Building a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck From Scratch

Salim Benbouziyane just spent months turning a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 into a fully custom cyberdeck—complete with mechanical keyboard, custom PCBs, and a translucent case—and documented every mistake along the way. This is the kind of project that makes you appreciate both the ambition and the reality check.

The CM5 is essentially a Raspberry Pi stripped down to just the compute bits. No USB ports, no HDMI, no GPIO headers—just raw computing power waiting for someone to figure out the rest. That's both the appeal and the terror. "A compute module is basically a Pi without the IO, and that's actually the point," Benbouziyane explains. "You get to make those decisions for yourself and tailor to your own project."

The Design Phase (Where Everything Seems Possible)

Benbouziyane's vision was straightforward: a clamshell device about the size of a regular keyboard, with a 12-inch display, low-profile mechanical keys, and batteries that could actually power the thing. The display came from WaveShare—an IPS panel using the MIPI interface for power efficiency. He paired it with industrial torque hinges from McMaster-Carr that would hold the screen at any angle without flopping around.

The keyboard got the full custom treatment: split ortholinear layout with a trackpad in the middle, plus a small OLED screen and extra controls. He even sourced keycaps specifically for an ortho layout. This wasn't going to be some compromised portable setup—this was going to be nice.

Then came the hard part: designing carrier boards with high-speed differential signals. "If I mess this up, nothing works, and I won't even know why," he admits. High-speed signals run as differential pairs—two traces carrying the same signal, one inverted, so noise gets canceled out when the receiver subtracts them. Getting the impedance right requires online calculators, four-layer PCB stackups, and a lot of faith that Fusion 360's signal integrity tool knows what it's talking about.

He borrowed heavily from Raspberry Pi's official CM4 IO board designs, reverse-engineering schematics for USB hubs, I2S audio circuits, and GPIO headers. The audio setup was particularly clever: one amp for tiny internal speakers, another for headphones, with the headphone jack mechanically switching between them without any firmware intervention needed.

The Part Where Reality Gets Involved

Here's where things get interesting. Benbouziyane designed the entire enclosure around product dimensions he found online—before he actually had the display in hand. "That's something that I later regretted," he notes. Turns out the product diagram was missing some critical details. The hinge mounts he designed? Screws pulled right out after a few opens and closes. Back to CAD.

The display itself weighed 775 grams—way heavier than expected. Open it fully and the whole device would tip backward like an overeager laptop. Even after redesigning the riser feet to shift the center of mass, he was still 180 grams short of balanced. Solution? Brass weights machined by PCBWay to add ballast to the base. Not exactly elegant, but it worked.

Then there's the part where he placed the IO ports on the back because it "looks cleaner," only to realize that plugging anything in prevents the screen from opening fully. He had to carve clearance notches into the back panel. And because he boxed himself into an impossible assembly order, he added a cutout so the back panel could slide in after installing the main board.

Soldering Microscopic Mistakes

The electronics assembly is where most mortals would have given up. Benbouziyane hand-placed surface mount components—including ESD protection diodes he describes as "some of the tiniest I've ever seen"—and reflowed them in sections because the board was too big for his hot plate.

First power-on of the keyboard? It showed up as a drive, which was promising. Except it wouldn't accept firmware. Turns out he forgot to connect a rather important pin on the flash chip. One bodge wire later, LEDs started lighting up. Well, some of them. Cold solder joints needed touching up.

The carrier board had its own drama. When he finally got the CM5 to boot with the display connected, it would just... refuse. Multimeter debugging revealed the display was leaking 3 volts back through the DSI connection, confusing the compute module. "I cut the 3-volt line going from the CM5 to the display because I didn't actually need it in this case," he says. After that, the screen finally worked.

Thermal management became another issue. The thin cooler he designed the case around couldn't keep up—the CM5 was hitting throttling temperatures under load. He switched to a thicker cooler meant for the CM5, which fixed performance but required rethinking some internal clearances.

What Actually Works

Despite all the setbacks, the final device is legitimately impressive. Native battery reporting through a kernel driver means no custom firmware hacking. The keyboard can "steal" input from another host when plugged into a special port—useful for bench work when you need a spare keyboard. And that transparent bottom case shows off all the custom PCB work underneath, complete with a neon color that looks even better when scratched.

The project files are on GitHub, which is both generous and slightly terrifying. Anyone can build their own, mistakes included. The video runs 25 minutes and doesn't skip the failures—the wrong ribbon cables, the assembly order nightmares, the weights needed to prevent tipping. It's honest about what custom hardware actually involves: months of CAD work, multiple prototypes, component testing, bodge wires, and a lot of "well, that didn't work."

For anyone thinking about building custom computing hardware, this is what the process actually looks like. Not the polished final shots, but the debugging, the redesigns, and the moment you realize you forgot an important pin connection. The CM5 gives you total control over your IO, but that means you're responsible when high-speed signals don't behave or hinges pull out or displays leak voltage where they shouldn't.

Benbouziyane made it work. Whether that makes the rest of us want to try it ourselves or appreciate our boring, reliable laptops a bit more probably depends on how much we enjoy fighting with ribbon cables at 2 AM.

—Tyler Nakamura