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When you first got your Steam Deck, did you sit there and think: "Wow, these pesky controls and this silly screen are getting in the way of my enjoyment, I wonder if I can remove them and make this thing more useful?". Wait, you did think that? Well, apparently you weren't alone!
A user known as crastinator-pro on Git Hub (thanks, Hackaday) was annoyed at the size of their Steam Deck, believing that the form factor of the device was just too large to be practical as a handheld and portable system. Before they knew it, they were seeing just how easy it would be to cut down the "unnecessary" parts of the Steam Deck and make this thing as small as they could.
Now this isn't for the faint of heart, crastinator-pro themselves said that this is a pretty bad idea, and we're sure the chances of getting something wrong and ruining your Steam Deck are decent if you don't know what you're doing and have the right tools for the job.
They found after some tinkering, that they could pretty much cut the Steam Deck down to the very core components of the mainboard, a battery, and a fan to cool the system, stripping out the touchpads, analog sticks, triggers, and basically all the daughter boards related to the controls on the Steam Deck.
They then 3D Printed a simple shell for the Steam Deck's structural frame to attach to, thus giving the Steam Deck the look of a very portable console. You can just simply hook it up to a USB-C dock, supply power to the device through Power Delivery, and use the USB ports on the dock for controllers or a keyboard and mouse. You can even output to a TV over HDMI as the Steam Deck can output a video signal over its USB-C port.
The end result is a device that's about the same footprint as the Steam Deck's display itself, making for a very portable, and reasonably powered console, which crastinator-pro uses AR glasses with for a display.
If you want to check out the project in full, you can do so over on crastinator-pro's Git Hub.
While we don't encourage anyone to take their Steam Deck apart and use power tools to turn them into portable consoles, this is a pretty neat project. What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments below!
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If AR glasses ever get cheap and reliable enough to go mainstream then Valve making a SD Micro (or anything other PC developer doing that) would be a great idea. For now I wouldn't want to only have AR glasses as my option.
If you're a very frequent flyer and also love tinkering with hardware, this might be worth doing now.