We feature a lot of DIY portable computers — rehash the “is that a cyberdeck” in the comments to your heart’s content — but how many of them are explicitly girly? Certainly, none of the ones that come to mind oozed the distilled femme energy of [cc] AKA [bossbratox]’s project, playfully titled “Mermaid in the Shell”.
The build started with a frame clutch purse, which, given that it comes with nice hinges and latches, is really a brilliant starting point for a project case. The fact that you can find them shaped like pink seashells really seals the deal for this particular project. A ZitaoTech BB Q10 keyboard — in white, naturally — pairs with a 3.5″ touchscreen as the interface for a Raspberry Pi 3A+. You might be thinking, “great, another toy with an old Pi inside. What can you really do with a Pi3 in 2026?” Well, admittedly, for full-fat desktop Linux, the 3A+ is looking a bit long in the tooth and short in the RAM.
If you are willing to work within its constraints and not run a full Linux desktop, though, 512 MB is plenty of RAM to work with. [cc] has set up a custom terminal user interface (TUI) to give her everything she needs — wifi, bluetooth, a full terminal, a remote serial monitor, a local LLM chatbot, a PDF reader, a text editor, and, of course, a mermaid digital pet. That last one is user-skinnable, though, so if you want a terminal tamagotchi of your own, you can grab the code off GitHub and swap the spites for whatever you want.
Thanks to [cc] for the tip. Whether your next build is dripping the femme-ergy and kawaii as heck, or just utilitarian tacticool, please let us know in the tips line.
Remember, too, that an aesthetic doesn’t need to be skin-deep. We have some tips for good-looking PCBs here that are relevant because they now come in pink — as we saw with this wearable circuit sculpture.