Makers never cease to amaze us when it comes to making custom cases and builds to house their Raspberry Pi. They make everything from minimal, simple designs to complex creations inspired by works of science fiction. Today we have an excellent example to share of the latter put together by maker and developer Andrew Chilicki. Using our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi, he's built a custom miniature MDR computer from Severance.
This custom PC both imitates the MDR computer from the show and works as a PC on its own. It's small enough to sit on your desk as a decoration piece and resembles the design and function of the MDR computers in the series. Everything for the build was constructed from the ground up just for the project by Chilicki including the housing and software.
In Severance, MDR computers are terminals operated by a fictional company called Lumon Industries. The MDR acronym stands for "Macrodata Refinement" and feature an array of numbers that the workers must sort and process. This project replicates that array of numbers and animates the data processing to resemble the show as much as possible.
We're not sure exactly which model of Raspberry Pi is used in this project but you could likely get away with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for a smaller form factor or if you want more power, the latest Raspberry Pi 5 has all the performance that you need. The Pi is connected to LCD screen, likely via an SPI interface, which is used for visual output. All of the hardware is housed inside of a custom 3D-printed shell that Chilicki modeled just for this project.
According to Chilicki, the software that imitates the MDR terminals was created using C++. It generates an array of numbers, grouping together numbers that are deemed "bad" that must be processed. Like we mentioned before, this data processing features animations that resemble the interface seen in the show.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project in action, you can find the full source code over at GitHub and explore the project thread shared to Reddit where you'll find more pictures and demo videos of the MDR terminal animation.
