...no, not that Second Coming, but rather the second coming of the Homebrew Steampunk Laptop. Sorry, but to be quite blunt, I'm not anywhere near religious enough to warrant preparations for the one you were (probably) thinking of.

Up till this point, the motherboard for my Homebrew laptops had primarily come from a company called MeeGoPad. MeeGoPads are cheap knockoffs of the Intel Compute Stick usually, and when they aren't that, they're desktop-style "MiniPCs". They're decently popular on Amazon and eBay. My alternate motherboard source was traditionally a SunChip "Wintel CX-08" MiniPC. Both system lines tended towards identical specs -- an Intel Atom Z3735F CPU, 2gb soldered-down DDR3L RAM with no expansion ability, and a 32gb "eMMC" chip for an SSD. The notable exception here, my Cyberdeck system, used a MeeGoPad T09 MiniPC, which has an Intel Atom x5 Z8300 and 4gb RAM.

However, I managed somehow to trip over a NUC box on eBay for $70, which is to say, essentially free. It was being sold barebones -- no hard drive or SSD, no RAM< no OS -- and it was a 2014 model, so a little out-of-date, but at that price I wasn't about to be picky. I had the money, so I bought it. I also soon tripped over another cool thing -- a keyboard called the Qwerkywriter. It looked very nice, and it had some nifty extra functions, but cost an absolute mint. I took a look in my closet junkpile and dug out the original keyboard from the Steampunk Laptop, as well as a smallish copier drum and some brackets that originally held up the dial pad of a Western Electric (cloned by ITT) Model 2500 desk phone, I soon determined that I could rewire the original keyboard to add the Qwerkywriter's extra features, or, at least, the ones I cared about.

At this point I got out my pencil, assembled the parts I had (and added, by way of imagination, some that were still on order), and a paper concept emerged.