The GIBSON Rev-001

Designed with a bunch of I/O and sensors for on the fly environmental monitoring all whist looking dope in a tight package.

Features:

Pi4 running Twister OS

7” IPS touchscreen

Colour E-ink display

10,000mAh battery (installed behind the E-ink display)

Power management with a UPSPACK_V3 with auto shutdown and a gui for battery levels

USB 3.2 hat for 4 internal USB ports

Pimoroni Hacker hat for gpio access

GK64 mechanical keyboard with backlight

Sd card is mounted on an extension for easy access

Active cooling (manual control)

Internal storage that fits the following:

Pimoroni breakout garden with the following sensors

MAX30105 Particle/Smoke and Pulse Ox Sensor

BMP280 Temperature Pressure Altitude Sensor

SGP30 Air Quality Sensor

VEML6075 UVA and UVB light sensor

Trackball

Pi 0w with paper display running pawnagotchi

Future changes, revisions and ideas to implement

The biggest headache of this build has been the LCD panel. I opted for a model (WIMAXIT) that had a HDMI port on the back, problem is the rear port has nonstandard pin configuration and it seems as if it has a lower res than the side hdmi port. Either-way running it over a ribbon cable is pretty glitchy (even with hdmi_boost turned up to 11) so it’s my first priority to fix. 

Definitely need to add an external HDMI port as a 7” can get a little tedious.

Most of the internal wiring is using standard usb cables, these along with their plugs take up too much room so I would like to switch these over to some diy cables/plugs to save space. 

Would like to permanently mount the Pi 0w somewhere on the machine. 

I bought an Nooelec Nesdr Smart for this build and would like to install it at some point as I have made the room for it. I have two mounting points on either side to fit a ‘guitar strap’ might use these mounting points instead for two antenna(see attached image). 

The cooling fan is manual but I might switch it over to a gpio pin on the pi and make it automatic.

I really wanted to fit a thermal receipt printer in this build but it was just too big, but I am considering making a matching case for it to go along side. 

The display came with speakers that I have’t hooked up yet as I just use the headphone jack, but I might consider adding them in. 

I often use an external mouse rather than the couch screen, would like to have the trackball mounted permanently perhaps.

One of the main reasons I built this machine was to familiarise myself with linux and python and I have lots to learn in this department. I would like to create some scripts that display the sensor data on the colour paper display. So for example I can plug in the breakout garden and run a script that logs all the data from the sensors and logs it on the ePaper display. 

Add viewing port for Pi status led’s

And maybe so more in the aesthetics department, some proper 3d printed inlays and some textural highlights could be great.

Since designing this I have started using fusion360 (finally!) and as this project was designed is SketchUp. I would make the rev 2 model in Fusion which would mean starting from scratch but there are quite a few little elements that would really benefit from using Fusion. 

When I saw msglab’s incredible MSG Cyberdeck v1 I realised what I had idealised in Gibson’s and Stephenson’s novels as a kid was actually now a feasible reality and I set out to build my own. So a big thanks goes out to all the wonderfull models builders and geeks for their tumultuous inspiration!