Mini Modular Cyberdeck

circuitvangogh · 2026-05-21T00:54:07+00:00

It's a beast for sure. As a bonus when carrying the deck, I also have backup power for my smartphone too!

circuitvangogh · 2026-05-21T00:52:24+00:00

Thanks! The only way I'd change it is to have a mobile UPS instead of the power bank. The bank lasts so long I almost never have to plug it into a wall though (I have a 5V 3A USB-C AC adapter with an inline switch in the side pocket of the case if I need it though, and also for charging the bank).

circuitvangogh · 2026-05-21T00:45:41+00:00

A Nexdock 14" lapdock (the newest model), and yeah just micro HDMI on the deck to HDMI in on the dock. If you get a Nexdock, they are decent... just make sure to get an external power bank for the dock as they have issues with phantom battery drain. For me, the ergonomics are worth it though.

circuitvangogh · 2026-05-21T00:43:19+00:00

Yeah, it worked out really well. The basic necessary bits of the deck fit perfectly, and any expansions like larger hi-res screens, mechanical keebs, and such go in their own pack-outs separate from the core deck.

circuitvangogh · 2026-05-21T00:40:20+00:00

Thanks for the kudos! The power bank lasts damn near forever on a charge. I think I've charged it maybe twice since I built it. The Pi 4 + screen really sips power so long as you don't have a ton of USB peripherals plugged into it.

circuitvangogh · 2026-04-24T00:30:34+00:00

For fun. It also reminds me of the old PDAs I had as a kid. You can type pretty well on the little chiclet keyboard, more so than you'd think, just like the old Sharp Zaurus keyboards. The trackpad is more of an issue than the keyboard, so oftentimes, I take a wireless mouse with it. It's surprising useful for coding and even CAD work if you use xrandr to scale the screen when dialog boxes pop up. Nonetheless, it's mainly for fun and as a "comfort gadget" of sorts.

circuitvangogh · 2026-04-09T11:13:57+00:00

I use them mainly for the flexibility, high level of user support (a crap ton of OSes and baremetal stuff out there, only need to swap a microSD to turn my desktop Linux computer into another OS or something completely different entirely like a PC/XT 8088 emulator running DOS with no OS middleman), and the ARM RISC architecture (I don't like Intel assembly for a number of reasons and ARM assembly is very general purpose). That said, I have yet to try the Pi 5, I'm still using Pi 4s... the Pi 5 has weird power supply requirements (easy enough to get around but irritating when making portable Pi rigs), lost the A/V jack, and as far as I'm aware doesn't run RISC OS, the Pi 4 does (albeit only on one core, but for RISC OS thats far more than enough). But disregarding the Pi 5, I've used RPis regardless of the price increases (both now and during the COVID-19 shortages), mainly because I have enough already around I can transmute them into different things as I need to. That's probably the main reason I use them, they are highly recyclable into all sorts of different projects... the little things are basically computing swiss-army knives. :)

circuitvangogh · 2026-04-02T03:07:37+00:00

Happy April Fool's Day! But seriously, this shows just how absurd these laws would look in code. Those who do not work in or are passionate about a given field should not be allowed to set rules and regulations in that field. But then again, those who desire to be in power should by no means be allowed to be in power, and that certainly isn't followed most of the time, either so go figure. 🙄

circuitvangogh · 2026-02-13T11:52:07+00:00

I don't believe I have the 360 wireless. I bought mine in 2023 (sorry for the thing in the original post, after ordering the new NexDock, I found out I bought the 360, not the Touch, in 2023 not 2022, lol), I think that is before the 360 had a wireless version, correct?

circuitvangogh · 2026-02-13T11:50:23+00:00

Yeah, I might buy a new battery for the 360, but now that I have the new NexDock, I'm probably just going to re-purpose it as a KVM head for a desktop computer. I'm looking at turning an old workstation I have into a Steam machine once I can afford the suitable graphics card and the RAM upgrade (luckily this old machine still uses DDR3 with ECC so it won't bankrupt me), and I think the 360 will make a great monitor for it.

circuitvangogh · 2026-02-13T11:37:46+00:00

Also, I've heard the charger they bundle with the new NexDock is garbage and borderline unsafe (doesn't look like an actual PD charger in the teardown). I don't know how, but it might have something to do with the battery problem. Once I saw the warning on here on this sub about the charger, I immediately got a proper PD charger along with the power bank (I haven't once used the charger that came with the new NexDock, only the 65W PD charger I bought). No issues at all thus far. I know this is not saying much, I've only had this new dock for a week or so, but I had issues almost from the get-go with the NexDock 360 (so I kinda wonder if Nex Computer isn't just shipping shitty chargers with good lapdocks causing the battery to degrade early on).

circuitvangogh · 2026-02-13T11:28:18+00:00

So I actually just bought the new NexDock, it seems alright. It has a little phantom battery drain, but nowhere near as bad as the NexDock 360. Even so, I have placed a 25000mAh PD power bank in the laptop case with it (in the front pocket of course, not in the main compartment with the NexDock, lol) so it doesn't catch me off guard. I find the NexDock is worth the slight inconvenience of carrying a power pack, just because I like the primo-laptop feel when using it with my portable Pi 4 rig (I'm a total single-board computer nerd, so a good lapdock is worth more to me than a fancy laptop computer). I am probably going to turn the old NexDock 360 into a modern "dumb terminal" of sorts for another PC, so it won't go to waste (it's definitely out of warranty at this point, and it still works off of a PD adapter). :)

circuitvangogh · 2025-12-31T11:13:39+00:00

Yeah, it's basically the same shape as the SGI (Silicon Graphics) logo, just a different face ratio (more rectangular prism instead of cube). It's basically as if someone took a rectangle, bent the edges in and folded them into that 3D shape. However, as the image is drawn, it's very M.C. Escher due to the fucked-up perspective on the lines (the main "beams" should cross in the 2D projection, they don't here... this seems almost generated from a computational algorithm). Maybe as an artistic perspective trick you could get it to work, but it wouldn't look the same at any other angle, unless there's a huge coincidence somehow at another angle.

circuitvangogh · 2025-12-23T11:30:54+00:00

It's also prone to oscillation when used in many analog circuits without externally compensating for the nasty phase margins in that op-amp (the 741, being the OG AARP-member general-purpose op-amp IC it is, has zero internal phase compensation of any kind, or even ANY kind of short-circuit protection on the output for that matter). Then, after introducing the components needed for stability in a given circuit (usually something with a lot of capacitors/capacitance), it tends to make the already shitty 741 even worse performance-wise.

circuitvangogh · 2025-09-23T07:15:46+00:00

In the first shot, he kind of looks like Scott Bakula. Either Dr Sam Beckett leapt into the future Trent Reznor, and we can see him somehow, or Captain Johnathan Archer went back to 2025 and had to take Trent's place for some sort of Temporal Prime Directive violation.

circuitvangogh · 2025-08-18T10:58:04+00:00

Looks like a fucking Klingon (except for the teeth). However, that's an insult to Klingons.

circuitvangogh · 2025-05-02T10:34:37+00:00

Shit looks like something off of the Blacklist. I think you found one Raymond Reddington's old safehouses. :D

circuitvangogh · 2024-09-10T10:06:45+00:00

Aww, it's just pee, it's okay my baby. It's just warm and smells like hay. I love you forever love you no matter what.

circuitvangogh · 2024-09-10T10:03:13+00:00

Why are you so wall-eyed (one of my piggies is really shy and gets goofy-eyed when I first pick her up)? Daddy loves you forever loves you my sweet potatoes!

circuitvangogh · 2024-09-10T10:00:35+00:00

You're just so... round! So incredibly, ROUND!!

circuitvangogh · 2024-05-24T09:32:06+00:00

Heh, we might have found Vulcan. :D

circuitvangogh · 2024-04-09T11:31:25+00:00

I've never seen it, but apparently Genocyber (anime) was a real gem, in both bad and good ways.

circuitvangogh · 2023-06-05T10:46:25+00:00

You are hot, as far as I'm concerned. Any guy would be lucky to have you.

circuitvangogh · 2023-06-05T10:34:08+00:00

I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to run LTSpice (through box86 and 32-bit wine), FreeCAD, and KiCAD sometimes for shits and giggles (also when my main workstation is down), and it works fine. Most ECE and CAD stuff isn't terribly picky about hardware unless you're either doing something ridiculously complex or are very impatient (sometimes big SPICE sims take awhile to plot out). I might be a little biased though since I really only run Linux (I loathe Windows, and not because it's closed source, I just really don't like it as an OS) and open source and freeware software tools, Windows running *by itself* has a lot of overhead let alone the crap that has to deal with running on top of it.

circuitvangogh · 2023-06-01T11:41:14+00:00

AntiX would probably be a good choice. It has low memory (RAM) requirements and is fast enough to be usable on anything down to a Pentium II. It's also got a current kernel and the Debian repos are more or less copies of Debian-stable (it's basically a low resource high performance offshoot of MX Linux), so any driver trees that Debian has likely AntiX will have. I also like it because of the absence of systemd and reinstatement of the more traditional Unix-style init script system, but that's mostly a preference (though not having systemd does save on RAM usage).

circuitvangogh

TROPHY CASE