Have you ever wondered what it might have been like if the Victorians had owned Raspberry Pis? Wonder no more, as French maker Jean Gaillat has built this marvellous steampunked Pi that brought his future-retro dream to life.
“The Steampunk Pi is my Jules Verne-like mechanism,” says Jean. “I can see my loved one’s pictures or videos [through] a big magnifying glass and listen to very old songs or records through an old ear trumpet. This is the kind of stuff I would have been so happy to find in the attic of my grandparents’ house when I was a young boy.
“Steampunk looks good,” he continues. “I don’t know exactly why, but I suspect it has something to do with all the machines I saw in my grandfather’s storeroom - he was a wheelwright.”
The Raspberry Pi is housed inside a wooden box, complete with stand, magnifying glass, and a glorious ear trumpet. “I bought the box for two euros in the Cultura shop near my town,” Jean tells us. (Cultura is a chain of creative workshops in France; cultura.com). Jean covered the wooden box in Bomb varnish and placed a Raspberry Pi inside.
Once the Pi was inside the wooden box, it was time for some accoutrements. “The ear trumpet comes from a very old bike horn,” reveals Jean. “It’s supposed to amplify the sounds coming from a tiny loudspeaker in the box. The sound is exactly what I wanted - just like from an old telephone.”
Jean bought the magnifying glass for 12 euros in a store in Lyon that specialises in devices for camping. “I had seen this glass and said to myself, ‘Oh yeah, that’s just what I want for my Steampunk Pi.’ There were LEDs in it. I pulled out the LEDs and battery and kept the glass. It’s fair to say that this isn’t the kind of screen that’s comfortable for long shows, but it’s interesting to scrutinise and see my children’s smiling faces through it.”
Obviously, the sound and vision aren’t as good as a high-definition monitor, but it works surprisingly well. “I stare into the glass on the front to watch movies – at one or two metres it’s acceptable,” says Jean.
With the sound and vision up and running, it was time for Jean to turn the Steampunk Pi into an artistic object. We particularly like the Victorian stand. “I made it by myself using part of a golden curtain rod,” says Jean. The rod is fixed with screws to an old rusty iron oil lamp support.
“This is a recurring dream,” explains Jean, “to retrieve the very soul of our past, bypassing centuries using a kind of time machine. I have built this thing only to put it somewhere, where it can be found by a child in the future. But I have to solve the issue of an empty battery power unit.”
Jean is planning to add speech to the machine next, in his native French of course. “Like [Iron Man’s] J.A.R.V.I.S,” he says, “talk to the thing and the thing answers: ‘Oui maître. Que puis-je faire pour vous?’ I want to build the internet of talking things: steampunked talking things… waouh!”
