A few months back we brought you word of the YARH.IO, an extremely impressive Raspberry Pi portable that featured rugged good looks and a unique convertible design made possible by a removable keyboard. One of the most appealing aspects of the design was that everything was built from off-the-shelf modules; it only took a couple jumper wires and some scrap perfboard to get everything wired up inside the 3D printed enclosure.
The downside of this construction style was that the finished product was a bit chunkier than was strictly necessary. But that’s not the case with the new YARH.IO Micro. The palm-sized portable looks almost exactly like the original, though it had to ditch the removable keyboard in the shrinking process. Gone as well is the touch pad, though with the touch screen capabilities of the Pimoroni Hyper Pixel four inch IPS display, that’s not much of a problem.
What’s the catch? Well, at a glance we can tell you this one is considerably harder to build. For one thing, you’ll need to remove the Ethernet and USB connectors from the Pi 3B+. The USB ports get relocated, but Ethernet understandably has to be left on the cutting room floor. Nothing to worry about with the GPIO pins, the display takes up all of those, but you’ll probably want to wire the I2C lines to the female header on the side of the case so you can add external hardware and sensors.
You also need to nestle an Arduino Pro Micro in there to communicate status information about the battery to the operating system over I2C. If you wanted to save a little wiring you could probably leave off the DS3231 RTC module, but it depends on how often you’ll be able to sync up with NTP.
While it may be more difficult to assemble than its predecessor, it’s certainly not unapproachable. Once again, no custom PCBs or exotic components are required. You might be doing a lot more soldering (and desoldering) than you would have before, but it’s nothing that the average Hackaday reader isn’t capable of. For your troubles, you’ll get a exceptionally portable Linux machine that’s ripe for hacking and modification.
If the time and effort it will take to put together a YARH.IO is a bit more than you’re willing to invest right now, there’s always commercial alternatives like the DevTerm. But whether you go with the original or this new Micro edition, we think the satisfaction of having built the whole thing yourself will be more than worth it.
Damn, thats sexy
Agreed!
This definitely has some awesome design choices, and I think I want to take a look at this a bit closer.
(I want a serial port for a terminal device and this is pretty damn awesome)
Anybody else feel the punch in the gut when you saw the price of the battery? Oof.
Found this one, seems compatible https://www.18650batterystore.com/collections/18650-batteries/products/epoch-18650-3500mah-usb-pcb
I can see projects with the 40A version.
https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/efan-21700-battery-3750mah
Any particular reason you’d want to use individually cable rechargeable 18650s at a 10x markup? There’s enough room in there that I could wedge a standard battery, safety, and charge circuit for about 6$.
I guess the designer was lazy. I thought one could probably do that too. Or replace the power convertor for one that does all of it. However, for a couple of bucks difference on that particular build I’d probably get that cheap battery and leave the yak for someone else to shave.
What about replacing the ethernet jack with a mini one and a dongle like some small laptops use? A quick google for micro ethernet connector turns up a Thinkpad dongle. If the other half of the connector can be purchased, there’s your Ethernet for YARH.IO
What’s wrong with just putting the RJ-45 in your mouth, reading it by taste and typing it into a terminal fast enough to use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp to bridge it to your local machine??? ;-)
That’s 00s tacticool look.
Its nice. Honestly, could probably rework the inside a bit and go Ryzen3 SoC board. Even moving to a 6in screen would not be terrible for the hand size.
I love this for its street ability. It wouldn’t take much to replace a daily driver laptop.
https://us.dfi.com/product/index/1455