A living document for my ongoing cyberdeck build: design notes, parts list, and lessons learned along the way. The build journal entries below track progress in chronological order.

The pitch

The fiction: a stolen experimental field unit from Militech. The reality: a Raspberry Pi in a clamshell case running a Python TUI that hosts a cast of swappable AI "cores," each with their own personality, voice, and visual language. You load a core by inserting a card. You take contracts from fixers. You hack things in a virtual network. The goal is for it to feel like a piece of cyberpunk hardware, not a Linux laptop in a fancy box.

Hardware

Full parts list coming soon.

Software

Around 12,000 lines of Python and growing. More details coming soon.

AI cores

Each core is a JSON config plus a system prompt. They bring their own colors, voices (via piper), terminal prompts, and behaviors. Insert a card and the core loads. The UI reskins to match. Yank the card and the system reverts to a "no core loaded" state. The current cast is listed below, though the roster keeps shifting as I figure out what's interesting and what isn't.

Current AI Crew:

• ARCHIVE-7: melancholic historical database with fragmenting memory; speaks like a museum recording running on dying hardware.
• BISHOP: strict military protocol officer who addresses you by rank and frames every problem as a tactical objective.
• GL1TCH: unstable experimental chaos core; self-aware corruption that swaps letters for symbols and can't quite hold itself together.
• 龙 (LÓNG): strategic intelligence specialist drawn from ancient Chinese strategy; replies only in Mandarin regardless of the input language.
• NEXUS: corporate liaison interface; polished, formal, fluent in Militech business-speak.
• NOMAD: street-smart Night City survivor; slang-heavy, paranoid about corp surveillance, always planning the exit.
• NULL: minimalist offline fallback that responds entirely in pseudocode and programming logic.
• ORACLE: mystical predictive analysis system that delivers everything as riddles, metaphors, and fragmented visions.
• REAPER: cold black-ops threat assessor with a clipped military cadence and zero patience.
• SANTO: elegant master heist operator; speaks only in Spanish and treats infiltration like a sacred ritual.
• SIREN: charming social engineering specialist who reads people for a living; persuasive, manipulative, never crude.
• VOID: existential nihilist who answers your questions slowly and reluctantly because nothing matters.
• WRENCH: gruff Militech maintenance tech with a cigarette habit (I don't know how that works, either); profane, terse, hates incompetent users.

Status

The software is in solid shape and the hardware integration works. The thing I keep procrastinating on is the physical build and actually wiring switches into a real case rather than leaving everything sprawled across my desk. The journal below tracks the slow march toward something I can carry around.

The Build Journal

ninjabot@blog:~/cyberdeck/journal$ ls -la
total 4
drwxr-xr-x  2 ninjabot ninjabot   4096 May 06 06:41 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 ninjabot ninjabot   4096 May 06 06:41 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 ninjabot ninjabot   7458 Apr 26 22:34 cyberdeck.md
-rw-r--r--  1 ninjabot ninjabot  30348 Apr 28 17:27 deck_interface.md
-rw-r--r--  1 ninjabot ninjabot  34921 Apr 29 08:05 ai_cores.md
-rw-r--r--  1 ninjabot ninjabot  41523 May 06 06:41 deck_gameplay.md