Crosberry Pi

I spent the day reconfiguring the keyboard, because the Preonic has mysteriously ceased working. I did everything I could find to do, and finally ordered a replacement keyboard. I received it today, but it turned out I had ordered a Planck instead of a Preonic, so now I have a keyboard with one fewer row than I was expecting. I like the smaller form factor, it turns out, and I may be able to fit in some neat extra features with the additional space. 

Back up and running with the Planck keyboard, but without the under lighting turned on. I haven't been able to figure out the reconfiguration of the keyboard with QMK, so even though the Planck has under lighting LEDs I don't have a way to turn them on yet. That will be a project for tomorrow. In the meantime, I tossed in a glowy keychain.  

I acquired and lost my first trackball mouse in the 90s, and I replaced it in 2021 with a Logitech Marble Mouse. I was using the mouse at my main computer and imagined it could work really well in the confined space of a deck that wasn't going to get a trackpad. I took it apart and removed the business components, then measured where I wanted the wires for the ball and each of its two side buttons to sit. At that point, the top surface of the deck was made out of a pizza box, so I cut a channel in the cardboard for the mouse wires to fold through. That way I could leave the circuit board under the pizza box layer. 

Later I used the cardboard as a template and cut the final top surface out of plexiglass. I dremeled a little channel in the plexiglass for the cables to slide through and housed its circuit board on the underside of the plexiglass with some gaff tape. 

Yes, the buttons are hard to press. But, with practice, hitting those little red switches became second nature for me.

The Crosberry Pi is a media machine, in that it does a great job of playing lofi hip hop and radio broadcasts at a decent volume and with that classic Crosley sound. Making use of the speakers in the case was my brilliant wife's idea. We used a donor 3.5mm audio cable and soldered it to the existing board, which is easily accessible once you remove the plastic turntable top. I removed the RCA outputs and used the hole in the case for the USB hub's power cable, which powers the entire deck.