The end of the world seems closer now than ever before, even in the 1980s. But you, dear Hackaday reader, will want more than just a bug-out bag full of C-rations and waterproof matches. You will need the technological version of a bug-out bag — a mil-spec-esque cyberdeck, which is exactly what [hammerandhandmi] is in the middle of perfecting.
That’s not some kind of fancy cake pan — it’s a Pelican 1170 case lined with conductive foil tape. You see, [hammerandhandmi] has various reasons not elaborated upon for doing this, including EMP protection. Inside is an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4B donning a Pi Juice UPS HAT and sipping from a fancy power supply. The main charging source for the old Mac book battery is solar via a large panel that’s external to cyberdeck. A smaller, secondary panel lives inside for backup purposes. There’s also an MPPT charge controller for to support the different battery chemistries. [hammerandhandmi] chose the Pelican 1170 because they need to mount it to the back of an LC2 Alice rucksack frame. The 1170 is wider than the popular 1150, and is in fact almost the exact width of the LC2 frame.
The point of this build is to maintain power for the purpose of preserving knowledge — all that stuff we’ll need to rebuild humanity. There will be much information available up via FOSS offline browser Kiwix, plus an atlas, some military field manuals, a lot of survival info, all of the books Project Gutenberg has to offer, plus a handful of movies and a few game ROMs so [hammerandhandmi] can live out the rest of their days in what is hopefully some kind of solar punk utopia.
Provided there’s enough time to implement it all, [hammerandhandmi] plans to add an SDR with antenna hookup, GPS unit, 12 V port, a couple of SSDs, a powered USB hub, and maybe an RFID reader. But the coolest part is that they ultimately want to connect everything up to a HUD mounted in a ballistic helmet. See? The apocalypse could be awesome. It’s up to us!
We often see cyberdecks with mechanical keyboards, like this cherry Pi number. But the salvaged keeb from a 1989 Compaq laptop might be just as future-proof.
ApocaPi Now Is a Cyberdeck for What Comes After
Source: Manila Flash Report
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