I love me a typewriter. They’re gorgeous, mechanical works of art. Sadly, they’re loud, and I’m just not as fast on them as a keyboard. So, I made a “Writer Deck,” a subspecies of cyberdeck, the science-fiction-spawned concept of a small, self contained compute device that’s hyper-portable and often kept on one’s person. Writer decks deemphasize general computing and instead focus on distraction-free systems optimized for focused writing and composing. I’ve been writing some more fiction lately, and I’m an easily distractable man (I mean, c’mon, it’s the internet – it’s awesome!). So I made myself one:

Under the hood it runs a Radxa Zero 3W, a Pi-Zero-form-factor SBC with 2GB of RAM (just barely sufficient to run a desktop environment with i3 WM). Originally I started with a full size RasPi 5 (shell pictured below), but I liked the smaller size much better. It hosts a keyboard dongle, HDMI out to a 1080x480 wide aspect ratio monitor, and a 20Ah battery pack to keep it rolling on the go. I modeled a shell in OpenSCAD and we were off to the races!

It works really well! Just enough beef to run Typora, my markdown editor of choice, but it’d work just fine with a vanilla RasPi Zero if you did your editing in vim.

It doesn’t quite capture the magic of a typewriter, but I still like it. Also gets a lot fewer dirty looks when you use it in a cafe!