When did tech get so boring? The 2000s had colourful Game Boys, Tamagotchis and phones shaped like burgers. Now, we’re stuck with black-and-grey rectangles that are aggressively functional, with the looming threat of AI stealing our jobs and drinking our water.
Instagram girlies are rebelling by building gadgets with personality, no engineering degree needed. Their teacher: YouTube tutorials and Reddit’s r/cyberdecks. Their motor: Raspberry Pi (a credit-card-sized single-board computer). Their creations: Tiny computers that fit into powder compacts, pink dollhouses and dangly keychains. The mini-machines are designed to do specific things and do them well, be it run retro games, store music, or display ebook pages.
This is about more than making computers cute. It’s a way for women to use tech for creativity and self-expression. Because, in the words of Elle Woods, who rocked a fuzzy pink cordless phone, “What, like it’s hard?”
Fuzzy logic
Cyberdecks aren’t new. OGs cobbled together their own in the 1980s. The revival, however, is led by women, and draws from the early internet’s spirit of fun and experimentation.
On Instagram, @RasPiManiax has fitted a cyberdeck (pearl embellishments, a mini compass, clock, screen and keyboard) inside her compact mirror. She uses it to plan yoga sequences and play downloaded music. When haters told @GaziSj to spend less time online and touch grass, she took the advice literally. Her cyberdeck is a wooden box, filled with actual grass and moss, along with a screen and keyboard for playing retro games.
For 24-year-old Delhi-based UI/UX designer Mudita Singhal (@WithLuvAamo), the inspiration comes from the 1995 film Clueless (1995). Singhal says she was fascinated by the protagonist Cher Horowitz’s computerised wardrobe, which let her mix and match outfits for the day. “Every girl I knew wanted that technology. No one built it then, and we didn’t know at the time that we could do it ourselves.”
Her latest cyberdeck (a tiny screen attached to a stuffed tiger she crocheted herself) is linked to a printer and prevents her ideas from languishing in her notes app. “Once a week, it automatically prints one idea that I just have to do, and the idea is then deleted from its memory.”
DIY divas
Tech has long been a boys’ club. A 2026 survey by Akamai Technologies found that nearly 90% of women leave tech careers within a decade of starting them, while women account for less than a third of the global workforce in tech-related fields. Perhaps getting a safe space to tinker with tech on their own terms might help? “I don’t have a background in electrical engineering and I know nothing about hardware, but seeing other women on the internet do it made me think, maybe I can too,” says Singhal.
Creators such as @SageCadence_, an electrical engineering student at Stanford, are making the process less intimidating, breaking cyberdeck-building down into five basic components: The Raspberry Pi (the brain), a screen, input devices such as keyboards and buttons, a power source, and an enclosure. The last is where things get fun. You can 3D-print a case, use acrylic or wood, or repurpose a vintage suitcase. Once the hardware works, it’s all about software customisation.
Anjali Johan (@Pink.Progress.AJ), a 23-year-old computer engineer from Rajkot, Gujarat, knows how alienating the tech world can feel. “Even in my office, men would take up maximum space and equipment.” Her computer engineering course was dry and theoretical, not geared to build the fun stuff. Small, hands-on projects, she believes, can make learning the basics much more intuitive. Her own cyberdeck is an old smartwatch that plays music. “It’s like playing with Lego blocks. A YouTube video or ChatGPT and Gemini can tell you exactly which parts you’d need and how to program them.”
Girl code
Cyberdecks are just the beginning. @CovaCut has built a Tamagotchi-style flash drive, with a tutorial showing followers how to build and animate their own characters. @Ux_Deniza made a butterfly hairpin that records your voice and turns it into diary entries. Her step-by-step tutorial covers everything from the circuit board, mic and battery to the coding. She even shares the behind-the-scenes fails: Botched soldering jobs, wires that stuck out of the hairpin, and a last-minute decision to pretend they were part of the aesthetic.
Meera Patil, 29, a firmware engineer at AMD in Canada, makes keychain charms embedded with NFC stickers that can play a voice note or song when tapped against a phone. She moulds them out of air-dry or polymer clay into tiny houses, flowers and letters tucked inside envelopes, then programs them using her phone. “It’s pretty simple. Even a layperson can do it.” Next on her list: Building a smartwatch that tracks UV exposure and tells you when it’s time to reapply sunscreen.
Not everyone gets the vision. Singhal recalls a woman on Twitter who stitched together Raspberry Pis to make a corset, only to be flooded with comments from men asking, “What is this? You’re wasting so many Raspberry Pis.” Sigh. Some people do need to touch grass.
From HT Brunch, October 24, 2026Follow us on www.instagram.com/htbrunch
