Ever since the Raspberry Pi was released to an eager public just over five years ago there is one project that seems to have been tackled more frequently than any other using the small computer from Cambridge: that of making a laptop with Pi for brains. Perhaps you feel you have had your fill of Pi laptops both good and bad, but it’s still a project that can bring up some surprises.

[Archie Roques] is a young maker from Norwich, UK, and at the Raspberry Pi birthday party in early March he had rather an unusual laptop. He’d done the usual thing of mating the official Pi screen, a bluetooth keyboard/touchpad, Pi, and battery, but as always it’s the detail that matters. His case is a carefully designed sandwich of laser-cut plastic that somehow manages the impossible task of containing all the laptop internals while not being too bulky.

For power he at first used a 4 AH LiPo cell from a dead tablet with a Pimoroni LiPo power board, but since he hit problems with the Pimoroni board supplying both screen and Pi he’s switched to an off-the-shelf power bank. Unusually this laptop also has built-in audio, using another Pimoroni product, their speaker pHAT.

Where this laptop has a flaw though is in the display hinges. He has plans for a beautifully made 3D printed hinge, but for now he’s using a piece of tape, which though functional does not add to the aesthetic. When we saw it in Cambridge the keyboard was fitting more snugly than it does in the photos on his write-up, so perhaps he’s fixed some of its issues. Despite the in-progress hinge it’s a very usable little Pi laptop, and though (Hint, [Archie]!) he hasn’t yet published the design files for it, we’re sure when he does we’ll see other people building the same machine. They won’t be quite as exclusive as [Archie]’s model though, while he was in Cambridge he managed to get it signed by [Eben Upton], founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and judge for the 2017 Hackaday Prize.

We recently showed you a Pi laptop build in a cigar box that was useful in its detailing of the various modules required, but in the past we’ve shown you another one using the official touch screen, a lovely one in the style of a Psion palmtop, and vertically bulky yet small-footprint one, and another that keeps its presence hidden.

A tip of the hat to Norwich Hackspace.