• Penguin Pi (Progress and Documentation 2021-PRESENT)

    Adam Wakelin • 05/08/2025 at 00:34 • 0 comments

    Hello, my name is Adam Wakelin, the creator of Penguin Pi.

    I am a high school student in San Diego, California, and an aspiring engineer. I love to learn about electronics, science, and radio; and when I find the time, I love to work on my personal STEM projects.

    Penguin Pi has been a personal project of mine since late 2021. Throughout its on-and-off development over the course of the past four years, the design, purpose, and scope of the project has changed significantly. I can proudly say that I am still learning, and that this fun, humble project of mine has pushed me to learn and grow in my designing and engineering skills.

    The project has simple origins, which date back to 2021. At the time, I was very interested in portable or handheld Raspberry Pi technology, as most Raspberry Pi computers are confined to a desk, requiring a rat's nest of wires to operate. I spent a lot of time browsing the internet and reading various technology or hacker forums, where Raspberry Pi enthusiasts and hobbyists showed off their portable Raspberry Pi computers, which are commonly referred to as “Cyberdecks”.

    Many of these Cyberdecks were designed to resemble devices or computers from popular video games or movies, such as Fallout, Star Wars, and more. The designs looked amazing and it was obvious that a large amount of time and effort went into their creation, but they did not seem to be the most practical due to their form factors and interfaces. (This is not to say that my device is any better, in fact, many of these devices are still far smaller and more ergonomic than mine)

    Pipboy 3000 from Fallout, featured on Adafruit.com (Article written by the Ruiz brothers)

    Other hobbyists popularized “doomsday” Raspberry Pi-based rigs, which were more often than not built into a Pelican case. These makers would cram as much functionality as possible into these devices, which both looked clean and high-tech, and had a clear function that they could perform well. These Cyberdecks were some of my favorites, but they were still a bit large.

    this off-grid cyberdeck computer is designed for the end of the world

    The Raspberry Pi “Recovery Kit”, created by Jay Doscher

    It was around this time that I started to research Raspberry Pi “handhelds”, which were another genre of Cyberdeck. I was interested in these devices, because their smaller size made them easier to transport, and/or recreate on a tight budget. Some hobbyists were also debuting devices that were simply just the devices themselves - the function or use case was determined by the user. Some of the inspirations for my project were the YARH.IO handheld, which had a full keyboard, a trackpad, and a screen, the Blackberry Pi, the Brick Pi, and the SmallPi.

    The YARH.IO, a handheld Cyberdeck gadget with a full keyboard and mouse pad.

    The Blackberry Pi, a handheld with a BBQ20 Blackberry Keyboard, created by Taylor Hay

    *The Deckility, created by Ken Van Hoeylandt

    Most of these projects were small, practical, and inexpensive to reproduce, and in all honesty, were extremely smart designs that are still more practical than the modern iteration of my Penguin Pi project.

    Even though it would have been easier and far more practical to modify one of these existing designs, (Multiple are still open-source) I wanted to take it upon myself to create a Cyberdeck of my own, through reverse engineering and my own spin on the idea.

    The project had no clear purpose when it started. The entire goal was simply to create a mobile interface for the Raspberry Pi. I had multiple ideas for possible use cases, such as a Wikipedia Backup, a digital library, and even a hacking multi-tool.

    Looking back, I feel that I was focusing too much on trying to formulate a solution to a problem that did not exist.

    I still felt that the design needed an overall purpose behind it, and so the early iterations gained a working name: ERIC. ERIC stood for Emergency Recovery of Information Computer. My Raspberry...

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