Jack In, The 2023 Cyberdeck Challenge Starts Now

The modern laptop is truly a masterpiece of engineering, craming an incredible amount of processing power into a thin and lightweight package that can run for hours on its internal batteries, all for just a few hundred bucks. Combine that with the ubiquitous smartphone, and it’s safe to say that the state of mobile computing has never been better.

Despite this, over the last several years we’ve watched cyberdecks go from a few one-off examples to a vibrant community of truly personal computing devices. While there are some exceptions, most of them are larger, more expensive, and less portable than what’s available on the commercial market. But that’s not the point — a cyberdeck should be a reflection of the hacker that built it, not the product of a faceless megacorp.

Which is why we’re excited to officially announce the 2023 Cyberdeck Challenge, starting now and running all summer through to August 15th.

Whether it’s a ridiculously over the top wearable that wouldn’t look out of place in a cyberpunk anime or a pocket-sized gadget that you operate with a handful of unlabeled buttons, we want to see it. All we ask is that it be a functional device capable of some useful amount of computing, anything beyond that is up to you. Turn in one of the top three designs, and you’ll earn a $150 USD DigiKey shopping spree, just what you need to pack a few extra bells and whistles into your rig.

Conqueror the Sprawl

Beyond the top three winners, we’ll also be looking for builds which best exemplify the following special categories:

• Icebreaker: While there’s nothing wrong with building a deck for the aesthetic, we’re especially interested in practical builds. Does your deck have some special capabilities that make it stand out from your average laptop?
• ROM Construct: Some of the most impressive decks are the ones that have been customized to the point that they can only realistically be used by their creators. If the average person wouldn’t even know how to turn your deck on, this might be the category for you.
• Dex Dealer: Safely powering a portable cyberdeck can be a challenge, especially as their computational capabilities increase. Decks considered for this category will feature either unique or particularly well implemented power sources, allowing their jockeys to connect to the net wherever they are.
• Turing Police: Artificial intelligence is here to stay, so you might as well make the best of it. This category is for decks that utilize some form of AI, or perhaps were even designed or built with the assistance of an AI.

A Consensual Hallucination

Need some inspiration? We might be a bit shy of the “billions of legitimate operators” that William Gibson imagined in Neuromancer, but there’s certainly no shortage of cyberdecks here on Hackaday. While the idea is not to replicate another hacker’s design exactly, browsing through the incredible entries we saw in last year’s cyberdeck contest should get you on the right track.