Retro cube in action, showing the housing, display, and rotary encoder.

Housing for a Pi Zero & an OLED

2026-01-24

A while ago, I became absolutely fascinated with cyberdecks. On my journey to design and build my own, I started small, and this is the result:

It's a 3D-printed housing for a Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, an SSD1309 OLED display, and a rotary encoder for navigation.

Before this, I used Blender to design my custom 3D-printed things, simply because I'm familiar with Blender and was a little intimidated to learn CAD. But then I discovered FreeCAD and thought it would be a good time to actually try it. It was so worth it. It took about two days, and I won't go back to Blender.

Features

The Retro Cube has three views. You can switch between them by rotating the dial. If you press it down, the display turns off completely, which can be useful at night. The three views are:

  1. Clock
  2. Weather dashboard
  3. Message

The first two are rather basic, but the last one is the most interesting. There is a server running at retro-cube.jflessau.com serving a basic-auth protected endpoint that returns a text message.
The Pi fetches that text at a configurable interval and displays it in the respective view. The second endpoint of the server is a web form where users can alter the message.

Soooooooo

If you want to say hi or something else, go to retro-cube.jflessau.com, log in with

user: retro
password: cube

and send something :)

And in case you want to build your own Retro Cube, head over to the repo for the code, STL files for printing, and a list of parts.