Hobbyist xenomorphs Raspberry Pi into Alien-themed DIY laptop

We've all been there: You're doing maintenance on a Weyland-Yutani hauler dragging mineral ore back toward Earth, and there’s no terminal handy to tap into the MU/TH/UR AI to check ship systems. Lucky for you, one enterprising maker has created just the machine for the job. Okay, maybe the megacorporations, starships, androids …

[Scotthva5]

Want

Imagine the looks you'll get at your local coffee emporium when you pull out one of these.

[wolfetone]

Re: Want

To be fair he's put the files up on GitHub and gives instructions to build one.

So you know, get a 3D printer or avail of 3D printing services, get the parts together, and get soldering it down your local Starbucks.

[David 132]

Ah, progress

FTA: "...and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W - a low-power board with 512 MB of RAM - meaning it can't do too much..."

2026 me to 1979 me: "We have a self-contained computer with 4x 1GHz cores, 512MB RAM, a touch-capable 1280x400 full colour LCD screen, and wireless networking in the megabits-per-second speed range. Oh, and the motherboard costs the equivalent to you of £2.40. But we won't be able to 'do too much with it'."

1979 me: "Errr...."

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Ah, progress

It only needs another 128K to beenough for anyone.

[David 132]

Re: Ah, progress

Did you perhaps mean 128MB, if you're riffing on that old 640 joke?

Or have I just been, as da kids say, whooshed?

(Addendum to my earlier comment above - full disclosure, "1979 me" would have actually said something like "brbrbrbrbrbbbrbrb wanna wanna teddy wanna teddy NOW", as I was still in nappies. I was precocious, yes, but not that precocious.)

[Bill Gray]

Re: Ah, progress

In 1979, I was a spotty 14-year old lad in a school that had a PDP-11 with four video terminals hooked up to it, sharing (I think) 16 KBytes. And we were darn lucky to have it, too. 512 MBytes would be... uh... 32000 times what we had at the time. I don't think it would have been more memory than existed on the planet at the time, but it'd have been a significant chunk of it.

(If you've been whooshed, so have I.)

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Ah, progress

Epson PX-4 was 64K CP/M. You could page in sections of either EPROM into the normal address range.

I used them for POS - including the Gallup Pop Chart recording (about 1600 shops taking part) - before the music industry took it in house (allegedly 4 shops taking part!).

I also used the barcode reader as an input from timing beams for use on F1 test days (all the teams apart from Maclaren) - the same year that I did the first F1 in-car telemetry links back to the pits (Arrows). All in Z80 assembler including the fixed point maths functions required to calculate the speeds through the timing beams. (One EPROM was the timing system code and one EPROM was the text - although only English and French were needed.)

The linked page of Epson products does not include the EHT-10 - a touchscreen handheld 1986 style. https://randoc.wordpress.com/2020/10/26/epson-eht-10/

[Irongut]

Re: Ah, progress

No he meant 128 KB.

Bill Gates would have wet himself if you added 128 MB to an original IBM PC, that is orders of magnitude more than the 640 KB that should be enough for anyone.

The first PC I bought in the early 90s only had 1 MB of RAM! My first computer had 1 KB.

[David 132]

Re: Ah, progress

I can't decide whether you haven't noticed that the Pi Zero 2W has 512MB not KB, or you think there is some humorous significance to adding 128 kilobytes to 512 megabytes. "512-and-one-eighth megabytes should be enough for anyone"?

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Ah, progress

In 1979, I was using UNIX on a PDP11 at Durham University, as well as MTS on an IBM mainframe with a whole 6MB of 'main' memory, and shared by up to a hundred other users.

I would have loved a personal system of the size of either unit back then. Pretty much all portable systems were still in the future. The Sharp PC-1211, which is widly regarded as the first handheld computer was released in 1980 (and which I lusted for after seeing one brandished by one of the lecturers.)

There were microprocessors in other handheld devices, but they were really embedded systems designed to run as calculators.

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: Ah, progress

To David132...

Are you sure that you're old enough to be here alone? Do your parents know what you're doing?

[Kurgan]

Re: Ah, progress

You can't do anything with it because the enshittification of software has canceled the evolution of hardware.

[wolfetone]

Re: Ah, progress

Agree, 100%.

I'm going through a lot of stuff at home and I found an old ThinkCentre P4 PC I liberated from an office that went bust around 2008. The office did design work for Adams kids clothing company who had gone bankrupt earlier in the week. Anyway, plugged it in and turned it on, I forgot it had Windows XP on there zooming away with... *checks notes* 512MB RAM.

[IGotOut]

This...

...is what makes me happy.

When the tech Bros are ruining everything and destroying the planet, we have beautiful people making joyous items such as this.

[Jason Bloomberg]

The PX-88 I love. The PS-85 looks like he's lost his mind. But each to their own and I appreciate he's deep into the Alien franchise.

I had a Sinclair Scientific calculator with no equals sign because it used RPN, but I think I'd struggle using that PS-85.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are mistaken, that's not an alien keyboard, it's a native APL keyboard

[Peter Gathercole]

No no. Not APL. Not enough Greek!

[that one in the corner]

Don't be fooled by the weird keycaps; when you are in the bowels of the maintenance bay, water[1] dripping down the back of your neck[2], there isn't enough light for you to see the glyphs anyway.

In space, no-one can hear you touch type.

[1] just pray it is water and not Alien snot

[2] although, come on, water dripping in a space craft? Water, that number two[3] basic of staying alive in the vast night? They deserved to get eaten!

[3] well, number three, including toasted dough-based goods.

[Peter Gathercole]

I think in larger spacecraft, water[2] would be an issue. Condensation forming on cold metal is bound to happen anywhere there are people.And it you had a gravity field, it would drop.

Wasn't that one of the problems in Apollo 13, they didn't have the moisture scrubbers working, and all of the metal surfaces were wet?

[Gene Cash]

TRS-80 model 100

I immediately thought of the TRS-80 model 100 when I saw that "PX-88"

I guess there's only so many "keyboard slab with LCD" form factors.

[Dave559]

In space…

I'm sure there's a Raspberry Ripley/Ripple-y joke in there somewhere, but I can't seem to find it behind all that strange sticky goop that seems to be slowly dripping down on to the wall panels from the ceiling ducts…

[An_Old_Dog]

Done Before ... -ish

I have a friend whose home PC had a standard 105-key keyboard which was dirtier than the one on the pictured Nostromo-styled device. Between wear and grime, you couldn't read most of the keycaps.

We got rid of it under the guise of upgrading his entire PC.

[David 132]

Re: Done Before ... -ish

Anyone who's ever done PC repair for a heavy smoker can empathise, not to mention shudder with vicarious disgust.

Icon? What else -->

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Done Before ... -ish

Shudder, you've just brought back a bad memory from a previous job.

A customer brought in a PC for some attention. "Heavy smoker" didn't cover it, but the result of his smoking certainly did. The whole thing, inside and out, covered in a very generous layer (not film, layer) of horrible sticky carcinogen laden "tar". "Disgusting" really didn't do it justice. I was all for refusing to have anything to do with it on the grounds of it being a serious health hazard, but one of the other techs donned some plastic gloves and took it on (actually a simple fault in the end.)

But the irony was that he was one of the top bods at a local environmental campaign group !

[hopkinse]

Re: Done Before ... -ish

Office I worked in, early 90s when smoking in offices was still a thing, all the PCs were under desks so all the fluff and dust from the carpet tiles stuck to the nicotine that coated the insides. Doing memory upgrades that involved endless numbers of 512kbit DIP chips was fun and games!

[KayJ]

PS-85, shortly to be followed by the CN-20.