For the longest time the Raspberry Pi has been my go to for a small, inexpensive, easy to buy and hackable computer. I have a few of them running, powering a DMR gateway and an ADS-B receiver. Software support is good, third party peripheral support is good, and lots of people have gone to some substantial efforts to get workable tools running on arm64.
However;
The Pi has gotten very hard to buy over the past year, with most of the production inventory diverted to industrial and OEM clients. There is good supply of the RP2040 microcontroller, and the Pi folks seem to have diverted their "here, have a cheap and cheerful device to learn from" to systems built around that chip. That's great, don't get me wrong, but not my focus of interest right now.
This brings me to the subject line. What if the next obvious target for a small and hackable computer is not a Pi, but instead is a game machine? The Steam Deck runs all the Steam games, but it's Linux based, and it's easy to drop into a Linux environment. There's a built in display and a built in battery and easy ways to connect to external devices. And the form factor - a "cyberdeck" and not a bare board - is appealing.
Yes, it costs more; way more, to be honest. As of this writing there's still a queue for ordering so it will take a little while to ship. One per customer, please, so you're not going to see insane clusters of these things.
Some interesting reading:
Putting Tailscale on the Steam Deck, from Tailscale's Xe Iaso. Some of the trickier bits of systemd work you need to do in order to get the Tailscale VPN software running on the Steam Deck. You'll learn about systemd-sysext, which uses an overlay filesystem (overlayfs) to install components "on top of" an underlying immutable filesystem.
Running KrakenSDR on the Steam Deck, RTL-SDR Blog. KrakenSDR is a multi-device coherent software defined radio, with applications like direction finding for radio signals ("fox hunting"). The blog notes that the Steam deck "is essentially a powerful handheld computer with s creen and good battery life, so it makes an excellent mobile SDR computing platform too." For this particular application you'd want an external battery pack to power the SDR.
Listening to HAM radio on my Steam Deck, /u/freeloz on Reddit. A demo with video of SDR reception using an AirSPY HF+, a loop antenna, and the Gqrx software.
Flathub is a home for "flatpaks", a portable software installation format supported natively on SteamOS. This lets you develop your own applications and package them for easy use on the platform, and also opens up a library of software from the Linux world that's easier to install.
Of course, the main market for the Steam Deck is games, either brand new titles or old games via emulation.
updates and later additions
Direction-finding with help from the Steam Deck, Hackaday, 2022. Aaron (cemaxecuter) demonstrates radio direction finding with KrakenSDR and a Steam Deck as a portable controller in marine operations on a boat on Lake Redwine in Georgia. Like and subscribe to his Youtube channel for more information about DragonOS Focal, a software distribution for SDR applications.
