A frame.work cassette player

05 Aug 2024

The Deck

However I’ve been fairly unimpressed with a lot of the modern cyberdeck movement - they’re consistently pretty but rarely powerful enough to be interesting. A R.Pi 3 or 4 is a powerful little machine for its price and size but it’s no replacement for a laptop when it comes to computationally intensive things, be they games or code compilation.

So I set out on the journey looking at 3 key goals:

  1. It had to be a useable machine with power comparable to a laptop
  2. It had to fit the retro aesthetic. Being a perfect recreation of what was described in Neuromancer or Snow Crash was less important than it being a computer I would be willing to use in public, in street clothes, in front of others.
  3. It had to have a usable screen. None of these 5” or 7” postage stamps - I needed readable text and 1080p.

And without further ado - I present the fruit of my labors, the Hitachi TRQ220 tape recorder Cyberdeck.

Some design highlights:

Woes

Like any first iteration - there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors that go into keeping this clean on the outside. Inside there’s a mess of amateur solder connecting core components like the power button, botched 3d designs that resulted in flush cutter “patches” to the structural components, all of it friction welded using a dremel and some excess PLA.

Record to Power

The power button was a devil to get working right. Initially I purchased a pcb with the correct pin outs already set up to control the mobo directly but had a minor speed bump - I bumped it while it was soldered and ripped the traces out. I’m nowhere near good enough to repair such a mistake: so I went back to the original vendor and placed an order for 3 more. After 2 months of silence from the vendor I reached out to Tindie and got a refund for my order: There was no way around it now, I would have to figure out the pinout myself.

Hesitant to stretch myself even further I resisted the urge to learn PCB design and just bought the correct connector for the header, figured out which pins I meeded to bridge, and then soldered them to a circuit that the power button would complete. It only took 3 weeks to get that right!

After getting the header figured out I connected it up to the record button by running hook up wire to the lever arm that moved the original internals and a second wire that is placed so that the pressing of the record button touches the exposed wire, completing the circuit. Simple and straightforward!

Wifi card

Thew only part of the framework mainboard that didn’t fit in the guts of the casette player was the wifi card which was inserted via a M2 pcie slot. I looked for risers that might have been able to do a sharp 90° bend to get the card inside - to no avail. i had less than a centemeter to perform a 180 and attach the card.

It wasn’t really an option to run without it: Even if I didn’t need wifi I did need bluetooth.

The only option wad to cut through the case and print a cover for it. This was particularly nerve wracking because one misstep and I could end up with a botched case. Since it’s vintage there’s no guarantee of my finding a replacement.

Ultimately I needn’t have worried: the cut went easily.

Battery sandwich

The only way I could possibly power this beast was to fit the battery into the same frame. The battery is the same width as the mainboard so I had an easy enough time fitting it into the case. I used cad to carefully align the connector and then twisted the cable 180° to have it connect underneath itself. This remains the sketchiest part of this whole build.

Field testing

The ultimate field test was use during my commute on the NYC subway. I decided on something easy to try: Vampire Survivors is a game that can be played with a 2 inputs: a joystick and a single button. I connected up a JoyCon via bluetooth and off I went. It mostly went well too - The ride there was no issue, the ride back however I struggled to get the JoyCon to reconnect. When I got home and took it all apart I found that the wifi card had come disconnected from its antennae - meaning the bluetooth was disconnected as well. I ran another test trying to see if I had just not secured the connectors well enough: same issue.

The only other option was to solder the connectors onto the wifi card directly. I didnt love this choice but saw no other way. I connected them up with some detaching connectors so it could still be pulled apart… and success! I could go to and from work with the deck on and running.