NewsT. Rick Jones

Star Trek fan builds working LCARS-style display terminal, publishes DIY instructions

NewsT. Rick Jones
Star Trek fan builds working LCARS-style display terminal, publishes DIY instructions
Working Star Trek-style display terminal. Image Darian Johnson on YouTube

Working Star Trek-style display terminal. Image Darian Johnson on YouTube

Following on from yesterday’s story about an absolutely excellent scale model of the Enterprise-D bridge, today comes a story about another fan creation: a Star Trek: The Next Generation-era working computer replica.

A piece from Gizmodo highlighted the design by Darian Johnson, who describes himself as a technologist and maker (among other things) on Twitter. The computer is the size of a large alarm clock - in fact, its design is based on a similar, but smaller, Star Trek-themed alarm clock design by open-source hardware company Adafruit Industries. But with a bigger enclosure and some more sophisticated guts, Johnson’s computer can fetch the temperature and the weather, calendar data, news headlines and more. On the project’s Hackaday page, Johnson said, “This information is made available through a combination of APIs and hardware sensors. I leverage an ESP32 for the microcontroller, and leverage the AWS Cloud for all of the data collection and aggregation.” The whole thing features an LCARS interface and a set of simple buttons on the front panel.

Johnson also explained some of the background of the project. “I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he said. “I've always wanted to build a Star Trek themed device, so I finally got around to remixing one of my old projects to make a Display Terminal.” He even said he included a few “Easter eggs” in the project, like the use of a prefix code (a la Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), and references to Dr. Ronald McNair, a NASA astronaut who grew up near Johnson’s hometown and who lost his life in 1986’s Challenger disaster.

In a Twitter thread showing off the project, Johnson included several pictures and links to both the Hackaday page and the Instructables page so if you are so inclined, you can have a go at making one for yourself.