A purpose-built information workspace and safety device, designed to fit the needs of those who work deep underground, the high vacuum of space, or anywhere in between. It's thick and heavy, and if you could somehow compare it with modern tech, it's even less powerful than your smartphone...from ten years ago. Yet in a world where technology and manufacturing are extremely limited, this represents the best of the best.

I began designing this in 2D, laying out the silhouette and major components in Affinity Designer. Turning that into CAD wasn't that hard, especially after everything I had to learn in order to model the KL-90 handgun. I got stuck in the weeds in other places with this project, and unlike my other early assets, for this one I have no excuse.

First, any computer is useless without software, and with computing in this world taking a different form than we're used to, the software would likewise follow some different paradigms. But instead of focusing on that higher-level design, I spent way too much time fiddling with individual pixels. In the real world, low-power systems don't have the oomph to dynamically render text, so instead they rely on pre-rendered pixel or bitmap fonts. I made an attempt to design my own variant of those, spending a tremendous amount of time trying to make a coherent set of glyphs within some very strict constraints, and never managed to arrive at anything satisfactory. I eventually gave up and just used a normal font to finish designing everything.

Second, I really wanted to apply some of the stuff I was learning about physical electronics at the time and attempt to build a replica of this device. Raspberry Pi single-board computers and small touchscreen LCDs were cheap enough and easy to obtain, and I figured I could emulate the light bar with a couple of NeoPixel LED strips. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that assembling stuff from generic parts can't get even remotely close to the economy of real hardware that's engineered and integrated together. (After all, there's a very good reason why R&D budgets are massive.) On the verge of giving up, I discovered a category of ESP32 microcontroller boards with a tightly integrated, much thinner display, which looked a lot more promising. I bought one and learned how to flash it...only to discover that its pixels weren't square, making it near-useless for displaying my mockup UI! With that last straw, I cut my losses and shoved all that stuff in a box. One of these days I'll keep fooling around with it, but right now I have much bigger fish to fry.