Raspberry Pi laptops are not an uncommon sight, as many hardware enthusiasts have shoehorned the tiny board behind LCD panels into home-made cases.
[Frank Adams] has created one of the best Pi laptops we’ve ever seen, (for which we suggest you skip straight to the PDF). He’s removed the guts from an aged Sony VAIO laptop and replaced it with the fruity computer, alongside a Teensy to handle VAIO keyboard, buttons, and LED I/O via the Pi USB port. An M.NT68676 video board interfaces the VAIO display to the Pi HDMI, and a USB to SATA cable is connected to a 240Gb solid state hard drive. The laptop’s Wi-Fi antenna is routed to the Pi via a soldered on co-axial connector, and there is also a real-time clock board. There are a few rough edges such as a USB cable that could be brought inboard, but it’s otherwise well-integrated into the case. His write-up is a very comprehensive PDF, that should serve as a good primer to anyone else considering such a laptop conversion.
The result is a laptop that looks for all the world like a commercially produced machine, yet that is also a Raspberry Pi. In a strange way, a Sony laptop is an apt homecoming for the board from Cambridge, because other than red soldermask or very early Chinese-made models, all Raspberry Pi boards are made in a Sony factory in Wales. Whatever the donor laptop though, this is definitely a step above the run-of-the-mill Pi laptops. To see its competition, take a look at this very ugly machine with a bare LCD panel, or this laser-cut sandwich laptop.
No battery, not a laptop.
Sits on your lap, is a LAP-TOP.
I’ve got the perfect portable battery bank for that,
Maplin (The UK radioshack) stopped selling them though (I guess due to people maxing them out all the time so they cook themselves: Usually the 5V SMPS fet, sometimes the constant-current charge circuit’s BJT).
can’t remember what it was called though (I’ll find out the source site if ya’ll want, hopefully people can request said company for resale on the ‘bay'(s)).
It can supply up to 3A at 5v (With added heatsinks to the PCB and a current limit adjustment: 5A),
It charges at 2A (1.85A when I tested mine)
The best feature of it all is, this battery pack still spits out 5V when unplugged from the “mains” supply (OK from the USB port of the laptop/PC) whereas nearly every other one switches off and thus not a UPS… Added bonus, since it has a mechanical switch that is either on or off at any given time, then if you want to draw 0.087uA forever then it lets you do that (Until the battery self discharges)
Calling this a laptop is perfectly fine.
I beg to differ… the first computers we had in the house here were laptops. My father used to work for Telecom Australia, and this is what he used to bring home from work:
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/2235/toshiba-t3100-20/
No battery in that monster.
Later, it was a T2000 which had a VGA LCD and a NiCD battery. You youn’ins are spoiled!
We called these lugables, not laptops.oh, those were the days, elonex made good ones back in the day. nice plasma orange screen and wing commander all the geeks were jealous.
I don’t think people called that a laptop. That term came later with smaller computers that could be used in ones lap.
Nowadays people call portable machines laptop even if they can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be used in the lap. Legs and genitals are easily damaged.
That computer (IMO far from a monster*) was really high-tech in its day. Hope you got to play with it. :)
(* reserve that for 5kg+ draggables)
Ahh, but I did use that thing on my lap… and yes, by today’s standards it is definitely a monster. One thing you didn’t do with it though is balance it on one arm and type with the other. Lack of battery aside, doing so would give you one serious case of tennis elbow!
Don’t drop one on your toe, the laptop will be fine but your toe will require amputation.
I had a used Zenith Supersport Laptop. Monochrome monitor with duel floppies. Got it with another Zenith that had a pop-up floppy only accessible if the LCD display was up. Used it to program in GW-Basic.
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/pc/index.htm has a good picture of one.
Duel floppies eh? They fought often?
Dual vs duel. Lack of edit has got me twice in one day.
The Tandy 100 was called a laptop, and it was able to run on its batteries, and preceded the Toshiba T3100 by several years.
I wanted one really bad, but wanted a Fiat X1/9 even more.
Yeah, my point was, laptops exist without batteries, even straight out of the factory.
286 for telecom work? royalty, whats next, caviar for lunch? Back in Old Dart BT used 8088s! Zenith SupersPORT 8088:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX1tB9FjnZM
This is when Telecom was a real telecommunications company. Telstra (what it’s now called) is a joke by comparison.
Ohh, and that thing clearly DOES have a battery. The T3100 didn’t.
Hey Gecko, I now have my Pi running off of the Sony battery so it can officially be called a “Laptop”.
Cheers
Why always a raspberry pi? There are other boards with more computing power, gigabit ethernet, and integrated SATA, and they are not much more expensive.
Very true. The Pi has the momentum though, and it’s Pi projects we have submitted to us. Please, do it with another board, write it up and put it online, submit it to our tips line, and we’d love to see it and feature it!
A lot comes down to the piss poor support on other boards. They’ll design a board, port A version of a Linux kernel, throw the image up on DropBox, then run away.
+50, it all comes down to this. RasPi has a big, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable community backed up with excellent official support.
I wanted to build something like this, but with an ancient Thinkpad as a base. Then I realized I needed a portable LCD with Trackpoint-enabled keyboard more than a Pi-based laptop, so I’ll make use of this project as a good reference. :D
A lapdock with some adaptors makes a good crashcart in a pinch.
I’ve wanted to do this for some time with an old broken MacBook Pro but finding a video board to interface with the display has been the only thing holding me back. Does anyone know of one on the market for a 2009 MacBook Pro?
Have you opened the case up and looked for the LCD model #? You can generally find controller boards on ebay, either pre-flashed for your model or a generic that the seller will flash for you.
Only 30GB SSD. Seems a little small these days.
was that sneakily replaced by the 240Gb I spot in the article?
Should’ve used something with real SATA, SSD connected via USB is a hilarious waste
man. that’s a bit harsh calling it a hilarious waste. Can’t you say that nice and with numbers? What’s the USB 2.0 vs. SATA vs SSD throughput and what’s the most he could get out of? I mean sure, everyone can google that, but there’s a difference between constructive criticism and whatever your comment was.
Well, it certainly won’t be useless… the SSD will drain less power and not suffer seek time issues unlike a HDD.
However, the USB controller on a Raspberry Pi barely keeps up with the 480Mbps that USB 2.0 demands of it. A far cry from the 3Gbps that SATA is capable of. The biggest impact will be on the CPU due to USB requiring far more of the CPU than native SATA does.
The Pi is pressed at Sony ya say?
Remembering George Hotz fiasco and how $ony pushed other lives to worthlessness!
There lay 3x RPis (RPii?) around the house. It was about time to upgrade to a competitor. Anybody gotta list of non-sony manufactured ARM uPCs?
That’s a little unfair, there are good reasons to support it because of where it’s manufactured. The plant is in South Wales, not the most economically successful part of the UK because sadly our governments look very much towards London and the South East. Think rust belt, if you are an American. As I understand it they made CRT TVs there, until CRT production stopped, then were left with a plant with no product. They now offer contract manufacturing, have your production run made on a Sony line, and that’s what the Pi uses. So in my book that’s a good thing, whoever has the logo on the building, it keeps jobs somewhere they’re really needed.
+1
Eh, then consider the raspberry pi as a form of redemption. It’s added measurable value to a lot of lives. http://linuxgizmos.com IMHO is more or less the list you’re looking for. Happy hunting.
As an aside, the “ugly laptop” linked at the end of the article, was inspired by (oddly enough) the Amstrad PPC640. Not because I’ve owned one (I haven’t) but because I like the idea of the screen folding down under a keyboard that makes up the lid. Standard clamshell worked out to be a tad easier to build up, though…
I wish one of you Hackaday writers would publish an update to that story, as well — I tried sending it in and got met with silence — but I don’t mind trying again… it’s now got one of those Atom-based MiniPCs from eBay on its back, along with a new USB hub… while I prefer Linux Mint, Xubuntu 16.04 is what was willing to install and run (to whomever thought it brilliant to put a 32bit UEFI on a 64bit box, you know that scene in “Firefly” where Shepherd Book talks about going to the “special hell”…? Yeah, that.). I can attest that 16.10 and 17.10 most certainly do not work on my hardware, unfortunately… but I *finally* got the internal WiFi/BT and sound working by upgrading the kernel to v.4.12…
I might rebuild it again, this Christmas, if I can get the funds together. I want to give it a sort of steampunk look if I can — partially because I like steampunk, and partially because that will give it a resemblance to a typewriter, which is quite apt given that I’m using it to write a novel now…
Maybe with a compute stick instead.
It could then run x86 applications like a real laptop, or linux. Quite a few more bucks though
The still made by Sony Pi-O
I have added battery operation to this Pi “laptop”. The PDF at my github has all the battery information starting at page 29.
https://github.com/thedalles77/Pi_Teensy_Laptop
The Pi reads the battery status registers over a bit-bang SMBus coded in C. The Teensy ADC monitors the battery voltage and blinks the display at 10% state of charge. At 5% state of charge, the Teensy turns off the laptop.