"Fallout/Fallout/Fallout" players are certainly no strangers to Pip-Boy: a wrist-worn personal terminal that every shelter resident has, including map navigation, mission logs, item management, vital signs and radiation monitoring. During war, you can also turn on VATS to let you "pause and think" in the hail of bullets. The problem is, this romantic setting of "it's better than your cell phone in the apocalypse" has always existed only in games. Geek Bay's latest video simply turns fantasy into reality: they directly made Pip-Boy into a real wrist computer. It looks like a prop, but inside it is a complete PC that can boot, run Steam, and even play games!
Instead of customizing the motherboard, take the "most pragmatic" route: insert the Steam Deck motherboard.
At first, they thought very naively: Wouldn't it be better to replace the development board with a computer motherboard? But the reality is worse than the wasteland. Without "millions of dollars" to customize a new motherboard, we can only use off-the-shelf hardware for transplantation. Measuring the internal space of Pip-Boy, the laptop motherboard is almost too big, and there is no place to put the battery. After a lot of fussing, the answer came to a machine that everyone is familiar with: Steam Deck.
The reason is that after disassembling the Steam Deck, the motherboard body is very small, and it can start and operate normally with only this motherboard, without having to hang a bunch of daughter boards. USB Type-C, M.2, TF card slot and other key interfaces required for modification are also on the same board. For modification, this "highly integrated" design is more practical than any other design.
Three hell levels: cooling, battery, screen and interface
After the motherboard was actually decided, the trouble started to be queued up. The first is heat dissipation: the original heat dissipation module of the Steam Deck was designed to be laid flat, taking up a lot of flat space, and it was simply unrealistic to fit it into a limited cavity like the Pip-Boy. However, in the "Fallout" world view, the Pip-Boy is a low-power wearable device with no active cooling fan and no vents in the casing. This means that you have to make a machine that "looks like it has no fan, but cannot be overheated to death." Geek Bay’s method is to use CNC to process a copper middle frame of about 250 grams, covering the motherboard and conducting heat to the aluminum alloy casing, which is equivalent to using the entire casing as a radiator. At the same time, ventilating slots are opened on the copper parts and small fans are plugged in to find a way to squeeze out a little airflow when the air intake and exhaust are very limited.
The second is the battery: they have tried disassembling mobile phones to use high-density batteries, or using 18650/21700 in parallel to take the "homemade steelmaking" route, but the biggest problem they encountered is "you are using the original motherboard." The battery's charging and discharging algorithm and protective board control chip are all calibrated by the original factory. If you modify them yourself, it is easy to cause problems such as poor charging and messed up battery identification. The final conclusion is very unromantic but very reasonable: use the original Steam Deck battery, and then modify the case design to suit it.
The third is the screen and interface: the Steam Deck motherboard only has a fully functional Type-C, and the display signal must go through the same port. To achieve charging, data transfer and screen output at the same time, it is necessary to design a streamlined docking station integrated into the fuselage. In the video, they found an adapter board based on the CS5268 chip, which provides HDMI, PD-IN charging and USB. As for the screen, the reality is even worse: By 2026, it will be almost impossible to find a small 4:3 screen that can be connected to a PC, so they switched to a 5-inch 800×480 16:9 small screen, and then used software cropping and physical masking to create a 4:3 visual effect. The effective resolution is only 640×480. It sounds shabby, but it is more like the "low resolution and confident" temperament of the old CRT.
The actual test result is very strong, but "using it as a daily tool" will make you doubt your life
In order to make it not like "a weirdo with a Steam Deck on his hand", they also redid the control and front-end: using ESP32 to connect two encoders, turning the knob into a handle-like input, the big knob rotates to correspond to the direction keys, click to confirm, and the small knob is responsible for return and other operations; the software interface also directly replicates the Pip-Boy style of "The Last Life", the first page is connected to hwininfo to view hardware information (frequency, power consumption, memory), and the second page is from Steam Start the game and add alarm clock and music functions.
For the actual game testing, they first ran "Fallout 4 / Fallout 4 / Fallout 4": it can run stably at 480p and 60fps, and the power consumption of the CPU and GPU is only 2 to 3W; the temperature is about 60 to 70°C. Because the load is not considered the limit, the heat dissipation seems to be manageable. Then they also used the more resource-hungry new game "Resident Evil Requiem / Resident Evil: Requiem / Resident Evil: Requiem" to squeeze it out: it can still run about 50fps at low resolution, but the level of picture noise and detail breakdown makes the overall look and feel very much like "you go back in time with PS2", and the characters are so small that you only know that your eyes are suffering.
The really good part is when they end up using it as the "only device for the end of the world" to spend the day: logging in to WeChat and Lark, and verification codes come one after another; Windows automatic updates consume power to the point where you wonder if it is stealing money; the screen is so small that the visible area is like looking at stamps; when ordering takeout, it is still stuck in the payment process, and it is almost as hungry as surviving in the wasteland. The conclusion is actually very cruel: this Pip-Boy can indeed run games, and it can also make the "props feel" very real, but if you want to use it for serious work, the first thing to be successfully modified is not the computer, but your arm strength, neck and patience.
Cool is cool, it really tests your patience to use it
After watching the entire video, you will find that the most valuable thing about this Pip-Boy is not "whether it can run games" – the Steam Deck motherboard is already capable of playing – but that it makes the modification very realistic: if you want to be romantic in the end, you have to make trade-offs in heat dissipation, battery, interface and operating experience. It allows you to run "Fallout 4" on your wrist, and it also allows you to be tortured to the point of doubting your life in daily tasks such as logging in, updating, and ordering takeout.
So it’s more like an answer: not “Can Pip-Boy be made real?” but “After it is made real, do you still want to wear it every day?”
For Southeast Asian players, the immediate impact of this update will depend on execution quality, platform stability, and whether follow-up communications provide concrete details around geek bay makes pip-boy a reality. wrist computer: the steam deck motherboard is stuffed into a metal case. it .