This Hacked-Together Raspberry Pi Laptop Is the Essence of Cyberpunk

When people talk about the “cyberpunk” style these days, they’re usually saying something glows. Get a green mohawk, throw on a studded leather jacket, and make something light up, and boom — cyberpunk! But the true spirit of cyberpunk, as it goes back to its literary origins, is in hacked tech. Real cyberpunk is a bunch of futuristic tech smashed together to do something new. Imgurian Keyofnight’s Cyberpunk Laptop fits the latter definition perfectly.

Take a quick look at this laptop and you’ll immediately see why. Every component, down to the individual keyboard key caps, looks mismatched and hacked-together. Circuit boards are exposed, and everything is mounted inside a vintage wood Mahjong case. Despite the purposefully-crude construction, it somehow manages to be both incredibly stylistic and utilitarian. It looks cobbled-together — but with a purpose, and that’s the true essence of cyberpunk.

Style aside, this is a pretty useful build. The heart of the laptop is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, and the screen is an Adafruit 5" LCD connected by HDMI. It’s powered by a 12,000mAh LiPo battery through an Adafruit Powerboost 1000C. The unique keyboard is based on /u/pyrocrastinator’s Alpha PCB. Most importantly, it has a Pimoroni Phat Stack board for doing some actual hacking on the go. If you want a real cyberpunk laptop, this is the build to emulate.