Building Internet-connected things seems obvious today, but what about when there’s no Internet?

The concept often feels like something out of a science fiction movie or a doomsday prepper’s handbook- and while this device can work in both scenarios, it’s also about understanding resiliency for your projects and being a good steward of the systems in place today.

I’ve been posting the progress of this project on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook all month, and this is my full build log of the project. You’ll find the parts list at the bottom of this article. They are affiliate links that help me make more cool stuff, and by using them you don’t pay any more than usual- so thank you for supporting my projects, even just a little bit.

I posted about a month ago on my retrospective from four years ago when I made the Raspberry Pi Field Unit, which was generously shared on Hackaday then, and I posted a follow-up on Reddit several weeks back. There’s a few common issues that I came across:

There was no keyboard!

The solution isn’t truly waterproof

Numerous holes in the case would make ingress of water or moisture even more common

My wiring on the original project was a mess

The display took up too much room and was too hard to mount

The project was too hard to maintain or fix

Several connectors were very fragile

Material choices for the internal structure were not good- I picked plastics that were too brittle, and the overall structure was poor

No EM shielding from the preppers in the audience

I could go on and on, but those are the key points. I’ll address each of these below:

No keyboard

In 2014 I wasn’t aware of any reduced footprint keyboards, and I did look. Even looking today there wasn’t any that fit common search terms, but as a lurker in /r/mechanicalkeyboards I did find out and had already bought a Plaid keyboard kit. As luck turns out, it was a perfect fit. It’s my first ortholinear keyboard, but it matches the cyberdeck feel of the project. I’m using DSA Beyond keycaps and Cherry MX Silent switches, all hand-soldered. More pics are here, but here’s a shot below: