[Blog] Making Cyberwear at Home Pt.1: Introduction, and Conceptualization.

Hello frens, this will be a series on making your own functional cyberwear at home. This was directly inspired by both my time in the cyberdeck community, and watching Edgerunners.

I have recently been working on designing a wearable, functional and most importantly, practical device that I can use everyday for anything I need. Since the current design is pretty basic and can be made with stuff most people have at their house, I thought id make a tutorial series as I learn, experiment and try things out. The goal is to help other people make cool shit at home, easily and give them a good introduction to electronics, and doing cool stuff with them.

My core objectives for the project are:
- Can be worn without discomfort or clunk. 

- Can carry with me without any wires, or extra devices. Functions as a stand alone device.

- Fully functional, customizable and easy to use. (Can function as a computer).

- Easy to fix, repair and maintain.

- Modular, and easily modifiable.  

- Ideally FOSS conscious. (Free and Open Source)

- Looks cool and cyberpunk as fuck B)

The first hurdle for me was a big one, and part of why I am making this series. Pretty much all my equipment is across the country LOL. The only thing I have is some desktop peripherals, old phones, a laptop and a cheap soldering gun thats too hot to use on PCBs, and cant be adjusted. So neither of these will be in the tutorial, though I may make another series in the future. 

Terminology:

Soldering: Using a hot rod/gun to melt wires together, or conductive metals to a PCB.

PCB: "Printed Circuit Board", basically a way to connect electronics together in a compact and flat way (Think a motherboard) 

I first started off looking at using a phone for the main device, for a few reasons. Firstly its already an entire computer, no need for another board. Id just plug in a USB hub of some kind, maybe a lightweight external battery for longer life. Another reason being its touch screen, meaning there isn't a need for a keyboard and monitor. I can just type, using the virtual keyboard. 

The only problem was that I cant use android as an operating system, because not only is it very much not privacy conscious, but it doesn't give enough control to me as I'd personally like. That being said you can tweak android to your needs, just keep in mind older phones have a inherent security risk (which we will get a bit into later). 

A solution to this could be flashing a custom ROM, like Lineage. But sadly none of my phones are compatible with any ROM id like to use, so Ill have to look for another option.

(I will eventually make a post on flashing custom ROMs, at least the basics so if this approach is best for you, and you like my content you can have best of both worlds)

So for this I decided to use a Raspberry Pi. A raspberry pi is basically a small, and compact computer. It's been around for a long time, but sadly is extremely overpriced right now because scalping and silicon shortage. So I am gonna link a LinusTechTips video here, that gives some cheaper alternatives. I then realized I could probably use one of the phones as a touch screen, and hook it up to the Pi.

From these basic ideas I got to the drawing board and started designing the layout for the project. The design phase will be covered in the next part (which I am going to start writing right after this goes up). So stay tuned.

If you have any specific concepts you want covered, questions or whatever, please comment.Plz give kudos :D