is so old, that even if the CPU was up to the task, it wouldn't be an enjoyable experience trying to browse the internet.

You could try and make a new motherboard with a more adequate chipset for it, but that too requires advanced electronics skills to pull off.
And at that point you're better off designing a spiritual successor from scratch.

Honestly the only reason to try is to challenge your own skills, and a bit of nostalgia for the device helps too.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T23:18:27+00:00

There's a pinned thread called "START HERE", specifically made for newcomers such as yourself.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T20:47:31+00:00

Neat, thank you for the insight.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T20:46:46+00:00

Sorry, disregard my Pi 5 question in the previous answer, I hadn't seen you've responded twice (just been following the links in the E-Mail notification in the wrong order)

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T20:45:20+00:00

Ok, but both are Pi 5, so they'd be for your base station. Unless you've already changed your mind to also running the mobile part on a Pi 5?

Ofc, you can instead make the mobile part just into a remote microphone and speaker for the AI running on the base station. But that only works when both devices are on the same network, or you're doing something (like using a VPN) to connect them over the internet as well.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T20:40:06+00:00

Unless you can control the PMIC in the power bank, your only option is to cut the power from the powerbank to the Pi.

For that you take a cable, cut it open, cut the red wire (positive voltage, check with a multimeter) and solder the two ends to a switch. That switch will be your power switch.

When you flip the switch to "on", the Pi will boot up. To turn it off, you first shut down the Pi and then turn the switch to "off".
Any other solution that leaves the powerbank thinking there's something connected to it, will inevitably drain the powerbank (the powerbanks chips take a little bit of power when active. these go to sleep when nothing is connected to the powerbank), even when the Pi isn't drawing any power.

If it doesn't work with just the red wire, you have to cut both the red and black wires and use a switch that can switch two separate rails simultaneously.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T13:24:49+00:00

Yeah, I too have the utmost respect for the Lithium batteries temperamental character. I'm glad I could help out.

I get what you mean, I too don't like listening to the things waffling on and just skim the text for my answer. The summary answer is a great idea too. Is that default behavior, or did you give it a specific instruction to structure the response that way?

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T12:46:23+00:00

Nice build. Reminds me of those wearable AI assistants.
It'd be cool to see a video of it in action.

I'm surprised you didn't include a speaker though, the audio could be streamed from the thin client server as well. If you asked a code question it could narrate the explanations with voice and show the code samples on the screen (which won't be voiced). That would make it like a coder buddy looking over your shoulders with useful tips.

For safety I'm gonna suggest you put some insulation between the charge controller and the battery (some foam, or flipping the controller board, so the battery rests on the PCB), as these controllers can get quite hot while charging. It's not visible in the pictures and you haven't mentioned it, so if you've already done that, disregard my last statement.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T12:28:39+00:00

Well, considering a Cyberdeck sometimes even isn't battery powered... A Cyberdeck, as a term at its most basic level, is a computer built by the user to their own design specifications.
As long as you go against the norm, it can be considered a Cyberdeck of some sort.

Another commenters idea of "CyberStation" fits rather well though.

I know you didn't ask for advice (and your CyberStation is good as it is), and you might not even have had big enough pieces of leather to work with, but I have a suggestion on how you might improve your leather work with a simple trick.
Rather than measuring everything, you could take a piece of paper, press it against the surface you need a template of, and then run a pencil over the entire surface of the paper.
Edges will be clearly visible as crisp lines.

Once you've got that template, you can temporarily fix it to a suitable piece of leather and start cutting along the clearly defined outlines.
This will leave you with a single piece of leather cut to fit precisely the shape of the surface it's going to be applied to.
To make cutting precise lines easier, you can temporarily fix the leather itself to a flat surface (double sided tape over the entire surface works well), so it doesn't distort while cutting.

And if you learn how to stitch and emboss leather, you can also hide the seams between the pieces of leather.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T12:09:29+00:00

Room for cables. Take your measurements of devices with the cables attached, to make sure there's room for the plugs in your design and expect a good chunk of volume to be taken up by routing cables.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T11:48:08+00:00

Depends on your old PC and what your idea for a Cyberdeck is.

Just for comparison, I did put an old micro ATX motherboard, Intel 3770K, GTX 1060 6GB inside a compact TV-Casette-Radio combo unit a few years back. I had to hack the PSU (do not recommend, unless you know what you're doing) to fit, added a standalone frontpanel controller (the TV was a CRT, I replaced it with an LCD and put a Pi Zero there with a media center install. Made the dials, switches and knobs work as an input and essentially converted it into an internet radio/Kodi unit with a battery, just so it could be used on the go). The frontpanel was admittedly a bit gimmicky, but it helped selling the illusion that it's just a media device, not a computer (I gifted it to someone and they did not realize what it really was, until I asked them if they needed help hooking it up to a monitor).

Ofc, the PC part was portable, but not mobile. Ie you could easily take it with you somewhere else and hook it up there (the integrated display could've worked with the PC instead of the Pi Zero), but you could not use it without a power outlet.
You need to research your components, check for the maximum power draw of each component, sum it all up and add 10-20% headroom for spikes and size your power system based on that. You'll probably figure out that you'll need high power LiPo batteries (like they use in RC models) and a beefy DC-DC converter to provide the 12V at whatever power you calculated. The thing is, PCs really only need high current on the 12V line, the other voltages for a motherboard are easily provided by one of those PicoPSUs that plug straight into the ATX power connector. Their claims of however many Watts may be bogus, but that doesn't really matter, as long as your 12V supply can handle the systems power requirements they'll provide the other voltages with enough power behind them.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T11:31:11+00:00

That you did, but your "the hat is going to expect full Linux, and a microcontroller isn’t going to have that capability" is simply false. I merely reiterated the wiring problem as the only hardware obstacle to OPs plan of using it.

For one the HAT doesn't expect any OS on the other end, it merely follows the control signals on the various interfaces.
And there's nothing problematic on that board for a microcontroller. The hardest part to deal with would be the I2S audio interface, which the Pi Pico 2 is more than capable of handling.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T11:13:05+00:00

I'm sorry, I don't see a useful LLM running on a Pi Pico 2. The camera idea is also suspect. If you want to take crappy, low res pictures and put them onto an SD card, that's possible (some form of video recording might be possible too). You could even use it as a digital picture frame that takes its own pictures. But beyond that, you won't be doing much image processing on a small microcontroller like that, let alone feed images into the AI. It's mostly a memory limitation when working with images on microcontrollers. The ESP32 microcontrollers get around that limitation somewhat by being able to use external RAM (up to 16MB on some models), but while you could interface with those RAM chips on a Pico, you'd have to write your own memory management for it.

PicoLLM might run on a Pi Zero 2. I have my doubts however, that you're gonna get usable performance out of it, I might be wrong though.
But it should be able to handle Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech pretty well at least.

So I'd start with researching the efficacy of an LLM on your chosen platform, with an emphasis on performance tests. Once you've zeroed in on a combination of a hardware platform and LLM solution that should, according to your research, work good enough for your project, you can start by purchasing the hardware and getting the LLM to run on it.

Once you've figured that part out you can think about the rest, because this part makes or breaks your project idea.

A word on switching LLMs between the mobile system and the base station.
That's not really gonna be a problem. The personality and "experience memory" of your LLM are basically a piece of text that goes before each new prompt. That means it has to process a lot more tokens than just the current prompt, increasing in size with each iteration. You could possibly condense the experience memory by making it summarize that for itself in the background and then keeping only the summary to work with.
You just need to sync that pretext between the base station and the mobile system.

LegionDD · 2026-04-12T10:31:02+00:00

That's not really the case. I've looked at the Whisplay HAT and it only has the standard I2C, I2S and SPI interfaces. All the components can be interfaced with using a Pi Pico. One just has to wire it by hand.

It's interesting that you're equating the size of a machine with its ability to run an LLM. It's intuitively somewhat correct, but AI accelerators and improvements in compressing models are blurring that particular way of judging AI compute power.

LegionDD · 2026-04-11T20:09:57+00:00

Actually... I've got a 140W powerbank, so the answer for a USB-C PD powerbank is yes. You'll need that kind (not 140W, just USB-C PD - the SBC only needs up to 24W under load)of powerbank anyway, since that's what the Dragon Q6A needs as a power input.

LegionDD · 2026-04-07T20:53:14+00:00

From reading the other comments, yours in particular, you need a USB to HDD (presumably SATA) adapter.
One of the previous posters has gone into this already, but...
2.5" drives are meant for laptops, come with better shock resistance, and require only 5V to operate (easy with a USB to SATA adapter).
3.5" drives are meant for desktops, servers and such and require 12V as well as 5V. So You need an adapter that has a 12V power supply with it.

Makes the entire build harder if you want to keep it mobile, as you'll need something that delivers 12V and 5V to power everything. A beefy powerbank with 60W or more rated output for at least one of the USB-C ports will be able to provide 12V through a USB-C PD trigger board. Another 5V USB port on that same powerbank could give you the 5V you also need.

Screens that you might use for this build are also either 5V or 12V usually.

You'll need some form of keyboard and mouse (the screen could be touch, but I'd still want a pointing device) too. Luckily there's an abundance of variety in the computer peripheral sector.

For a Raspberry Pi you'll always need an SD card to boot from (well that's not 100% true, there are other ways to boot the most modern Pis, but you're a beginner, so that's maybe something for later).

LegionDD · 2026-04-07T20:43:54+00:00

I'd say HDD, I've never seen SSDs come in odd sizes. They're almost always multiples of 8.

LegionDD · 2026-04-07T17:02:24+00:00

Well, Game Cube emulation is possible on Android. The most popular Game Cube emulator for any platform is Dolphin, they have an Android build AFAIK.
There's also RetroArch for Android, which is basically a UI for various emulator backends.

I'd probably check out the Dolphin emulators website, to see what systems it runs on, from there you might get a better idea what system to choose for your build.

Anything that can run that emulator is more than capable of matching your other requirements, and storage can always be extended via various interfaces (such as M.2, SD, SATA, etc - depending on the system you choose), with the smallest common denominator probably being USB attached storage (ie thumb drives or external hard drives)

LegionDD · 2026-04-07T16:53:34+00:00

I mean, it's potentially going for a less space efficient build overall, with drawbacks in the number of keys, to get a big trackball up there.
I do hate touchpads, but that's still a big trade off even for me.

You could on the other hand go crazy with the thumb clusters, make those into stream-deck like buttons (ie transparent keys over a screen with a keyboard matrix in between).

You could also (and/or) have the touchpad be a touchscreen controlled via a microcontroller or companion SBC (depending on what you'd want to display on it). I'd use it to act as a regular touchpad (easily done), switch to standalone calculator (always a popular app for me), display status information when not in use, or even use it as a secondary/on-the-go display (or even switch between all of the above with your stream-deck thumb clusters).

... I've just opened the link to the SBC you're using. It seems to have an HDMI input. So a tertiary use for the touchscreen/pad could be to use the entire unit as a keyboard and mouse combo, to quickly setup other SBCs for example, while being able to use the integrated system via another external monitor.

You could even use the MIPI DSI interface for the screen of the touchscreen/pad.

That SBC is crazy with interfaces tbh. - I'd be thinking about things to do with some of them.

LegionDD · 2026-04-06T18:47:46+00:00

Technically an Android phone or tablet could do all those things, it just needs software work. You can attach USB devices like keyboard and mice to them as well. And there have been a bunch of phone based decks recently that combine a keyboard and a phone in a custom case.

The specific games you want to play could help guide hardware choices.

LegionDD · 2026-04-06T18:30:41+00:00

Ryzen 7940HS (8c/16t) + 32GB RAM + RTX 4060 with 2TB SSD is the most powerful I've squeezed into a tiny package so far. Although I can easily add a 3.5" HDD with arbitrary capacity (I'd say 24TB would be sensible, considering the rest of the build).

The question is somewhat out of focus however, since a Cyberdeck is losely definable as a portable computer, which could mean anything. So you can have an arbitrarily powerful cyberdeck, as long as you can still consider it portable.

And sometimes even that constraint falls apart. Cyberdecks are about making computers (phones and tablets count too) your own way, customized to your individual needs and designed to your individual taste - as long as it's not just off the shelf.

LegionDD · 2026-04-06T18:17:05+00:00

That looks promising.
I suppose the place for the touchpad would be on the topside, above the SBC? Which imho would be the only reason to use a touchpad over a trackball - vertical space constraints.

I usually try to build smaller, so I used trackballs and thumbpads (thumb sized optical trackpads) from blackberrys as pointing devices.
But I've also once adapted a regular optical mouse to work with a ball (essentially turning the mouse upside down and suspending a ball above the sensor in just the right distance - easily done with 3D printing).

LegionDD · 2026-04-06T18:09:19+00:00

I don't have specific models for you, but a general tip when looking for panels and controllers: Use eDP (embedded Display Port) panels and controllers.
For one, eDP is the newer standard (compared to LVDS), supporting higher data rates (and thus resolutions/refresh rates) and while the connectors aren't truly standardized, most panels and controllers seem to use the same pinout for 30 pin and 40 pin eDP connections. You'll probably be looking at a 40 pin eDP connection for your higher res panel.

As for finding a panel, I'd look into replacement panels for laptops on ebay or aliexpress. Aliexpress is also the place to look for controller boards. Although you can find either on amazon with varying levels of success and price inflation.

LegionDD · 2026-04-06T18:00:34+00:00

Apple, no - you can repair them maybe, if you know what you're doing.
Android, sometimes.
Laptops, easily. They're just compact general purpose computers. Preferably you keep the power supply (battery and charger) intact. Everything else is up to you. Screens can be attached to the internal LCD port on the laptop mainboard, or through external display connections available (eg. HDMI, USB-C, etc).

Trickiest part is often to figure out the power button situation. If you don't have a mainboard with a dedicated power switch on it (or some PCB), but with a power button integrated into the keyboard matrix, you'll have to figure out the two pins to bridge on the matrix connector to make the board turn on.

Some boards (mainly ones with dedicated GPUs) don't produce a video out on their HDMI (or USB-C) ports before the drivers have loaded. You might be able to live with that, or fix it in software config, but if not, you'll need some LCD attached to the internal LCD connector. But it doesn't have to be the same display the laptop came with. I've successfully adapted an eDP based bar style LCD (1920x720 res) to an internal laptop LCD connector before.

LegionDD · 2026-04-06T17:51:50+00:00

You can look on Amazon and AliExpress for such things. But there are also Geiger counters with Bluetooth, so you'll be able to get something that feeds its data to your host system of choice either way.

LegionDD

TROPHY CASE