I had an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano sitting around collecting dust, along with a 5-inch touchscreen monitor, and thought it would be fun to build a voice interface for my second brain. Not because I needed one, but because the idea of talking to a device with an oscilloscope-style voice visualization seemed like a cool weekend project.

Why Build a Cyberdeck?#

Honestly, I just thought it would be neat. I had the parts, I had the time, and the concept of a voice-first chat device in a custom enclosure sounded fun to build. I had no productivity goals, no problem to solve, just a project for the sake of building something interesting.

My org-roam knowledge base is the center of how I think and work. But it lives in Emacs, which means I can only capture ideas when I’m at my computer. I wanted a way to feed my second brain from anywhere, using just my phone—but I refused to put my notes in someone else’s cloud. The solution had to be entirely self-hosted. What I built combines Matrix for messaging, n8n for orchestration, and an MCP server that bridges to org-roam, all running on my own infrastructure.