I should say that my original plan was a lot less grand than what you see before you now.

Originally I was simply going to put a 5-inch LCD into the original bezel, with a Raspberry Pi (perhaps even a Zero) mounted directly to the back of it. I even planned on using a Teensy microcontroller to tap into the original keyboard matrix, since it was already had a full-sized 60% layout. Sure there were a couple weird keys, but I thought it would add to the charm.

But plans started changing once I started actually working on the project. One of the first issues was the keyboard -- it was terrible. Seriously, like the worst keyboard I've ever used. It had to go, but at that point, I wasn't really sure how it'd pull it off.

It also became clear that a 5-inch display would be pretty miserable for any real computing. In addition, the angle of the original bezel meant you'd have to look down while you were using it. This wasn't terrible (at least it wasn't completely flat like the TRS-80 Model 100), but I overall it seemed using the machine in this configuration would be uncomfortable enough that it would never be anything more than a novelty.

So the keyboard had to go, and the screen needed to be moved and made larger. So much for the "weekend project" I thought this would be.