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Mobile Raspberry Pi Computer: Build Your Own Pi-to-Go
An anonymous reader writes "Everyone has seen Raspberry Pi Computer, the credit card sized mini PC circuit board that costs only $35. Now there is a new Mobile Raspberry Pi called Pi-to-Go, with a mini LCD, 10-hour battery, and 64GB SSD, all packed together in a 3D printed case. See if you are up to the task to build your own."
I like Pi
The author could have done some research on battery packs instead of hacking up a laptop pack as he did. There is a company called batteryspace.com that sells multi-cell Li-ion packs with a protection circuit built in. They're not cheap, but they are reasonably safe.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
LCD Screen – $17.95
Raspberry Pi – $35
Mini Keyboard/Mouse – $29.95
Standalone Battery Charger- $75.00
Powered 7 Port USB Hub – $14.95
64GB SSD Hard Drive – $129.95
Dell D600 Battery – $88.50
$391.30 (not including 3d printer and other tools).
Nice hobby project if you have money to burn.
This thing is literally the size of a brick (and likely the weight too).
All said and done, this is:
- 5x the size and weight of a smartphone/iPod touch
- half the screen resolution
- 1/4 the battery life
- twice the price (not even counting the printer you'd need to make it)
If this is the kind of thinking exemplified by people who work at Dell, no wonder they're dying....
This is rather pointless, for all the reasons others have previously stated. But this is really laughable, Eben Upton of the Raspberry Pi Foundation thinks they can wait until 2015 to produce a successor to the Raspberry Pi. Even more amusingly he intends to still be selling the Raspberry Pi Model B in 2020, seven years from now: http://www.itpro.co.uk/644701/raspberry-pi-founder-has-plans-for-a-sequel-in-2015
The most expensive component in the entire device, by far, is the SSD. This isn't a necessary part. Hell, the Pi accepts SD cards as primary storage media, and for everything else there's a thumbdrive. Cool, interesting way to show off, but totally wasteful. Excluding the SSD drops the price to $261.35. That's a bundle.
The next most expensive parts are the battery and charger. A ten hour battery life is nothing to scoff at, but also pretty excessive for a low-end hobby mobile. If one naively assumes you can lop the battery in half and thereby halve the price, which may or may not be true, you wind up with a five hour battery life and $44.25 knocked off the price, bringing us to $217.10. However, whether a laptop battery (and its accompanying big bulky charger) is even the best choice for this is very debatable. I'm inclined to think there are probably cheaper and less bulky ways to do this.
Hobby projects and prototypes are usually expensive and have plenty of rough edges. This is a great example, unfortunately. One could easily improve on this design by aiming for economy over extravagance. It's over-engineered considering the Pi's modest credentials and low power consumption.
With the frequency of RPi "articles" on /. one might wonder if there is some payola behind the positive press.
But not a word is spoken about the ongoing supply chain issues, and resellers making candid statements about it not being worthwhile to try to carry them. Can we have a moratorium on articles that drive up RPi demand until the Foundation can get its supply caught up more with the demand you've already created?
Consumer culture is poisonous to both genders. I'm glad to have lived in a family that still embraces concepts like independence and creativity - I knew my great grandparents, if briefly, and learned more about them over time. I learned about the habits they picked up from surviving the Great Depression in particular, about thriftiness and resourcefulness. (Unfortunately I think this is also where my family acquired its hoarding gene.) Women used to take pride in crafts and creating their own clothing in the same way men took pride in trades like woodworking or machining. The demise of the trades made these skills unprofitable to obtain, and the rise of mass production made them unnecessary. The subsequent loss of interest just seems natural in the course of things, but the casual acceptance of mediocrity, homogeneity, and quiet dissatisfaction with everything attacks our nature. We have everything but we feel as though we have nothing, that we lose more every day. I see it all around me, constantly.
It isn't that we're becoming feminized or that we're losing our collective testosterone, but something bigger than that. We're losing our independence, our free will, even our desire to survive: basic underpinnings of sapience. You know, our humanity.
At least there's an upside to all this automation: Robots are becoming so cheap and easy to use that almost any poor idiot with a rainy day fund can eventually get his hands on a CNC table, and eventually, a 3D printer. It's no substitute for real creativity or real skill, but tools are tools - they exist to expedite the creative process. I don't worry about those. What I worry about is the rise of the kind of people who have no want or use for them.
The bulkiness of the PDA-like hackware makes me wonder why the RasPeople didn't design a sleeker board. I mean something as slim as an iPod touch or a Palm Pilot.
It's not as if there are significant design issues with a flatter board. "Only" the I/O connectors appear to be needlessly sticking out. How much more would it cost to substitute tinier versions of the USB and HDMI ports in the unit? Since feature/smartphones are already outselling PCS, I can only assume that the micro/mini versions of these standard ports have already achieved economies of scale.
If some Indian company can produce an el cheapo $50 tablet complete with LCD, rechargeable battery, and case, and there are full-featured phones that are cheaper than that, why can't there be a RasPi that one can hack into a homebrew eReader?
Even if you wanted to build your own mobile computer or something even more bold, the approach this guy took is just downright comical. That whopper of a battery pack and the SSD are both totally unnecessary, and add a considerable sum to the unit's size and final cost. This is the kind of shit that gets Pi enthusiasts laughed at.
Even if you wanted to go full COTS, which this guy pretty much did (he claims he had this stuff lying around from his work) you could do better and much cheaper with cellphone batteries (many prefabricated battery packs have built in chargers and 5v USB out, which is one way the Pi can accept power) and a smaller USB hub, and also by completely ditching the totally unneeded SSD. Plus the 3D printed case looks ugly as sin, the lazy bastard didn't even smooth it out. Some plascard, sandpaper, and a hobby knife could have done the job better. The mini-keyboard really takes the cake though, what a piece of crap.
I'm all for people building their own mobiles, tearing down the walled gardens and stitching together the fragments of the mobile landscape, and all that jazz; but constructing an overpriced, over-engineered, unwieldy, and underpowered device from leftover junk and actually having the nerve to show it off is just laughable. Keep this garbage to yourself, folks.
While the machine is ugly, expensive and underpowered, it's an interesting hack. The guy had to figure how to connect all the parts that came from differents sources, not aa a DIY computer kit. He even had to deal with some basic electronics to use one energy imput (laptop battery) to feed several parts with different voltage requirements. He even call this a protoype. And that's what this frankentop is, a fun prototype to do. Thanks for sharing it!
I miss the times when one visited a radio shack store and buy some parts to create an interesting hack. Now everything is about pre-designed arduino kits.
That's an awful lot of money to spend on 6 high drain 18650 batteries wired in series. You can pick up individual batteries like this on ebay for about $5 each, if you order them from china. These are the same batteries my e-cigarette takes.
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Beware! This "mobile PRI" site has "Recommended for you.." popups in the bottom right of the browser when you scroll down to near the bottom!
I mean, there's no real reason to have an SSD in there. Maybe if they omitted that and just put an SD card slot in there, it would be worth it.
I bought the raspberry pi for $35 and added a wireless keyboard from gear head for about $40.
I found the usb charger at frys for 10 and the micro usb cable about the same. The hdmi cable
was probably another 20. I am looking for a small 12 volt lcd monitor to go in the car and
I also have a usb charger that works in the cigarette lighter.
I was rather surprised how well the fedora image worked on the rpi. I was able to browse
the internet using midori and lynx (firefox had issues with yahoo mail ) I was able to
use yum to add applications or run update. Another benefit is that the rpi has a
toolchain so you can compile source on the rpi. If you have ever worked with embedded
systems you know that you have to cross compile on another system and then load the
image on the embedded system.
So as modest as the rpi appears it is a rather capable system.
Enough with the $35 Raspberry Pi. Please! The base board may(MAY) be found for $35, but you can't make it work, not even boot, without spending more money. You need a power supply an SD card with the OS on it, an optional case...
Then there is this particular project. Nearly $400 without counting the 3D printing gear or 3D outsourcing. He ends up with the equivalent of a Nintendo GameBoy! He could have bought a MUCH more powerful and much more useable Atom based Netbook or a 7-10 inch Android tablet for half that much. Seriously Slashdot, we don't give a crap about the poor decisions and rickety implementations of high school level projects such as this. Seriously!
I'm waiting for a Raspberry to make it to the space station, we would then have scientifically provable pi is the sky.
Could this be a secret ARM sponsered effort at "getting them while young"? Here's another: Could they, by insult to programmer pride by showing adolecent school children capable of doing what took years of training for most in in the profession, be instigating a "Oh please I can do that"-go-out-and-buy-one-to-prove-it-to-myself market reaction. I must admit when I first read up on the pi "summer coding contest" I certainly was pissed to hear of an 18 year old code a fully functioning php web server called "pancake" on the a pi. Presumably that must have been done in ARM assembly too.
testing